How To Track Your Photography Inquiries Using Google Analytics

Tracking your inquiries is vital for your photography business. It allows you to identify key stats about your potential customers and invest more into advertising strategies that work best for your brand. You also get a wide variety of data about your prospects, for example: their geographical location, browsers, operating systems, devices, pages they convert best on, their conversion steps and many more. You can later use these stats to improve your conversion rate or find new advertising opportunities.

In this tutorial we’ll explain how to track your inquiries to better understand where are your clients coming from, how do they interact with your website and where to look for relevant statistics.

The following tips and tricks will help you track your results, so you can put more effort into  increasing your number of inquiries and boosting your photography business.

What will you need?

• Google Analytics – it’s free to use and is very helpful for tracking pretty much everything on your website. If you don’t use it yet, here are 10 reasons why you should.
• Flo Forms– our free drag & drop contact form builder, packed with multiple features & design flexibility. Flo Forms works great with Flothemes or any other WordPress theme.
• Flothemes – to showcase your photography work in a beautiful and unique way, and get more inquiries from potential customers. You will need to create a thank you page for your inquiries.

How to get started?

1. Add Google Analytics to your site – this is an easy task with Flothemes. You will only have to sign up for a Google Analytics account and paste your code to your site, as described here. If you already have it added to your site, please skip this step.

2. Create a form using Flo Forms – you can include as many fields as you need (for example: email, name, phone number, etc.) and use conditional logic to dynamically collect information based on user inputs.

3. Create a thank you page using Flothemes – once you created your contact form you will need to create a thank you page in order to track the number of inquiries you get. You can use pre-defined blocks available inside your flotheme to easily create a thank you page. Send your users to this page after they submit an inquiry, to thank them and provide more info regarding their submission. Here is an example of thank you page:

Name your page accordingly and keep it for later, for example: https://example.com/inquiry-thank-you/, you will need this URL to set up a goal in Google Analytics.

4. Re-direct your contact form to this page after form completion – now you will need to go back to your Flo Form and enable the option to re-direct users to this thank you page. To do this, go to Flo Forms – All Forms, then click on your form and go to Form Settings. Next, go to Confirmation options and choose Redirect to a page option. Include your thank you page URL there and click on Save Form.

5. Set up a goal in Google Analytics – login to your Analytics account, go to Admin – Goals and click on New Goal. Next, set up the goal as follows:

• Goal setup – Custom
• Goal description – Name: Include a name for your goal – Type: Destination
• Goal details – Destination: Equals to https://example.com/inquiry-thank-you/, this is the thank you page you created earlier.  Value (optional) – you can assign a monetary value to this goal, if it makes sense for you. Funnel (optional) – this option is useful if you have multiple steps in your inquiry process (for example: step 1 – fill in your contact details, step 2 – review your inquiry, step 3 – receive a confirmation message and further instructions).
• Click on Save

6. Track your results – you can now see all relevant data related to your inquiries: number of inquiries, top channels, conversion rate, goal completion URLs and more. To view all your goals go to Conversion – Goals in your Google Analytics account.

To verify if your goal is working, submit an inquiry form and go to Real Time – Conversions report in your Google Analytics account. It will show you all your goals in real time. If your goal is showing there, it means everything works fine. 

Note: if you have a filter that excludes your own IP address you won’t be able to see your own inquiries in Google Analytics.

From now on you can track all your inquiries and work on improving your promotion strategy or your on page conversion rate. Here are a few examples on where to look for relevant statistics in Google Analytics and how to use them to make better decisions

• Conversions –  Goals – Overview – here you can see some general info related to your goals:  goal completions, goal conversion rate, goal completion location and more. Use this data to identify trends in your number of inquiries and conversion rate.
• Audience – Geo – Location – use this report to see where are your inquiries coming from. You can break down the data by Country, State, City, Metro area, etc. This is a handy report if you offer photography services in multiple locations or want to expand your business to a new region.
• Acquisition – All Traffic – Channels – here you can see what channels bring you the most traffic and inquiries: organic search, direct traffic, referrals, social media, email, etc. You can use this data to understand what is the most important channel in terms of conversions and focus on getting more inquiries from that channel.

You can set up multiple goals in Google Analytics, to support your marketing campaigns. For example, if you’re working hard on driving traffic to your website, you could build a few landing pages that target different keywords or have a different purpose (getting an inquiry, getting a newsletter subscriber, offering a free preset or resource, etc). Have on each of those pages a separate inquiry form and track conversions for each page with a separate goal in Google Analytics. Here are a few examples of common goals you might want to track

• Get a quote
• Download a free resource
• Subscribe to newsletter
• Get updates about new products/services
• Sign up for a course/mentoring session

That’s it folks, you can now track all your inquiries and start expanding your creative business. Analyze what works best for you and focus on improving the best performing advertising channels to get more inquiries and sales. If you want to learn more about Google Analytics and master it  like a pro, get this great online course now!