However, with the advent of a few recent features to Google Analytics,  we found the perfect platform for integrating statistics about live chat with the information that is important to you as a business owner.

Most live chat providers provide a simple graph of chats per day or chats as a percentage of visitors.  We don't.  Sure you want to know how your visitors use Olark, but what you really want to know is how effective is Olark at helping your customers reach their goals.  That's where our Google Analytics integration comes in.

Internally we have configured Google Analytics to record sales, signups, orders, and other goals on our website.  Primarily because we wanted to understand how our customers were using our site.  (I'll write a blog post about this sometime, google analytics is quite flexible).  A lot of our existing customers have integrated Google Analytics into their websites as well.

A few weeks ago we started piping Olark Events into Google Analytics, and keeping track of the sales that were the result of a conversation on the Olark Chat box.  We found these statistics fascinating, as they help us answer questions like "How does having Live chat help me?", "Which one of my operators has the best conversion rate?", "Does having Live chat increase conversion?", "Which of my goals are most effected by a conversation?", and much more.

We've found Google Analytics invaluable for helping us answer these questions.  So now we want to help you answer your own questions about Olark, and your conversion process.  And, we've made it incredibly EASY to do.

Just signup for an Olark Account and add your Google Analytics information to the customize tab of your Dashboard.  Make sure you enable the additional tracking features if you want to know how Olark effects your conversion rate.  Read the olark google analytics tutorial for a more in depth overview of the setup process.  (It's really simple).

Now you'll be able to see how talking to your customers with Olark affects your goal conversion rate, and if you see something exciting be sure to let us know.  (Most people do see an exciting increase in conversion from the people they talk to -- or at least the people who they talk to are more likely to have completed a goal).

My favorite report is viewing  Visitors --> User Defined and selecting the Goals tab in the middle left.  Here I can see exactly how talking to our customers correlates with signing up, and ordering a plan from Olark.

About 8% of the people who come to our website end up signing up for a plan.  As you can see the people who talk to an operator, are much more likely to convert than the average visitor to our website.

Our premium conversion rate is a bit lower than our signup rate, but visitors who have spoken to an operator are 4 times more likely than the average visitor to convert to paid.  Admittedly their is a potential for some spurious correlation, i.e. visitors who are likely to signup for a chat product are likely to want to have a conversation with an operator -- but, this is ONLY measuring people who went to our site and had a 2-way conversation with an operator.  I.e. visitors who attempted to chat, but did not reach an operator are not included here.  (They will be included in a separate category as soon as Google releases the view portion of some of there latest API features).  There is even more information in the dashboard, such as event tracking for customer interactions with your Olark Chat Box, read more in our  Olark Google Analytics Dashboard Tutorial.

The great thing is, with this latest release we've exposed ALL of this information to ALL of our customers.  Anyone with a Google Analytics account, and Olark on their site can add these great new statistics to their account in under a minute (depending on how fast you copy and paste your ID from your google analytics dashboard).  Just follow our Google Analytics tutorial to get started.

What else would you like us to track in Google Analytics?  Let us know?

-Ben