Have you ever wanted to track beyond just
page views and visitors? It is very important to figure out whether
your website is actually helping your business or not. Here Google
Analytics does a great job. But to get actionable metrics out of Google
Analytics, you need to set up a few things first.
Tracking Goals & Conversions
One of its prime features is tracking
your goals and then its conversions; goals may be anything, ranging from
the Purchase of a product to the completion of an email list sign up or
Download of an eBook.
In order to set up a goal, you’d need to
first go to your website’s profile in Google Analytics and click on the
“Admin” tab: you’d find here a tab for Goals.
Click on the +Goal link to begin adding
goals. Enter a short, descriptive name for your goal and then select the
goal type. The two most useful types are the URL Destination and Event
Type.
Note: You’re
allowed only 5 sets of goals with 5 goals in each set. You don’t get to
delete a goal and set up something new – so you’d better be choosy
about what you put in here.
You can also turn the goal “on” or “off”
with the “active” or “inactive” options. This is because Google
Analytics permanently applies the goals against your organization
compiling data for generating your reports.
Here are a few typical goal types on which you may want a comprehensive report/data.
1. URL Destination Goals
URL destination goals help you to keep a
track of specific URLs. Each time a visitor goes to that URL, they
trigger the goal. These are ideal for thank you pages, confirmation
pages, and PDFs.
Explaining some critical fields
Goal URL: Do not enter
the full URL, use only what comes after the domain; e.g. if the full
URL is www.example.com/pricing, enter just enter in “/pricing”.
Match Type: This field
helps you understand the match level vis a vis what you typed under the
‘Goal URL’, determining how stringent Google Analytics is when deciding
if a URL counts.
For an exact match, only the specific
URL will work and nothing else. If there’s a query string or a unique ID
for the session at the end of the URL, it wouldn’t take that into
account. Thus, it is advisable for you to not use the ‘Exact Match’
option if you have a system that’s constantly generating unique URLs for
each visitor.
‘Head Match’, another option under the
“Match Type” tracks any visits to the URL regardless of what comes after
the URL. If you make heavy use of query parameters or session IDs,
definitely pick head match.
‘Regular Expressions’ are for the
analytics pros. The ‘Regular Expressions’ let you define your URL
however you want. The downside is that they’re super complicated.
Case Sensitive: Generally, this field should be unchecked; check this box only if lowercase and uppercase characters are present in your URL.
Goal Values: This is an optional field.
Goal Funnels: Goal
funnels allow you to see exactly how many people move through each step
of your marketing process. You’ll know how many people abandon your
funnel at each step, thereby helping you understand exactly what are the
pages that need fixing. For example, build a goal funnel for your
ecommerce checkout to see how many people move through each step between
the shopping cart and the payment page.
You’re limited to 10 steps in your funnel. So if you need more, split the funnel between two different goals.
2. Visit Duration Goals
This one’s pretty simple. You can use
this to track how many people stay on your site for a certain amount of
time. Also, you can set the goal to track every visit that’s below a
specific amount of time. This is useful for support sites that are
trying to help customers answer their question as fast as possible.
Condition: Decide the
goal which you wish to activate on visits lasting for more or less than
the threshold that you provided. For measuring any engagement, you’ll
choose “greater than”; and for measuring how fast your support site
provides helpful information, you’ll use “less than.”
Under the ‘Goal Details’ section, you
are given specific description of some key fields, which in turn would
help you set up the details of your goal.
Hours, Minutes, and Seconds:
Specify the exact time you want to use for the goal. Most sites use 5
minutes here. It doesn’t really matter what time you choose. For
capturing the best data, set up a time which not everyone reaches, say,
for example seven minutes. Remember, if too many people activate the
goal, you would not be able to figure out how to improve your site.
How Google Analytics Tracks Visit Duration
Each time someone views your page, the
Google Analytics Tracking Code sends a timestamp to the Google Analytics
servers. Here’s an example:
Say someone comes to your site: they
visit your page and a time stamp is collected; when they click on a
second page, there’s a second time stamp which is collected. The
analytics is done by comparing the two timestamps with hich we know how
much time someone spent on that first page. But what if they leave after
the second page? Well, we have no idea how much time they spent on page
two. Without another timestamp, we can’t figure it out.
Does this mean the visit duration data is worthless?
You should assume that the time on site
metric is VERY different from how long people actually spend on your
site. But we can still gain insights by comparing the metric over a
period of time. If you have a site where the visit duration is critical
(like support sites) look for trends in how this metric changes over
months.
3. Pages/Visit Goals
Pages/visit is another easy goal type.
In this case, instead of tracking how much time people spend on your
site, this goal tracks the number of pages each visitor sees before they
leave.
Condition: Our three
choices are “greater than,” “equal to,” or “less than.” Just for visit
duration, pick “greater than” if you’re measuring engagement and “less
than” if you want to measure the effectiveness of your support site.
Number of Pages Visited: Simply set the number of pages that you want to activate this event.
4. Event Goals
Event goals are a little more
complicated as you have to set up the events. Once you have the events
ready, you can easily select any event as a goal.
You can track just about anything you want with Google Analytics events such as:
- External links
- Downloads
- Time spent watching videos
- Social media buttons
- Widget usage
- Any element that your visitors interact with can be tracked with events.
Step 1: When you set up
an event, you define it with a category, action, label, and value.
Using the dropdowns, specify which of your events should be counted as
goals.
You can use as many of them or as few of
them as you want. The event goal will only trigger if the event matches
EACH one that you’ve defined. So if you only define the category, the
goal won’t care about actions, labels, or values. But if you define all
four, the event will match all of them for the goal to activate.
Step 2: You can also
decide whether you want to use a new goal value or to use the event
value as the goal value. Generally, use the event value if that value is
directly tied to revenue. If not, use a new goal value, or leave the
goal value blank.
Warning: You can’t use
event goals in a funnel. Every step of the funnel needs to be a URL
(including the goal). So if you want to build a funnel from steps that
doesn’t have unique URLs, you’ll need to use those virtual page views.
Bottom Line
Use URLs, time, pages/visit, and events
to set up goals so you can track the essential metrics of your site. The
closer these metrics are to activities that generate revenue, the
better. You should definitely start tracking:
- Leads
- Trial signups
- Account creations
- Newsletter signups
- White paper downloads
- Ebook downloads
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