Better Goal Setting in Google Analyticsby Alison Casey

 
Defining site goals and tracking goal conversions is one of the best ways to assess how well your website is meeting its business objectives.

In Google Analytics, a goal represents an activity or a level of interaction with your website that’s important to the success of your business, such as an account signup, a request for a sales call, or even a visitor’s time spent on the website or a specific page.

We’ve written about the importance of goal setting before, however Google Analytics recently upgraded this functionality and we feel it is worth another look. The website statistics program now allows you to track even more conversions by creating up to 20 goals per profile (up from 4), with a few simple steps.

First go to the “Analytics Settings” page for your site and edit the profile for which you want to configure a goal. Once you are on the “Profile Settings” page, look for the “Goals” section. You can create up to four sets of five goals each.

Google Analytics has expanded its goal setting capabilities allowing you to define three types of goals including URL Destination Goals and new threshold goals such as “Time on Site” and “Pages per Visit”.

When defining a “Time on Site” goal, you have the option to set a "Greater than" or "Less than" value for the amount of time you’d like to see visitors spend on your site. The same notion applies when defining a “Pages per Visit” goal, you have the option to set "Greater than", "Equal to", or "Less than" values when defining the number of pages you’d like your users to view during their visit to your site.

To define a URL Destination Goal, go to the Profile Settings page under “Analytics Settings” and select URL Destination as the goal type. Next, enter the URL of the goal page. You don’t have to enter the entire URL. You can simply enter the request URI which comes after the domain name.
(i.e. http://www.isl.ca/en/home/company/enewsletter - the bold section being the URI)

Make sure that the URL you enter corresponds to a page that the visitor will only see once they complete the conversion activity. So, pick something like the “Thank You” page or a confirmation page for your goal.

Threshold goals are useful for measuring site engagement and branding success, whereas URL Destination goals are best for measuring how frequently a specific activity has been completed. If your objective is for visitors to view as much content as possible, you might set a “Pages per Visit” goal. Or, if you have a customer support site and your objective is for visitors to get the information they need in as short a time as possible, you might set a “Time on Site” goal with a "Less than" condition.

Some things to keep in mind when setting up goals:

• The name of the goal: Specify a name that you will recognize when viewing the goals within each set of your reports.
• Define a funnel: You may specify up to ten pages in a defined funnel. Although funnels are optional, defining one can help you map where visitors drop off during the path to completing a goal. For example, if you notice that many of your visitors never go further than the “Enter shipping information” page, you might focus on redesigning that page so that it’s simpler to navigate.
• The value of the goal: Google Analytics uses an assigned goal value to calculate ROI, Average Score, and other metrics. A good way to value a goal is to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers. If, for example, your sales team can close 10% of people who request to be contacted, and your average transaction is $500, you might assign $50 (i.e. 10% of $500) to your "Contact Me" goal.

Once you have your goals set up, you’ll be able to track their performance in the “Goals” section of the Google Analytics menu. Here you’ll see an overview of your goals’ performance and you’ll have the ability to generate reports on such things as total conversions obtained, conversation rates, and value of your goals. This is the spot where you’ll find visuals for any funnels that you might have set up as well.

So, if you’ve been wondering whether or not your site has been meeting your organization’s objectives, and weren’t sure how to get started, establish some goals – the information and insight you’ll gain is invaluable.

Need a hand interpreting the stats in Google Analytics?  ISL can help.