Google Analytics goals

Now, Google Analytics is a great web analytics tool that can give you answers to a number of important questions about your website, your traffic, or even your online business in general. Who is your target audience and what do they look like? How do they find your website? Which pages generate the most traffic for your site? What is the bounce rate for your website?

Now, most business owners and webmasters focus on these metrics and pieces of information and for good reason. However, the problem, is that they never go beyond these parameters. So while all of these pieces of information are very important to paint the overall picture of your business, they don't necessarily tell you things like how much revenue your website is generating or if your website is actually helping your business in generating a good ROI. And it's these metrics that are much more important.

In other words, beyond the analytics basics, you should be interested in how many leads your website generated for your sales team to follow up on? Or how many product demos were requested from your landing pages? How many potential customers subscribe to your weekly newsletter? How many potential leads downloaded that whitepaper and were entered into your sales funnel?

These are much more meaningful metrics if you're trying to improve the profitability of your business. And thankfully, Google Analytics allows you to do all that and more once you set up certain goals for tracking. So let's look at how to set up these goals.

Setting Up your Goals

As mentioned, Google Analytics contract pretty much everything for you. However, first you're going to inform Google Analytics what it requires to track. So after you establish your goals, Google Analytics will begin to track them. Goals could be anything now. For example, whitepaper downloads, demo requests, multiple page visits or users spending a certain amount of time on your website.

The sky's the limit here and we won't be able to cover everything in this writing. So let's concentrate on Google Analytics four different forms of goals, and how to build them.

Let's begin with finding these goals in Google Analytics.

Click on the ‘Admin button’ in the bottom left corner of the screen after logging into your Google Analytics dashboard, and then click on goals. While in this goals section to start a new one, go to  + goal sign and click.

Now Before we jump in on the four types of goals, let me give you some general tips here first.

• Number one, when you name the goal, be sure to make it descriptive so that you can easily recognize it. The name of this goal is going to pop up pretty much everywhere within Google Analytics. 
• So it should be descriptive and clear for you. You'll be tearing your hair out if you have to constantly go back and check what the goal was all about. Unclear or ambiguous goal names become especially problematic if you setup multiple goals.
• Tip number two, think ahead before you set up your goals because Google Analytics permanently applies goals when applying data for your report and it doesn't allow you to delete them. Yeah, you can deactivate, but not permanently delete. So be sure to think everything through and don't just start brainstorming goals as you go along.

Number three, selecting the name of the goal obviously isn't the only thing you will have to plan for. Make sure that you fully understand the type of goal you want to track. And with that, drumroll. 

Types of goals in Google Analytics

This brings us to the next and most important section of this writing. In Google Analytics, you can set up four different types of goals. URL destination goals, visit duration goals, page or visit goals and events goals.

URL destination goals are one of the most common. These goals keep track of specific URLs within your site. And whenever someone visits the specified URL or URLs, this visit triggers the goal. For example, you have your ‘Thank You page URL’. And if a visitor lands on this URL, it doesn't matter how, Google Analytics will treat it as if your goal was achieved. The URL destination goals are perfect for ThankYou pages, for confirmation pages, downloads, sales and so on.

For instance, when someone completes a transaction, he or she is probably redirected to a Thank You page. By tracking how many people reach that Thank You page, you will be able to track how many people purchased from you. And in that case, of course, you want to make sure that that URL is hidden and not indexed by search engines, so that nobody can directly access it or stumble across it by accident.

The only way to land on that webpage should be through the sales funnel after buying the product. That'll lead to a hundred percent accurate tracking.

Visit duration goals are used track how many people stay on your site for a specific amount of time. This type of goal comes in handy when you're trying to increase engagement on your website and increase the amount of time users spend on your site. Now, one important thing to remember here is that you use the visit duration goal type in two ways.

Let's suppose that you set three minutes as the time you want people to spend on your site. You can identify the number of visitors who stayed for more than three minutes, but you can also identify the number of visitors who spend less than three minutes on your site.

Now the key is to choose the length of time that only a few people will spend on your website. In other words, if you select a time that applies to almost every visitor then the goal will have no real value and you'll find it difficult to use this data as guidance to improve your site.

You can also monitor how many pages people visit before they leave your site through pages and visits goals. Such goals are set exactly the same manner as the visit duration goals. If you want to keep your users engaged and you want them to visit multiple pages on your site, this is the goal you should set. Then you can track for areas for improvement.

For instance, maybe you've got a page that inspires 95% of all your users to leave your site. So maybe that disaster of a page is worth looking into or maybe you've got a customer support website and you'd like to see where users are on your site when they need to bounce over to your help section.

Now, the last type of goals is events. These are slightly more tricky and complex than the three goal types I just explained. Because first, you have to set up these events in your website's code. Setting up these events may require adding JavaScript code to the elements you want to track.

For example, a button click, playing a video, downloading a file and so on. Then whenever user interacts with that element, for example, a download button, it can be tracked with event goals. So once you have that event setup, you can then use it as an event goal in Google Analytics.

Last Comment:

If you want to learn more about event tracking, be sure to read the Google Analytics event tracking guide. And that's the basic idea behind goals, they play a huge role in Google Analytics. And by setting them up, you can get very specific about tracking aspects of your site that really matter.