Google Analytics Goals The Basics
Until recently we have probably classed ourselves as casual Google Analytics users who use the tool to get a bit of an ego boost on the number of visits to the site each day. Like most casual users we never really took any notice of the Goals feature the tool offers, when really we and others should, it gives you a lot of great insight to your site.
Goals give both a focus and can help the business in general, but also help you to keep track of what works and what doesn’t, based on what people choose to do on the site. Wouldn’t it be great to know how many people signed up for the monthly newsletter or gave you a lead based on a keyword they typed to find you. All these help to focus efforts on those keywords. How about if you knew what pages made more of your visitors sign up, buy something, or download something, you could work on the under performing pages so that they become as successful.
So How Do I Set Up Goals?
Setting up goals couldn’t be easier just follow the steps below and you could be on the road to making your site work better for your business, and what’s more this is all FREE how great is that?
1. First off you need to decide what your “Goal(s)” will be. Here’s some ideas to get you started:
- Complete a contact form
- Make a site search
- Purchase a product or service
- Clicking on a certain link
- Download something
2. Now on the main page of your sites, click Edit for the site you want to set up a goal on, and then find Goal 1 and again click Edit.
3. Now make sure to double check that Set Active Goal is ON.
4. Decide what type of match it will be. Setting it to “exact match” is a good start on the majority of things, once you’ve used this tool and become experienced you can start playing with funneling options.
5. For your goal URL you can do one of two things:
- Put in an actual URL like “/portfolio/smsbid” where “smsbid” is the only page that gets viewed if there is a Goal conversion
- or for site links, downloads, or goals that don’t go to an actual content page, make up a name (make sure it doesn’t match an actual directory or page) like “/goal/download/”. If you make up a name (5.2) you’ll need to make sure to do step 5.1 as well.
(You’ll only need to do step 6 if you had to carry out 5.2)
6. Edit the page that has the link that you need to track and make sure to add the following code to the “a” tag:
onClick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/goal/download/');"
7. So lucky number 7 then. If there’s a value to your goal (like £0.99 every click or sign up) then you can fill in “Goal Value”. Then click Save and your done.
Now sit back and watch over the next few days conversions being met. Keep up to date with these stats by viewing the “Goals” in the left hand nav of the dashboard, and then you can begin to tweak your site to make it meet the users needs. Happy days!