You may already know about the popular website analytics tool called Google Analytics. For those of you who may not know, briefly, it’s a robust and user-friendly tool to analyze website traffic and marketing effectiveness. With Google Analytics, you can measure key metrics of your website or blog such as the amount of visitors (new and returning), what countries and states they are coming from, what keywords they are searching on to get to your site, and what other sites are linking to yours. And it’s free!
One feature of Google Analytics that is particularly helpful is the ability to create goals so you can track conversion rates for certain areas of your site. Every website has a conversion point meaning a place where you would like the visitor to take some sort of action that will lead to a result. A result can be to contact you, sign-up for your newsletter or purchase your product. This knowledge will help you assess the success of certain conversion points so that you can strengthen or change your marketing initiatives, write and/or design better-targeted advertisements and landing pages and improve your website overall.
First, let’s talk about some areas of your website that you may want to track such as:
- A “Buy Now” button
- Contact Form
- E-mail Newsletter Sign-up
- “Download Completed” page
- Receipts
By setting a goal for these areas, you will be able to see the statistics of that goal on the Google Analytics dashboard. This makes it easy and convenient to view your results along with other key metrics.
How to Create Goals
To get started, you will first have to have Google Analytics installed on your website or blog. For directions on how to do this, visit the Google Analytics home page. For those of you who have an account already set-up, you can follow these detailed directions for setting up goals and funnels. You can also set-up funnels. A funnel is defined by Google as: “The path that you expect visitors to take on their way to converting to the goal. Defining these pages allows you to see how frequently visitors abandon goals, and where they go. For example, funnels in an e-commerce goal may include the first page of your checkout process, then the shipping address info page, and finally the credit card information page. The only report that shows the funnel path is the Funnel Visualization report.”
While the directions in the links above are comprehensive, I want to point out the differences between the types of goals you can create. Here are the three goal selections:
- A URL Destination – This is a specific page that you would like to track the number of visits to such as a newsletter sign-up, contact us, or a thank you page for a purchase of some kind.
- Time on Site – You can create a certain amount of time a person visits a page as a measure of its success. Keep in mind though that there has to be an entry and exit point because when someone visits one page of your site and then leaves (known as a bounce) then it will be recorded as a zero even if a person was on that page for hours.
- Pages for Visit – This will allow you to identify which sources are sending you the traffic where people are staying around as well as which pages send people to other pages in your site.
Here is a screenshot of the goal set-up page:
Watch this video of Google Analytics Product tour, which has a segment on goal setting. Good luck setting up your goals, and, I think, you will see how informative goal setting can be to the success of your website.
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Great post.
Having goals in SMART format is a great way to really make them happen.