Set Goals in Google Analytics, Because you need to
Setting goals for your website is important, it’s part of your overall marketing strategy and as such you should be able to track your ROI. Setting goals in Google Analytics will not only give you a better idea on your digital marketing efforts but you can also see if your marketing strategy is working by the funnel you create. If you’re running a Google AdWords campaign, you want to track the people going to the landing page, are they filling out that capture form? Are they downloading that piece of material? Are they purchasing what you’re promoting on the page? This is the importance of Goals for your digital assets and this builds on a previous post on using Google Analytics to track visitors.
You can view this as a tutorial on how to set up goals in Google Analytics, and you will see my process as I create an actual goal for this website, what I want to achieve, but how I achieve it is my secret.
Setting up your Goal
The first thing we have to do is login to Google Analytics, if you don’t have an account please sign up at http://www.Google.com/analytics. now at the top of the screen we’re going to click on Admin:
We’re going to click on goals in the third column:
Click on New Goal button:
This next step is not as straight forward as most of the others because I classify this step as a dynamic step, meaning it’s one of those steps that vary depending on your needs. For this goal I’m setting for myself, I’m wanting to track visitors to this post, I’m going to choose custom, because I’m wanting to track visits to a certain page, but you can use their pre-defined setups for tracking downloads, member sign ups, content sharing, and so much more.
So we’ve set up the goal to custom, we named our goal, and we said we want to track a destination, because we’re tracking hits to this post. Now we have to set the details to tell Google Analytics what exact page to track for this goal.
So I’ve set the destination to the permalink of this post and I’ve set it to “Equals to” because I don’t want to track anything but this post. You can set a variable such as “Begins with” or “Regular expression” so you can track multiple pages or a string of pages. I did not set a value but if your tracking for monetary purposes you can set a value of this goal. Finally you can set a funnel, so you can see if people are following the conversion process you want them to follow and if not see where they’re falling of and you can better optimize that part of the process to continue them through the funnel.
Finally you click create goal and you’ve created a goal to track. You can see these in the “Conversion” section in your reports. You can also look at your funnel and gather the required data there to keep visitors going through the funnel process. I hope this helps you understand the goal process and shows you how you can track your digital marketing efforts, increase your ROI, and start getting results.