What are Google Analytics Goals?
Google Analytics Goals track user actions on your target website and measure the conversion rates of the goals set in place.
Utilizing Goals within Google analytics tells you the performance of your website. Tracking specific goals that are based on your business goals helps you understand your profitability, website performance, marketing effectiveness, and more.
Goals in Google Analytics is an essential element of web analytics, read more here.
Goals and conversions should be implemented in every Google Analytics installation as soon as possible as goals can’t be implemented on historical data, and only new user sessions can be used for conversion tracking.
Every Google Analytics user can benefit from the use of goals. From the regular conversions such as form submissions to website performance metrics, goals provide a variety of conversions to be tracked that every business online can utilize.
Google Analytics goals are based on user sessions and are counted once every session. Keeping this in mind will help you better understand your results.
Google Analytics goals can be used in Google Ads to improve conversion tracking and return-on-ad-spend.
Planning Google Analytics Goals
Different goals have several tracking and conversion purposes. For the best results, you should be looking into, what key indicators matter to your business the most, before implementing the use of goals.
By defining your needs beforehand into important and less important goals, you are more able to keep track of data that matters first. It doesn’t mean tracking subgoals isn’t valuable, as they can be used later when needed.
Your primary goal could be online sales or form submissions and subgoals being the rest of the funnel.
It’s crucial to keep tabs on key behavioral metrics as well as sales and other profitability measuring conversions.
Behavior metrics as bounce rates or time spent on pages are key metrics in evaluating how your website is doing and might indicate the possible lack of sales if that should be the case.
The key is to understand how behavioral metrics affect your sales or your main conversions.
Small changes in goals in Google Analytics can make a big difference in the performance of your business in the long run.
Discovering opportunities with goal tracking leads to a path of optimizing, which is key for a successful business in the era of growing data.
Being able to benchmark a variety of data sets between each other keeps you improving every aspect of a website or business.
Having the right goals from the start makes proper profit-based decisions available for you at all times. Setting the targets for KPIs is crucial for driving results.
Google Analytics Goal Types And Examples
All Goals in Google Analytics are one of the following four types, and every goal can be categorized within them.
Twenty goals can be created within a Google Analytics view, and four sets can be created for the goals. Google Analytics goals are tracked as conversions in Google Analytics.
Twenty goals per view are enough in most cases, but separating different business goals into different Google Analytics views with defined goals, opens up the possibility to keep track of the most important conversions at a glance.
For example, the online store sales funnel and key behavioral metrics goals could be separated into their views.
Google Analytics Goal types are:
Destination Goals
Destination goals track the visit on specific URLs. A visit for a specific page would trigger the goal and be marked as a conversion.
Destination goals are perfect for purchase confirmation pages, thank you pages, and any pages that are at the end of the funnel created.
The use of thank you pages can be used in creative ways to track a variety of funnels that requires conversion tracking.
Duration Goals
Duration goals are used when it’s needed to track how many users stay on the site for a certain time.
For example, an article you have written, takes on average to read five minutes, and the goal could be tracking just that, triggering every time a reader passes that five-minute mark. Or you realize a reader who spent three minutes, is likely to read the rest of the article.
Tracking the opposite will show the least performing pages quickly, which is helpful when optimizing your website for the better.
Tracking the data could potentially show the performance of individual pages, and knowing this, you can start optimizing your pages for that goal.
Event Goals
Event goals require more setup but offer more customization and more specific trackable goals.
Using event goals, you can track everything on your website after the necessary events are created. Any element of a website can be trackable such as buttons, links, actions in widgets, etc.
Pages/Screens per Session Goals
Pages/Screens per session goals tracks how many pages a visitor goes to before leaving the website.
Great for measuring the success of internal linking on your website. A goal could be the above-average pages needed to gain a sale or a lead.
Google Analytics Goals Values
Values can be added to Google Analytics goals, which makes tracking the profitability of certain events and pages easier.
A problem with values is that you must learn the value of the events first. For example, how much would a page view bring to your business on average?
For calculating a page view value, you could average out how many page views are needed for purchase from your online store.
For online stores, goal values can be set with e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics, and it will track purchase transaction values.
Another benefit of adding a definite or relative value for a page is to understand what type of content is producing the most results. It will make deciding on the type of content needed to be created in your content marketing strategy easier.
9 Google Analytics Goals and Conversion Ideas
These nine Google Analytics Goal ideas will help you measure conversion that makes a difference in your website and business.
Like we discussed earlier, choose only goals that are directly beneficial for your business success. While it is certainly interesting to collect data of different kinds, having too much of it can distract you from your business goals.
These ideas are a starting point for measuring goals in Google Analytics, and many of them are not as direct as tracking purchase conversions but can be modified to your specific needs.
Nevertheless, here comes the nine conversion ideas for Google Analytics.
Online Store funnel
- Product page views
- Analyzing product page views will show you the most desirable, searched, or most marketed products in your store, and help planning future expansions through the information.
- Knowing how many users end up on your product pages versus other pages is crucial.
- Add-To-Cart
- An add-to-cart conversion tracking is important for every online store to understand how their customers are behaving on their online stores.
- A goal to track add-to-carts can be used to measure how many users drop off the funnel before purchasing in the store.
- Purchase
- Tracking purchases as a goal has many benefits. First, you will quickly see your overall conversion rate of your online store. Secondly, measuring purchase conversion data between products and categories can help you improve them, to increase conversions.
- Follow Up
- Reviews and other follow up activities improve your online store trustworthiness and increase repeat business in your store.
- Tracking your follow-ups as a goal, you can optimize your purchase funnel. For example, knowing how many buyers end up repurchasing or leaving a review is beneficial, and it increases your overall return-on-investments.
Offline Goals
While online advertising is growing in use and effectiveness, offline advertising can still provide results for businesses and websites. Especially, local businesses targeting nearby areas can use offline goals as a tool to track the effectiveness of a local advertising campaign.
Tracking offline goals could be implemented by creating custom landing pages with simple URLs.
For example, a local business print out two different flyers, the first is shared among customers, and the second one is for the customers to share with their friends. Both would have a unique landing page with a trackable URL. By tracking the data, the business would then be able to optimize offerings, advertising, and more.
Landing Page Optimization
Using goals, you can track key metrics to better the performance of your landing pages.
After deciding on the business goals of the landing page itself, you can produce a set of goals to measure specific measurements of the landing pages and measure and test them against each other.
Having a set of Google Analytics Goals for landing pages can be useful for many use cases later on, especially when optimizing landing pages for advertising campaigns.
Using Goals To Create Audiences Within Google Analytics
Google Analytics audiences are used to activate remarketing features in Google Ads. Using specific goals to create remarketing lists that are used in Google ads increases your online advertising ROI by targeting advertising to groups that have behaved in a certain way on your website.
To the very least, if you’re using Google Ads, creating a basic remarketing campaign for targeting users who have visited your website is advisable.
Utilizing a set of different types of goals, you can expand your use of more specific conditions to target groups with more targeted advertisements for visitors in different stages of your funnel.
Trial Signup, Leads, Quotes and Contacts As Goals
Goals such as quotes, trial signups, leads, and other contacts are valuable goals to track. Most websites and businesses have these in some form or another. To understand how much is the website producing a single action like lead or contact is crucial data.
Values for these goals should be implemented, but that might not be as straightforward as first it might seem. In the end, how much is a lead worth?
A method for calculating values for the goals is to measure how much revenue customers will produce during it’s purchase-phase or during its lifetime. Comparing the total produced value of customers with the number of leads or contacts needed to convert a customer will produce a concrete value to measure the profitability of your website.
The goal values can be used for effective online marketing, with Google Ads, or Facebook Ads, to determine the profitability of an advertisement campaign.
Internal Linking Flow
Internal links are important for growing your website organically through search engine optimization. Collecting data of visitors’ movement from page to page will help you determine if your website visitors are staying longer on your page by consuming more and more content, which leads to better rankings in the long run.
By determining pages that increase traffic and pageviews on your website early on can improve engagement on your website, which can lead to more leads and sales.
Negative Conversions And Goals
By measuring only positive conversions, you’re not up to speed in everything that is going on your website.
Negative conversions expose your problems on the website, overall user experiences, and sales funnels.
Measuring negative conversions and lowering negative conversion rates will improve positive conversions.
Examples of negative conversion to consider:
- Out-of-stock product page views
- Failures in contact forms
- Landing on 404-Error pages
- High Bounce rates
- Low amount of page views/session
- Sales funnel drop-offs
Negative conversions should be implemented in a new Google Analytics view for more easier and clearer action.
A/B Testing with Goals
Regular A/B testing with variations of your website, landing pages, or specific functions on your page can lead to discovering more effective solutions.
Creating a set of goals to measure each test that takes into consideration the end goals of the test itself will track key metrics for the test to be analyzed.
The key is understanding the underlying business goals of the test before producing goals for it. By using unique goals for the test, you extract more convenient data, when compared using the same goals for everything.
Tracking and Measuring Downloads
If you’re offering free downloads of any kind such as:
- eBooks
- Material downloads
- Spreadsheets
- Anything that can be downloaded
Then you want to be able to track them as a goal in Google Analytics.
Measuring if your visitors are downloading the provided materials will tell you if there’s any correlation between downloading a free eBook and later converting it into a customer.
Data will also show if the produced downloadable material was worth the creation.
Something to consider, while the download is the end of the funnel, but if the downloadable content would be a page, you could extract more data.
Conclusion
Google Analytics Goals are a crucial part of managing, optimizing, and tracking web analytics in your business and website. They help you make data-driven decisions and help you discover if any weaknesses your website might be having.
For every installation of Google Analytics, the use of proper goals should be utilized.
Having the right goals set up for the business goals you want to measure is essential for growing faster and profitably.
We have listed a few starting points for you to build a good set of goals for Google Analytics, but as every business requires data from different points of view, you will have to implement your own goals that suit your business the best.
Engaio Digital is an online marketing agency producing data-driven marketing strategies for companies to utilize for their growth.