Advanced Google Analytics: Conversion Goals (Part One)

May 20, 2008 in Analytics, Expert Advice

So you've signup up for Google Analytics. You've grabbed the code, you've pasted it on every page. You're done, right?

Wrong. You've only tapped a portion of the Google Analytics Goodness. Setting up goals in Google Analytics is very easy, and very powerful. You only need to invest a few minutes to avail yourself of this very valuable additional data.

First, let's define goals:

Goals are desired visitor actions on your website.

For example, here are mine from a current venture:

• Created a profile
• Joined the email list
• Made a purchase

Yours might be things like, submitted a sales inquiry, viewed a key page, started or downloaded a free trial, upgraded their account, referred a friend.

Currently, Google Analytics only allows you to select up to four goals so choose wisely.

How goals work:

Goals are actually just a page view. Really, that's it. When you define a goal in GA, you tell it what page view constitutes the completion of a goal, and GA tracks it as a goal.

For example: let's say you want to track purchases.
You just tell GA to track your Receipt.html/ThankYou.html-type-page  and define that goal as "Made a purchase" and as long as you have the GA tracking code snippet on that page, you're done defining that goal.

Let's walk through it:

Step One: Click the "Edit" link on the Google Analytics Website Profiles page.

Step Two: Click the "Edit" link in the "Settings" column for the first goal (i.e. G1).

Step Three: Here's where you want to enter the page, that when viewed, constitutes the completion of a goal. (This part is only a tiny bit tricky, so don't freak out.)

Active Goal: leave it marked "On" or it won't track.

Match Type: This is the tricky part, you or your programmer can read the excellent help to find the appropriate one for how your pages work, but if you're not sure, try Head Match. This allows your URL to have additional values after the page file name (e.g. Receipt.aspx?orderid=123), or not, and still be tracked.

Goal Name: You can put whatever you want here, but put something clear and meaningful so you'll know what you're looking at when you view it in your Google Analytics Goals Dashboard.

Scroll to the bottom of this page, click Save Changes and you're done!

Let a little time pass, then head to the GA dashboard and click the Goals nav item to see how things are going.

Told you it wasn't hard.

Hope that helps motivate you to look closer at goal tracking with GA. It's valuable business intel you'd be crazy not to track.

In future posts we'll cover goal value tracking (track the income from certain goals) as well as funnels, and tracking things that don't have a distinct page view associated with them.

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Thanks. While I see it daily, I have yet to activate goals. I am doing it right now... thanks!