PixelMEDIA Inc.

How do you determine that your website is successful?  Maybe you expect to see a certain number of leads every month or entice a certain number of visitors to view a specific demo.  Whatever your goals, it is imperative that you track results — whether or not your goals are being attained.

The good news is that tracking your goals and establishing specific funnels is relatively simple with Google Analytics (GA).  Before you begin, you must be an administrator on the account.  Once you have this access level you will need to click the “Edit” link in your profile that you would like to track.  You will then see a table for goals below the main website profile information.  On the “Goals (set 1)” line click “Add goal.”  You have the option to add up to twenty goals per profile.

You will first need to enter the goal name, which typically describes the goal in terms of the specifics that you want to occur (“user spends two minutes on site,”, for example).  You must also select one of three goal types:

URL Destination: This goal is successful when a visitor navigates to a specific URL.  An example is the thank you page URL of a contact form.

Time on Site: This goal is hit when a visitor spends a predetermined amount of time on the site.  For example, if a visitor spends over two minutes on the site the goal would be achieved.

Pages/Visit: This goal is achieved when a visitor views a predetermined number of pages per visit.  An ecommerce site might determine this goal to be hit when a visitor views at least ten pages per visit.

You can also set up values for each of your goals, if you know the value of a lead to your business. The field is optional, however, if you haven’t put a value on your goals.

If you set up a URL destination goal you will have to choose a match type based on the specifications of the URL.  Basically, this tells Google how strict a match has to be for it to count. Let’s say I want to set up a goal when visitors complete the contact us form on this URL:

http://www.abccompany.com/contact

Upon submission, visitors see a thank you page with this URL:

http://www.abccompany.com/contact-thank-you

Here is how this goal setup would look in GA (I have assigned this goal a value of $100):

A goal has now been set up for visitors who complete the contact us form. The fact that a “Head Match” is specified here simply means that if the head end of the URL matches, additional characters in the actual URL will not disqualify this encounter from being logged in the ‘goal-achieved’ total.

Let’s say you want to see if visitors are following a desired path to the goal.  You can set up funnels that will track each of your goals – “contact us,” for example.  Ultimately, the goal URL may be the thank you page, but it might be helpful to add — as a step in the funnel — the form that the user must fill out in order to get to the thank you page.

Now, in order for the contact us form’s thank you page to be counted as a conversion a visitor must first view the contact us form.  Here is how this funnel looks after data has been collected:

This funnel tells us that of the 109 visitors who reached the contact us form, 25 actually filled it out.  Thus, the conversion rate for this funnel is 22.94%.  You can also see which pages visitors who did not fill out the form landed on.  This funnel is fairly simple, but depending on the detail you’d like to see you can set up multiple step funnels and see where visitors drop off.

To view goal activity go to the main dashboard and click the “Goals” link in the left hand navigation bar.  You will see how many of your goals have been reached.  As you can see from the image below, you can also track clicks on outgoing links.

Tracking goals is a necessity because you have to determine how effective your website is.  Google Analytics goals are easy to set up and are a great way to show the success of your website.

Tags: google analytics, web analytics