How to Set up Google Analytics Goals & 7 Tips to Get Ahead

• Updated on: 2018-05-17
• Read original article here

How well you understand your website traffic will ultimately determine the success of your marketing and advertising efforts.

And there’s more involved in performance analysis than simply reviewing user behavior metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, and pages per session.

You may unknowingly be falling victim to high traffic generation and low site engagement due to a lack of call to action and site usability.

This lack of intelligence can easily be solved via the introduction of goal set up in Google Analytics.

Before we set up goals in our account, let’s take a look at what makes a good goal and how we define our own individual website success.
Determining Your Site Goals

Setting up goals in your analytics platform is rather easy; the difficult part is having all decision-makers agree on the objectives of the site.

Through collaboration, your team should determine how the website needs to help the company achieve its overall goals.

More importantly, does the website achieve its goals?

If not, goal tracking in Google Analytics (GA) will help you understand if your site is helping you to move forward or causing a lot of confusion for your users.

More importantly, does the website achieve its goals?

If not, goal tracking in Google Analytics (GA) will help you understand if your site is helping you to move forward or causing a lot of confusion for your users.

In your mutual consideration of site goals, it’s important that all parties understand the difference between key performance indicators (KPIs) and site goals.

A site goal is the overall end result that you desire from a site user’s journey through your sale. This may be a sale, a lead generation submission, a web chat session, etc.

Key performance indicators are metrics that help us understand whether we’re moving closer to reaching a goal (i.e., items added to a cart, video starts, clicks to chat, or contact an organization).

It is fine to monitor KPIs via event tracking in GA, but these should not be tracked as goals.

Before departing the meeting room, identify what these goals are worth to your organization. This will come in handy later.

For example, determine how many leads reach a sale. What is that sale worth? What are your profit margins?

Now that you know what a goal conversion is worth, you can gain a better understanding of the return you are seeing from your digital marketing and advertising efforts.
Setting Up Goals in Google Analytics

Now that we have agreed upon goals for our site, we can move into Google Analytics, within the Admin > Goals section to set up our goals.

You will be given the opportunity to choose between a template-based goal or a custom goal format.

These are basically the same and from my experience, it is easier to choose the custom format.

You are then given the chance to choose between Destination, Duration, Pages/Screen per Session, or Event as a Goal Type.

Typically, you want to choose Destination.

I urge you to not set goals based on pages per session or visit duration. These are not goals; they are KPI metrics.