How To Set Up Goals In Google Analytics

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One of the most important things that we can do with Google Analytics is to track conversions. A conversion is when someone makes a desired action on your website and you get a data point indicating that the conversion has occurred.

For example, a desired action on an E-commerce website is when a visitor makes a purchase. An e-commerce conversion is usually tracked by implementing code into the thank you page once a purchase has been made. (The only time a thank you page will be shown is when a transaction has been successfully completed so this is why you would track a conversion there. )

If someone clicks on one of your UTM links from a Facebook post and then continues on to your website and makes a purchase then your conversion code gets activated and we can see that our Facebook post led to a sale.

For a blog, a desired action might be for someone to subscribe. A desired action for a law firm is for someone to call into the law firm to discuss their case.

There are hundreds of different conversions and each conversion can be tracked in a unique way. In analytics we set these conversions up as goals.

Let’s set up a couple goals.

 To start go to the ADMIN section of your analytics.

Then click on GOALS. You can do this in the MASTER view you created earlier.

 

 Then Click on NEW GOAL

Here is where we set up a goal.  One goal for a blog might be to get users engaged in our content. One way to measure that would be time spent on the website. If someone checks out our content and leaves pretty quick it wasn’t that engaging.  So, let’s set a goal of having people spend more than two minutes on our website when they visit.

You may need to select the “CUSTOM” option to see the screenshot below.

First we need to name the goal.  Let’s call it Engaged User > 2 minutes.

The type of goal we are choosing is duration so select that.

Then click CONTINUE.

You will then see the following:

Enter 2 minutes.  Then you can verify this goal.  Since we don’t have too much traffic right now, don’t be alarmed if your conversion rate is low or zero. If it asks you to “try again later” that is also fine. Click Save to continue.

Your goal is now set up.

Let’s do this for 2 more goals.

1) Set up a goal that tracks when visitors visit 2 or more pages.

2) Set up a  destination goal that tracks when someone visits your contact page on your website. Just use www.yourURL.me/contact which you can use to create the goal. (For my students, don’t worry if that page exists, you do not have to create the page on your website for this assignment).

Once you have your goals set up you track how well your digital marketing efforts are going. Did you post on Facebook and get 2% of the people who visited the website to buy your product (A conversion). Did an email lead to 7%? Advertising 10%?

Without setting up conversions the only thing we know is how people are finding us and that we are making sales. With goals set up in analytics we can tell which channel led to how many sales. And as we get more advanced with analytics we can tell exactly how much revenue we generated from each channel.