Measure your marketing efforts often to determine whether they are effective and how your marketing investment is yielding a return. You can use Google Analytics to do this successfully. If you do not use Goals, you aren’t getting the full benefits of Google Analytics.
You probably have a specific goal in mind – or rather, a set of goals – that represents that value if you want your website to generate any kind of business value.
In Google Analytics, goals are used for collecting measurable data on that goal value so that you can analyze behavioral, acquisition, and demographic data that will not only help you see at a glance what is and isn’t working but will also help you make improvements that will accelerate your goal achievement process. Who wouldn’t want that? Google Analytics provides a staggering amount of information for free – if you want it.
The first thing you need to know before you dive into this free for all data playground is what goals are available through Google Analytics. That’s exactly what we will examine in this article.
WEBSITE TRAFFIC’S DIFFERENT VALUES
Seeing how much of your web traffic comes from organic and social sources is interesting, but what is even more useful is tracking website visitors like GA to find out if those visitors are delivering value to your business. However, although big traffic numbers are undoubtedly extremely exciting, it’s important to remember that traffic numbers can be little more than a vanity metric that does little more than boost your business ego.
Think about getting 10,000 visitors a month to a blog post on a topic that’s high-level and popular like “business success quotes.” Nice! For example, imagine you have a post about graphic design services that gets 100 visitors per month, which is exactly what your company provides. Sounds boring, right?
But, if you stop for a few seconds and consider what traffic is most valuable to your business, you can probably predict which traffic is more valuable, but it’s still easy to fall into the cozy illusion that ANY increasing traffic levels are necessarily positive.
With Google Analytics goals, you can quantify the value of that traffic. It is possible to check if that traffic is translating into conversions or if visitors are taking the actions you want them to take. The reason for this is that while big traffic numbers are nice, conversions are better and translate into cash.
To answer the question of what types of goals are available in Google Analytics, there are four main types.
THE URL DESTINATION GOALS
Google Analytics goal types like this are among the most popular. The URL Destination goals are usually the ones most businesses use most often because they allow easy access to data on a wide range of topics.
This type of goal keeps a close eye on certain URLs – URLs you specify, and the goal is triggered when someone visits those URLs.
For example, suppose you have a webpage called “www.coolwebsite.com/thank-you.” When a visitor reaches this URL in some way – through a link in blog posts, a direct Google Search, or even from a mention on social media – Google Analytics will consider your objective as achieved.
You can use URL Destination goals for sales pages, free downloads, confirmation pages, etc. Imagine, for example, whenever anyone fills out a form to download a free resource, they will be led to a thank-you page. By tracking how many people visit that thank-you page, you will be able to see how many people found the resource useful enough to download it from you.
To ensure that all of this works, the URL must be hidden so that it cannot be accessed directly. You can only reach that page by following a specific link and completing a specific action – in this case sharing their contact information.
THE VISIT DURATION GOAL
Unfortunately, despite its simplicity, this Google Analytics goal type is often overlooked, which is a shame, because the data it generates can be extremely useful.
The Visit Duration objective measures how long people spend on your site. Simple stuff. But if you’re hoping to boost engagement and increase user time on your site, this goal can be helpful.
It is important to keep in mind that the Visit Duration goal type can be used in two different ways.
Let’s say you set a five-minute timeframe for visitors on a particular page on your site. Let’s say a blog post that will take a visitor six minutes to read. The number of visitors who stay longer than five minutes indicates that they read the whole thing.
Additionally, you can use these Google Analytics goals to figure out how many people spend less than five minutes on each page, which implies that your blog post just didn’t hold their interest long enough.
You can use this information to identify what blog posts are most popular with your niche market; not only does this help you create better, more engaging content, but it also gives you a glimpse into the minds of your demographics, which can be extremely useful as well.
VISIT/PAGE GOALS
It may be more helpful to track how many pages visitors visit before leaving your site (Pages/Visits objectives) instead of how long they remain on your site (Visit Duration objectives).
The Pages/Visit target is similar to the Visit Duration target.
When you want to keep your users engaged and have them visit many pages on your site, you need to set this goal. You can also use this Google Analytics goal type to gain audience insight. For example, an e-commerce site can follow which pages visitors browse through during their browsing, and then what they ultimately purchase.
THE EVENT GOALS
The event category is a bit trickier and more complex than the three objective categories I described.
The first step in setting up an event is to create it as a goal. Once the events have been set up, you can choose any event as a goal.
If you want to track events, like button clicks, video playback, downloads, etc., you may need to add JavaScript code to the element you wish to track.
Using event objectives, it is possible to track any interactions with that component (for example, clicking on a download button).
For instance, Affiliate sites profit from sales of the products and services they promote on their websites. If a visitor clicks on the affiliate link and purchases something, later on, the affiliate site receives a commission.
On the other hand, the transaction is conducted on the website of a third-party company. A merchant’s website and reports are the only way to find out. However, it takes a lot of time and effort to visit each one if you’re an affiliate for multiple companies. Those who click on these links can be tracked through a Google Analytics Event. Clicks on these links are the closest proxy for conversions.
For blogs, the desired conversion action is often to subscribe to an email list. Google Events are a great way to see how successful your blogs are compared to each other at achieving your goals.
Most people avoid event goals as they require a little more familiarity with code than they are comfortable with. Even accessing Event Goal data is challenging. Events are not shown in normal reports, under Goals and Conversions. To obtain Event insights, you need to use the Behavior report in Google Analytics, which makes basic data analysis more difficult and time-consuming.
If you think Event Goals in Google Analytics would be useful to you, but you are less tech-savvy, perhaps you should ask for some help setting them up and learning how to use them. Are you interested in getting that help? In our Las Vegas SEO agency, we have Google Analytics experts who can assist. Get in touch with us today.
