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Google analytics and Goal Setting & How to Set up Goals in GA

Google analytics is a platform as part of the services of Google marketing platform brand. It is an analytical service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic.

Google analytics and Goal Setting & How to Set up Goals in GA

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google Analytics lets you measure Return on Investment of advertising budget as well as track all video and social networking sites and applications. It tracks specific visitor interactions on a website.  There is an option to define a specific action in a website which is defined as a goal.  Google Analytics records that as a conversion.  Here are the steps to set up goals

  1. Go to your Google Analytics standard reports
  2. Click on the “Admin” button in the top right
  3. Click on “Goals”
  4. From one of the Goal sets, click “+ Goal” to set up a new goal (goal sets are just a way for you to easily group goals).

After setting up the goal, the GA allows you to choose the type of goal. There are four types track your goal

  1. URL Destination Goals- URL destination goals keep track of specific URL’s. Each time when someone visits the URL, they trigger the goal. These are ideally the thank you pages and confirmation pages. When URL Destination Goal type is chosen there are few details GA wants the users fill in
  • Goal URL– Here enter only what comes after domain i.e. testga.com/pricing enter only /pricing.
  • Match type- This option determines how strict Google Analytics is when deciding if a URL counts. It only works specific URL’s. For example, if there query string or unique ID for the session on the end of the URL, it won’t be considered.
  • Goal Funnels- This step helps you to see exactly how many people proceed through our marketing process. From this it also helps us to know which pages have to be fixed.
  1. Visit Duration Goals- In this step we can track how many people stay on our site for a certain amount of time.

When someone views your page each time, the Google Analytics Tracking Code sends a timestamp to the Google Analytics servers like

  • They visit a page and a time stamp is collected
  • Then they click on a second page so a second time stamp is collected

By this we will get to know how much time spent on the first page but not on the second page. This is why we see a time on site like 00:00:00 when there’s visit from the user.

  1. Pages/Visit Goals- This goal instead of tracking how much time people spend on your site, it helps to find out the number of pages each visitor sees before they leave the site.
  2. Event Goals- This goal is one the complicated one because here we have to set up the events. Similar to virtual pageviews, we have to add a bit of JavaScript to the element that you want to track. This tells Google Analytics when an event has occurred. With the help of Google Analytics events we can track the following
  • External links
  • Downloads
  • Time spent watching videos
  • Social media buttons
  • Widget usage

The setting up of goals in GA will provide ability to prove that digital marketing investments are paying off.   Further, reaching or not reaching goals is the real  insight of your efforts and given indication on how to improve your efforts.