Setting Website Goals in Google Analytics

We have already discussed the importance of not just having a website for your business, but also setting goals for that website that will help you regularly reevaluate what your website is accomplishing, and how it’s helping you grow your business. But once you’ve set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-sensitive, where do you go from there? How do you actually figure out if your website is meeting your goals? How do you identify what needs more work?
Web analytics, and specifically Google Analytics, is one of the best ways to evaluate how your website is doing. Google Analytics has a range of features running from the most basic “number of visits per month” to much more sophisticated segmentation strategies.
Google Analytics has a feature called Goals that allows the user to set a simple or complex metric of success that is then conveniently reported back in terms of a percentage: the percentage of visitors who have completed that goal. For instance, you can see that 5% of your website visitors add an item to the shopping cart, and that 30% of those actually go on to complete a sale (this would be set up as two separate goals).
Google Analytics has Goal templates for the most frequently tracked metrics, in the categories of:

• Revenue
• Acquisition
• Inquiry
• Engagement

You can also set up a nearly unlimited array of custom goals that are designed specifically for your website. GA goals are broken down by type, and include:
Destination goals — track how many visitors end up on a particular page. These can also be used to track visits to a sequence of pages, which, as you can imagine, is very useful for measuring the success of your sales funnels.
Duration goals — track how long visitors are spending on a particular page. These goals can help you measure engagement by tracking what percentage of visitors spend, say, more than a minute on one of your webpages.
Event goals — track how users are interacting with a particular page, with actions such as clicks on particular links or buttons on the page.
Pages per session goals — track how many pages a particular visitor hits before exiting your site, providing another metric of engagement. If you have a blog, for example, you can track the number of visitors who read more than one post on your site.
Of course, all this merely scratches the surface of the flexibility of Google Analytics Goals. You can combine the above in any way that is useful to you, such as, for example, measuring the percentage of visitors who have followed the sales funnel on your site and have clicked on the BUY NOW button at the bottom of the final landing page.
For more information on setting up Goals in Google Analytics, visit Google’s Analytics tutorial.
Need help setting goals for your website in Google Analytics? Little Jack Marketing can help not only implement Google Analytics throughout your website in the most effective manner possible, but also set up advanced goal tracking and generate regular reports to help you guide your website marketing strategy going forward. Contact us today to get started!
 
[templatera id=”10393″]