Google Analytics Setting Up Goals

Google Analytics Setting Up Goals. 4 Google Analytics Goal Types That Are Critical To Your Business

Tracking pageviews and visitors to see how much traffic you’re getting is incredibly important right? WRONG. Finding out if your website actually helps your business is MUCH more important.

Knowing important metrics like:

• Leads
• Trial signups
• Account creations
• Newsletter signups
• White paper downloads
• Ebook downloads

…are really what you should be tracking. But how do you do this with Google Analytics?

Well that’s what we are going to show you today.

Google Analytics doesn’t tell you how your business is doing without some additional setup. You have to tell Google Analytics to keep track of what’s critical to your business – and you do this with goals.

In Google Analytics, you have four ways to track goals:

• URLs
• Time
• Pages/visit
• Events

Here’s a complete breakdown on how to set up your goals so you can start tracking the metrics that are critical to the success of your business.

Where to Find Google Analytics Goals

• To start setting up your goals:
• Go to your Google Analytics standard reports
• Click on the “Admin” button in the top right
• Click on “Goals”

From one of the Goal sets, click “+ Goal” (goal sets are just a way for you to easily group goals) to set up a new goal.

First name your goal. This name will pop up all over Google Analytics so make sure the name is clear enough that you can instantly remember what’s being tracked.

The “active” or “inactive” options allow you to control whether the goal is functioning. If you ever want to turn the goal off, pick “inactive.” You won’t be able to delete your goal, you can only deactivate it. This is because Google Analytics permanently applies goals as it compiles the data for your reports. In other words, Google Analytics can’t go back and remove goals from historical data.

Now we have to make a choice. What type of goal do we want to build?

1. URL Destination Goals

URL destination goals keep track of specific URLs. Each time someone goes to that URL, they trigger the goal. These are ideal for thank you pages, confirmation pages, and PDFs.

URL Destination Goal Google Analytics

Goal URL: This is the URL that will trigger a goal. Don’t enter in the full URL, use only what comes after the domain. So if the full URL is www.kissmetrics.com/pricing, enter in “/pricing”.

Match Type: This determines how strict Google Analytics is when deciding if a URL counts.

For exact match, only the specific URL will work. Nothing else. If there’s a query string or unique ID for the session on the end of the URL, it won’t count. So don’t use exact match if you have a system that’s constantly generating unique URLs for each visitor.

Also be careful with exact match on landing pages. If you’re adding utm parameters to track all your marketing campaigns, Google Analytics will only count direct visits and not your campaign visits.

Head match tracks any visits to the URL regardless of what comes after the URL. If you make heavy use of query parameters or session IDs, definitely pick head match.

Regular expressions are for the analytics pros. Basically, they let you define your URL however you want. The downside is that they’re super complicated. Head over to Google’s regular expressions guide if you want to jump down this rabbit hole.

Case Sensitive: Check this box if lowercase and uppercase characters in your URL go to more than one page. Usually, you’ll want to leave this box unchecked.

Goal Values: For a complete run-down on how to calculate goal values and when to set them up, check out the KISSmetrics blog post When to Use Google Analytics Goal Values.

Goal Funnels

Goal funnels allow you to see exactly how many people move through each step of your marketing process. You’ll know how many people abandon your funnel at each step so you know what pages need fixing. For example, build a goal funnel for your ecommerce checkout to see how many people move through each step between the shopping cart and the payment page.

But be careful, goal funnels really only work when you require your visitors to move through a series of pages. Unless required, visitors seldom follow a clear path on your site and a goal funnel won’t help you make any sense of how your visitors move from page to page. For paths with less structure, use the Visitors Flow report.

You’re limited to 10 steps in your funnel. So if you need more, split the funnel between two different goals.

Remember the match type you selected above? Well it also applies to all your goal values. So if you’re using some crazy regular expressions up top, they’ll also get applied to every page on your funnel.

Required Steps: By default, Google Analytics will track visitors in the funnel even if people jump into the middle. If you want to make sure that the goal funnel only counts people that have started on step 1 and completed the goal, check this box.

But this only changes how the funnel visualization (the fancy diagram) tracks visitors. People will still be counted as conversions if they visit the goal URL.

Hacking URL Goals with Virtual Pageviews

In Google Analytics, we can force a pageview into the system whenever we want. With a small bit of JavaScript, Google Analytics will track anything as a pageview. We can even define exactly what the URL is.

Doing this with any link is super easy. Let’s say we want to track a link to another domain and the link is so important that we want to make it a goal. We could use events to track it but we’ve decided that we want to use the goal as part of a goal funnel. Since event goals don’t allow us to do this, how can we use virtual pageviews and a URL goal?

Here’s your normal link:

<a href=”www.othersite.com/promotion”>Click Here!</a>

Now we have to decide how we want the URL to look in our reports. We can’t get it to display as othersite.com because Google Analytics will think the URL is a part of our domain. Let’s build a URL that easily tells us that it’s a virtual pageview, what domain it’s pointing to, and what page on that domain our visitors are going to. Which gives us a URL like this:

/vpv/othersite/promotion

Remember: Google Analytics drops your domain in your URLs. For this virtual pageview, Google Analytics thinks that www.yoursite.com/vpv/othersite/promotion actually exists on your domain. But we’ve tricked it.

The vpv stands for virtual pageview so we know this URL is fake, “othersite” tells us which external domain we linked to, and  “promotion” clarifies which page we’ve linked to specifically. You can name your virtual pageview URLs whatever you want. But take the time to name them in such a way that you can instantly figure out what they are 6 months from now.

Now let’s use our fake URL with an onclick event and modify the original hyperlink. We’ll end up with this:

<a href=”www.othersite.com/promotion” onclick=”_gaq.push(