Google Analytic’s and Goals

Today we’re going to briefly explain what Google Analytic’s goals are and why we should get them setup for you today!  Many of you have heard of Google Analytics, even if you don’t know how to utilize this enterprise class analytic tool. Analytics is a wonderful way of measuring your campaigns’ effectiveness and turning those insights into action and ultimately improve engagement and conversions. However, there’s one thing that has always been lacking, until recently. It would be great to know how much money you really made from an organic or paid search – and integrate with your shopping cart? This is where Google Analytics Goal values come into play. With goals, you can literally break down data to a campaign, keyword, referral level. There really are two options. If you’re not using ecommerce, goal values is the way for you. If you’re using an ecommerce platform, like woocommerce, use the ecommerce path. For goal values, you can measure your objectives via destination, duration, pages/screens and events. Here’s a break down of what that means:

• Destination – html pages like thank you pages and confirmation screens that appear after landing pages downloads or sign-ups.
• Duration – minimum time period you would like users to spend on your website before it’s tracked as a Goal completion.
• Pages/Screens – how many pages were viewed in a session, e.g. you can set the minimum to 3 pages.
• Event – e.g. user interactions like when a user plays a video, clicks on an affiliate ad, signs up for a newsletter or leaves a comment on your blog.

How you measure goals is though a monetary value. You assign a dollar amount. This dollar amount can be arbitrary or it can have literal meaning.  Wouldn’t you like to know how much money you’re making from organic traffic – from traffic that comes from your marketing campaigns/efforts? Goals is a great way to tell where the traffic is coming from but to find out how much money you made, you need to set a monetary value to that.  If you have an ecommerce site, as mentioned above, you’ll want to set monetary values using ecommerce first.  After this you can setup goal funnels, if they apply.

Goal funnels are great for seeing if users are following a specific path – visiting a set of particular page before your goal is “complete”. For example, you want them to visit the homepage and then instantly go to your quote page; they’re following the path you would want them to.  Or, maybe it’s them going through your entire product checkout process.  This can be insightful – are they leaving before checking out?  If so, where are they going? Finding out data that actually helps your business is so much more important than seeing what traffic you’re getting.  This is why we love Google Analytic Goals.  Contact us today and we can get you setup with this awesome tool so you can start really taking control of the data and invaluable information that is out there for your website!