4 Types of Goals in Google Analytics – How to Make Most of Them?
What are goals and what are different types of goals in Google Analytics? To know more about that lets dive into the basics first. Your Google Analytics account without goal is like life without a purpose. Sure you enjoy tracking how many people visited and where they came from but at the end of the day it should mean something about what you want to gain by driving people to your website.
What actions you want your users to take to which will help you? More importantly, how will you track them?
The comprehensive answer to that very question is Google Analytics Goals!!
Using different types of goals in google analytics you will be able to track who played the video on your website, or how many people downloaded your catalogue or how many people left before finishing the purchase or which page is most popular and many more..
How to Set Goals in Google Analytics?
- Go to Admin button on your Google Analytics left panel
- Set the account and view you want to use and then under view tab click goals
- Press the +Goal button
- Voila! Select the type of goal and you are done!!
Now let’s discuss what these goals actually do. In Google Analytics, there are four ways to track goals:
- Destination
- Time
- Pages/visit
- Events
Let’s dig into each of them individually.
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Destination Goals
Destination goals keep track of specific URLs. Each time someone visits the specific URL set by you, the goal is triggered.
When to use?
You should use them on your thank you page, confirmation pages, download pages etc. As these pages are not visible otherwise, so only a unique set of user who perform your desired action will reach here, enabling you to get the most accurate data.
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Duration Goal
This goal tells you, how many people spend how much time on a particular page of yours. You have to set the minimum duration bar so that one who stays over that duration should be considered as goal conversion. Also if large portion of users stay below your set time that means the page requires some improvements.
When to use?
Try to go through each of your page from the point of view of a visitor. Try to figure out how quickly a user can go though the content to find relevant information, so if more users are staying below that time that means people are not getting what they want and the page should be tweaked.
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Pages/Visit Goals
In this you track the number of pages user goes through per visit to your site. You can set the number of pages and this will help you analyze how many users are actually going through your website, checking all the content available on different pages of your website.
When to use?
Websites with a lot of articles or in which the content is distributed on various pages use this to analyze overall quality of content on their website, so if a user is visiting more than a certain amount of pages you can analyze how much relevant your content is.
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Event Goals
This is slightly advanced as compared to other ones, but with advancement of website content it has become a critical point to analyse the popularity of your content.
Event goals are used to track any interaction user makes with your website, be it external links, social media buttons, video views, using a widget etc
Events have following components:
- Category – It is a name that you provide as a way to group objects that you want to track.
- Action – Is the type of event or interaction you want to track
- Label – It is the additional for the event you want to track like song name etc
- Value – You can use it to assign a numerical value to a tracked page object
# As per your need you may use as many or as few of them as you want. The event goal will triggered only if the event matches
When to use?
You should use it when you have a lot of interactive content on your website say, videos, games or widgets etc. This will help you in understanding how many people are interacting with content and help you analyze their behavior.
Other key terms:
Goal Values – Goal values is an option in google analytics which helps you in analysing the worth or revenue wise value of your visitors/customers. You can define goal values for each of your goals and populate your reports with data on where your revenue is coming from.
You can use it for your leads, for eg: if a travel agency got 10 leads during the month which produced $10,000 in revenue. Now, consider the total revenue of $10,000 and divide it by the total number of leads generated i.e. 10 thus this states the worth of each lead is $1,000. That’s the goal value.
Goal Funnels – Goal funnels allow you to monitor exactly how many people move through each step of your marketing process. It shows how many people leave your sales/marketing funnel at each step so you know what pages need fixing. For e.g., build a goal funnel to see how many people move through each step between their shopping cart and the payment page.
As per default setting, Google Analytics will track visitors in the funnel even if they jump into the middle i.e. if they don’t start from first page of your funnel. If you want to make sure that the goal funnel only counts visitors that have started on step 1 and completed the goal, check the required step box.
Well that’s all folks, this was an overview of the goals in Google Analytics. If you like analyzing the users in-depth and get them to make desirable actions for your business, Goals is definitely the top most tool in your toolbox.
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Photo Credits: Kissmetrics
