What are Goals?
In Google Analytics goals help you measure and report the fulfillment of specific objectives of your website.
Goals help you answer questions related to your websites’ conversions:
- How many orders did we receive last month?
- How many people signed up for the newsletter yesterday?
They also help measure other objectives related to your visitors’ interaction with your site and answer questions such as:
- How many visits included at least 5 pages?
- How many visits lasted more than 3 minutes?
What types of goals can we setup?
Analysts can use Google Analytics to track three types of goals. In addition to URL Destination goals which track visits, we can also setup engagement goals to that track Time on Site and Pages/Visit.
- URL Destination Goals: These goals report a goal completion when visitors view a specific page on the site
- Example: A visitor views the thank you page after signing up for the newsletter
- Time on Site Goal: These goals report a goal completion when time on the site of a visit is greater than or lesser than a predefined value
- Example: Visits where the time on site was greater than 3 minutes
- Example: Visits where the time on site was less than 30 seconds
- Pages/Visit Goals: These goals report a goal completion when the visits span a predefined number of pages, the visit spans more than a predefined number of pages, or the visit spans less than a predefined number of pages
- Example: Visits that had exactly 5 pages
- Example: Visits that had greater than 7 pages
- Example: Visits that had less than 3 pages
Google Analytics allows us to create up to 20 goals for each profile. These are grouped in to 4 Goal Sets, each with 5 goals. We can use these sets to logically group similar goals. For example: We can use Set 1 to track the ecommerce conversions, Set 2 to track downloads of product brochures, etc.
How do we set up URL Destination Goals?
In order to setup a goal we always start the process by editing the profile for which the goals have to be set-up. Then click the “Add goal” link of the goal set you want to use, this will open up the goal information form.
URL Destination goals track and report the number of times a particular page was viewed. These would be the steps you follow if you’d like to track the number of sign-ups for a newsletter by configuring the goal to track visits to the sign-up thank you page.
Complete the goal information form with the following details:
- The name your goal: In this example we are using “Newsletter Sign-up Thank You”, and this will be the name that is reported in the different reports
- Choose the URL Destination radio button
- The URL of the Goal Page: Please note that we only need to enter the part of the URL that follows the domain name. In our example the URL of the thank you page is http://www.mydomain/newsletter-thankyou.html, therefore we use /newsletter-thankyou.html
- Click Save Goal to complete the process
Please make sure you select the Case Sensitive check box if this is applicable. You can also define the funnel, which is the path you expect your visitors to follow en route to the goal page, which will help you visualize the goal path and identify the pages that contribute to goal abandonment.
Time on Site goals track and report goal completions where the time on the site of a visit is greater than or lesser than a predefined value. Let’s say one of your objectives is that visitors should spend at least 3 minutes on your website. This is how you can set-up a goal to track the visits that fulfill this objective.
Complete the goal information form with the following details:
- The name your goal: In this example we are using “7+ Minutes”
- Choose Time on Site radio button
- Set the condition to show “Greater than”
- Enter 7 in the Minutes box (0 in the Hours and Seconds boxes)
- Click Save Goal to complete the process
Pages/Visit goals track and report goal completions where the visits include a predefined number of pages. If one of the objectives of your website is that each visit should span more than 5 pages, then you need to do the following to set-up a goal to measure this objective.
Complete the goal information form with the following details:
- The name your goal: In this example we are using “More Than 5 Pages”
- Choose Pages/Visit radio button
- Set the condition to show “Greater than”
- Enter 5 in the Pages Visited box
- Click Save Goal to complete the process
It is also advisable that you assign a goal value to each goal you setup. This will help you track the monetary value contributed by each of your goals. Google Analytics also uses the goal value to calculate metrics such as Per Visit Goal Value and $ Index.