Problem: We know we’re making less revenue from our site, but we don’t know why.
Solution: Set up goals in Google Analytics and take advantage of sophisticated goal tracking and reporting.
If you’re not tracking goals in your analytics app — whether it’s an expensive enterprise app like Omniture or a free one like Google Analytics — you’re leaving a lot to chance. I’m going to drill the importance of setting up and tracking goal conversions hard on this blog because it’s the single most mistake I see as an analyst. Even with multi-million dollar companies. Pretty crazy.
How to Track Conversions
The most common goal you’ll want to track are thank you pages that constitute a conversion. Let’s say you have an ecommerce site, an online newsletter, tip of the day email, or a subscription of some type. You would naturally want to track each person who has signed up or bought something? Right? (Of course right.)
Step 1: Go to Overview page and click on Edit to the right of your profile name.
Click for larger image.
If you have more than one profile, make sure you choose the right one.
Step 2: In the Goals section click Add goal.
Click for larger image.
You have up to 20 goals per profile. I like to plan my goals out in advance by sifting through a site looking for every key performance indicator (KPI) I can think of that would adequately measure success. Then I try to group similar goals together in each set.
Step 3: Name Goal and set Goal Type
Click for larger image.
This step is pretty straightforward. But one thing to keep in mind is make your Goal Name short (so it fits in reports you run) but intuitive. There’s nothing worse than trying to figure out a client’s clever goal names like “Rock Stars” or “Signup” — unless they just have a couple goals in the whole site.
The Active Goal option is mainly so you can set a goal up in advance and then just make it active when you’re ready to track it (like you just uploaded the thank you/confirmation page). And in this case, we’re setting the Goal Type to URL Destination because we’re tracking visits to a conversion page. This is the most common type of goal you’ll have, although Google did add the options to track Time on Site and Pages/Visit around this time last year. I add one of each to every profile I set up. I’ll name the goals something like “Time > 3 Min” or “Pages > 5” — short, sweet, intuitive, no?
Step 4: Set Up the Trap for Your Goal Page
Click for larger image.
Okay, this was the step that intimidated me at first. Here’s how to think of them:
- Head Match simply means that the URL will contain whatever you put in that field. For example, /thank-you.php will match any page that contains /thank-you.php. If you have thank you pages in several directories, you will want to include the name of the directory in the page name, e.g., /contact/newsletter.php. This is a good option if you have parameters in your URL strings (e.g., /contact/newsletter.php?sid=14597), and you want to include those pages that have them.
- Exact Match is exactly that: the URL only counts if it appears exactly as you’ve entered it. I rarely use this option as it’s the least flexible of the three.
- Regular Expression Match: Okay, I have to admit, this is my personal fave. You have so many options if you’re familiar with RegEx. I wrote a post that explains how to use regular expressions in plain English. For example, if you want to make sure you only get the thank-you.php page in the root directory, you’d enter ^/thank-you.php (or whatever the URI of your conversion page is). Or if you have two different conversion pages, thank-you-qualified.php and thank-you-non-qualified.php, you would denote that with /thank-you-qualified.php|/thank-you-non-qualified.php. The piper character (|) very simply means either or.
Step 5: Fill in Goal Details
Click for larger image.
Following the directions in Step 4, fill in the necessary details. I never select the Case Sensitive option. But, more exciting than that, you can assign a value to each goal you set up. For example, if you know it takes 20 leads to generate a conversion and each conversion is worth $60, all you’d have to do is divide the goal value ($60) by the number of leads (newsletter signups) that are required to typically generate a conversion, and you have your goals value.
Step 6: Set Up Funnel (Optional)
This option is particularly useful for sites that have particular steps toward a particular goal. With each step, you can make the step a Required step by checking the checkbox to the right of the Step Name. But be careful with that. If you make something a required step (let’s say /step01.html) but the search engines are dumping people onto the step02.html page (I see this all the time), making step01.html a required step will cordon off all those conversion.
The nice thing about setting up a funnel for your goal is you can see where visitors are abandoning your funnel, AKA cart abandonment rates. One time I tried to fill out a form that had a state drop-down box, and you were supposed to pick your state from the drop-down menu. One problem: The drop-down menu didn’t work AND was a required field. So I couldn’t progress further. Having a funnel set up in your analytics would have revealed (in that case) that users were abandoning your form because they can’t use it. Who knows how long that company went before realizing the mistake.
Step 7: Click the Save Goal button.
I think this step is pretty self-explanatory, don’t you?
Again, I can’t underscore enough the importance of tracking goals in Google Analytics. And not just the big ones that everyone hawks over. Track microconversions that may measure KPIs like engagement or even lead to a sale. I include items like clicking through to check you out on Twitter or Facebook, viewing a contact page, performing a search on the site, reading an article, etc.
The best way to find your micro- and macro-conversions is to ask yourself: “What do I want my visitors to do?” It’s as simple as that.
babyartikel says
Simply discovered your web page through google and I consider this can be a disgrace that you are not ranked upper due to the fact that that is a fantastic post. To switch this I determined to avoid wasting your web site to my RSS reader and I will try to point out you in one of my posts since you actually deserv extra readers when publishing content material of this quality.
Annielytics says
Thank you very much for that feedback. I’m glad you’re getting value from my posts. 🙂