Google
Analytics has many features and reports that enable users to track and segment
website performance. A few of the most
important features available are related to measuring a company’s objectives. Before jumping into tracking conversions or
measuring performance, a company needs to have clearly defined objectives. These objectives should be measurable. Once
objectives are established, then goals can be created. Goals are the specific strategies that are
used to achieve business objectives (Kaushik, 2010). In Google Analytics, a goal is a Web site
page that helps generate conversions for your site (“Lesson 6”, 2013). Some examples include a ‘thank you’ page after
a user has submitted information, a purchase confirmation page, or just a
particular page that is deemed valuable.
There are four different types of goals that can be set up in Google
Analytics. They are URL destination,
visit duration, pages/visit, and events.
As we explore each goal in more detail, I will include my personal
experience with utilizing these goals on my blog.
URL
Destination
The
URL Destination goal tracks specific URLs within the site that marketers
consider a conversion. This type of goal
is ideal for ‘thank you’ pages, confirmation pages, or PDFs (Lofgren, 2013). To gain more experience on how this goal
tracks, I implemented it within Google Analytics for my blog. I chose one blog post URL to track. So far it does not have any conversions,
which means no one has ventured to that page yet. My goals were only set up a week ago, so I
hope to see improvement over time.
Visit
Duration
Visit
duration helps marketers understand visitor behavior on the site. Google Analytics tracks visit duration across
the site and it is a dimension that can be used when segmenting data. Using visit duration as a goal allows
marketers to establish a benchmark to view collectively how visitors are
interacting with the site. When setting
up this goal, marketers can choose any length of time, including hours,
minutes, and seconds. They also decide
whether the goal should trigger greater than or less than the specified amount
of time. If a company has refreshed
their website or changed the functionality, this report can help them
understand if users are interacting with more or less pages.
Visit
duration is another goal I implemented on my blog to see how much time users
were spending on my site. Since my blog
only has 5 posts, there is not a lot of content to consume. I set my goal to trigger when users spend
more than 1 minute on my blog. While the
traffic to my blog is low, and I only implemented the goal last week, I have
had 2 visits last longer than 1 minute.
Pages/Visit
The
pages per visit goal triggers after a defined number of pages have been visited
in one session (“Lesson 6”, 2013). This
goal measures the engagement a user has with the site. Specifically for retail or e-Commerce
clients, this can track how many pages of products users browsed. For my blog, this was an insightful goal to
implement so I could tell how many people were viewing multiple posts. Since I only have 5 pages, I set my goal to
trigger when someone viewed at least 2 pages.
This is an important engagement goal for my blog. Since implementing, I have had 2 visitors
view at least 2 pages. Considering I
only had 11 visits in that same time period that is almost 20% of visits
viewing more than one page.
Event
An event goal
tracks an action taken on the site, which is usually unable to be tracked by a
unique URL. Events can track external
links on the site, downloads, social media buttons, or time spent watching a
video (Lofgren, 2013). I have not
implemented event tracking yet, but will be experimenting with it in the
future.
Goal
Values
An additional feature that Google
Analytics provides with each of its goals is the ability to add a goal
value. For example, marketers could put
a dollar value on a download or a submission form completion. Google Analytics will assign the dollar value
whenever a goal is completed. To test
this feature, I used a $10 goal value for each of my implemented goals on my
blog. As you can see below, my current
goal value is $40 because I have had 4 goal completions. My number is arbitrary, but this can be a great
tool for websites to value actions differently.
Funnels
A
funnel represents the path marketers want visitors to take in order to complete
an action or make a conversion (“Lesson 6”, 2013). For example, to make an e-Commerce purchase,
users would put an item in their cart, enter shipping information, enter
billing information, review information before purchase, then complete
purchase. Each of those pages can be
tracked in a Google Analytics funnel, which can help marketers visually see
trends such as user abandonment. Below
is an example of a funnel report.
I
do not have enough content or conversions to warrant implementing a funnel on
my blog, but I believe marketers should take advantage of this feature. It is important to understand visitor
behavior at each step a user takes to complete a desired action. If the drop off is high on one particular
page in the process, then marketers can focus on optimizing that page. Once optimizations are made, marketers can
use the funnel report to see if the drop rate on that page decreased.
Filters
One
last feature to discuss is filters.
Filters can be applied to the information in Google Analytics to report
only on certain data. Filters can be set
up to exclude visitors from a particular IP address, to report only on a
sub-domain, or to convert dynamic page URLs to readable text strings (“Lesson
6”, 2013). An example of how I could use
filters on my blog would be to exclude my personal IP address so my reports would
not include traffic from myself. This
would make my reports more accurate.
Google
Analytics goals, funnels, and filters are all valuable features that marketers
can use to measure performance of a Web site.
Specifically, they can help measure business objectives and provide
actionable data for optimizing specific URLs to conversion paths. Implementing goals on my blog has helped me
understand how users are interacting with my site. As I post and promote more content, I will be
tracking how my goal metrics change.
References
Kaushik, A. (2010, April 19). Web analytics 101:
Definitions: Goals, metrics, KPIs, dimensions, targets.
Occam’s Razor Blog. Retrieved on May 29, 2013 from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-101-definitions-goals-metrics-kpis-dimensions-targets/
Lesson 6: Successful approaches in Google Analytics.
(2013). P.I. Reed School of Journalism, WVU.
Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webct/urw/tp0.lc5116001/cobaltMainFrame.dowebct
Lofgren, L. (2013). 4 Google Analytics goal types
that are critical to your business. KISSmetrics [Blog]. Retrieved on June 30, 2013 from http://blog.kissmetrics.com/critical-goal-types/
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