One of the most useful features in Google Analytics are goals. These allow you to record instances of specific events and can help you understand which parts of your site are not working as efficiently as you would like. When you are planning your site you will hopefully have thought about what constitutes a successful visitor. This may be a successful purchase or a request for information via a contact form.

Goals

Within Google Analytics there are two types of goal:

• URL Destination – This type of goal triggered is when a visitor reaches a particular page within your  site
• Threshold – This type of goal is triggered when a visitor stays on your site for a specified amount of time or visits a specified number of pages

For the purpose of this post we are going to set up a URL Destination Goal.

If we look at my site then my main aim is to try to get people to purchase websites, hosting or hire me for Search Engine Optimisation or Social Media work. There are two main ways of prospective clients contacting me, using the Freephone telephone number at the top of every page or completing the contact form on the Contact page. So for me a successful visitor is somebody who visits my Contact page. I will show you how to set up a URL Destination goal within Google Analytics for that purpose.

Creating a Goal

The first thing you will need to know is where you set goals. Go to Profile Settings and you will see part way down the page you will see the Goals box. You can set up a maximum of 20 goals and these are then subdivided into sets, with each set containing up to five goals. The idea of having individual sets is so that you can separate out specific types of goals. For instance you might have one set of goals that are dedicated to marketing and another set of goals that is aimed at miscellaneous pages, you might want to know how many of your visitors actually visit your Terms & Conditions page.

Click on Add Goal and you are taken through to the goal settings page. The first thing to do is to give your goal a meaningful name so that it makes sense when you look at the report in a few weeks’ time or if your boss requires a look at the report.

You can choose whether the goal is active or not with the radio button underneath, you might want to set up a goal in advance of a product launch and then start the tracking once the product is live. In reality you will almost never want this setting to be set to “No”.

Next we will choose which set and goal number it will occupy. Remember, sets can be used to separate out different business objectives.

Finally, for this section, we will choose the type of goal. In this case it is URL Destination

You will now see some new information is required under the heading “Goal Details”. The piece of information that you need to choose is the Match Type.  There are three possible Match Types for you to choose from:

• Head Match – The default setting as long as your goal URL is contained within the URI then it is allowed e.g. Goal URL “products/lamps/”, URI “products/lamps/bedsidelamps/” would be counted because “products/lamps/” is contained within “products/lamps/bedsidelamps/”
• Exact Match – The goal URL that you want to track must match the one that the user is visiting
• Regular Expression – This checks the URI and if the regular expression entered in the Goal URL is included anywhere within the URI then the visit is counted. A good example of this would be seeing how many PDF’s have been downloaded, you would enter the regular expression “.pdf”

Next you enter the location of the page that you want to track minus the domain name and extension. I am going to track visits to www.mickwalmsley.com/contact/ so I will only include /contact/.

Funnels

Creating a goal only tells you half a story. Yes, it is great to know when a visitor follows the path that you have wanted them to take and ended up on the page that you wanted them to be on, but what do you do if they do not end up there? You need to be able to identify where in the process they are stopping and then address that issue. The way that you do this is through the use of funnels.

Creating a Funnel

To create your funnel you need to enter the URL of each step that the visitor will need to take. You enter  everything after the domain name and give it a meaningful name as shown in the figure below

In this example wed would be tracking a visitor who has visited every page on my site other than the blog.

You can have up to ten steps to any goal. If you think you need more than 10 steps then you need to look seriously at the architecture of your site. Ten steps should be more than enough!

Finally click on the Save Goal button at the bottom of the page and you have just created your first goal.

You will find that Google Analytics goals are massively useful to you in understanding your website’s performance. If you are interested in hiring me to help with your Analytics then, if you are in the UK, why not call me on the telephone number at the top of the page for free and if you are outside of the UK then use the contact form. I am based in Blackburn, Lancashire but carry out Search Engine Optimisation work for clients all over the country.