Setting goals for a website is like setting goals for your life. Goals are objectives you work towards. A goal for a website defines what is important to your business, just as a goal for your life defines what is meaningful to you.
Creating these metrics is the best way to manage the success of your business website. Below are two steps that will differentiate you from your competitors via the understanding of your audience and ability to market accordingly:
1. First step: Goal Identification
The first step in properly setting up the goal function of Google Analytics is to identify your site’s targets. Measuring a site means measuring a site’s effectiveness. Whether you are an e-commerce site, lead generation site, or publishing site, identifying your goals is the most important step in the process of setting up your Google Analytics profile.
Some examples of different goal types are:
• Completed transactions
• Adding something to a cart
• Starting to complete a form
• Form submission (lead generated)
• File downloads (PDFs / white papers)
• Links clicked (follow RSS / submit a comment or review)
• Visiting a particular page
2. Second step: Goal Setup
When you first login to your Google Analytics account you arrive at the Overview page. From this page you must identify the Profile that you would like to configure goals for (up to four per profile) and click “edit” on the far right in the “Actions” column.
This will bring you to the “Profile Settings” page; in second box down you will see a section titled “Conversion Goals and Funnel”. On the far right the “Setting” column offers the option to “edit” your goals. If there is no information in the “URL” column and you click “edit” you will be creating a new goal. The page you are now taken to contains two different sections, “Goal Information”, and “Define Funnel”.
The goal section includes six pieces of information, detailed below:
a. Active Goal – If you are setting up your goal, the “On” radio button must be selected. You can use this to toggle a goal “On” and “Off” in the future.
b. Match Type – From this drop down menu you must choose from “Head Match”, “Exact Match”, or “Regular Expression Match”. An Exact Match is an exact URL match. A Head Match would be used if the URL string has a session ID or parameter that is included in the URL so that each time the URL is generated it is different.
c. Goal URL – The goal URL is the page that a visitor is taken to once they have successfully completed your goal. For the goal page “http://www.mysite.com/thankyou.html” enter “/thankyou.html”
Note: Usually you do not need to enter the entire URL. The request URL, what comes after the domain or hostname, make it more readable.
d. Goal Name – This information will be used to identify your goal in your reports, as well as when editing information in your Google Analytics profile.
e. Case Sensitive – This is a check box, that if selected will only goal a goal if the URLs entered above match exactly the capitalization of the visited URLs.
f. Goal value – This is a very important field and one that is often over looked. Every goal on your site should have a monetized value.
By properly adding goals to your analytics page you gain a greater understanding of website performance. In associating value to each goal you can prioritize your actions to increase cumulative returns. Enabling Google Analytics on your website will provide you with essential information that has never before available to you. The data collected from your web page will allow you to shape the format of your website to better suit the needs of your intended customer, and promote an overall greater understanding of customer needs.