Before we set up a goal in Google Analytics,
let’s draw a distinction between two types of goals: business goals and Google Analytics
Goals. Business goals are actions you want your user to take on your website. Each time
a user completes one of your business goals, we call this a “conversion.” This could
be signing up for a newsletter or buying a product. But in Google Analytics, you use
a feature called “Goals” to track these conversions. Once you configure Goals, Analytics
will create conversion-related metrics. Like the total number of conversions, as well as
the percentage of users that converted. We refer to this as the “conversion rate.”
When you set up a Goal in Google Analytics, you can also set up a “goal funnel.” This
is a data visualization of the different steps needed to complete that goal. This visual helps you identify where users are dropping out of the conversion process. You must be an Administrator on the
View in which you want to enable Goals in Analytics. Also note that you can only set
up to 20 goals per view, so be thoughtful about which goals are most important to your
business. First, you’ll need to decide what you want to track based on your business goals.
Since The Google Store is an ecommerce store, one goal they could track is successful checkouts.
So, let’s set up a goal every time a user reaches the checkout confirmation page. We’ll
also set up a funnel visualization, so we can see if users are dropping off on their
way to the confirmation page. Note that this Goal won’t track actual revenue; it will
simply track how far users get at each stage of the goal and where they might abandon the
process. Creating a funnel visualization to track goal completions is completely optional,
but it can add a lot of visibility into each step of the conversion flow. To get started,
we’ll go into the Admin section. Then, under “Views,” click “Goals.” Then
we’ll click “New Goal.” Note that your Goal set-up may look a little different than
the one for The Google Store, depending on your business type. Analytics provides you
with some pre-set business goal templates. Since we want to track whether users made
it to the checkout page for The Google Store, we’ll choose “Buy merchandise” and click
“Continue.” Because we want to track checkout confirmations, we’ll name the goal: “Checkout
Complete.” Each goal uses a particular “Goal Slot ID” that are numbered from one to twenty.
The Goal Slot ID is a simple way to organize your goals. The default slot will always be
the next slot available. If you’re creating your first goal, the Goal Slot ID will be
“1,” but you can choose a different slot if you have certain goals that you wish to
group together. Next we’ll choose one of four Goal types. Each of these types is triggered
by a particular user action. “Destination” is when a user reaches a specific page on
your site such as a thank-you page; “Duration,” is based on the length of
a user’s session; “Pages or Screens” is based on how many
pages a user views in a session; and “Events,” is for tracking specific actions on a site.
We’ll cover events more broadly in an advanced course. Note that if you want to create a
Funnel Visualization, you can only use the “Destination”-type goal, so we’ll select
“Destination” and click “Continue.” Next, we’ll enter the destination URL of
the “Order Complete” page in the “Destination” field. The destination URL is the URL of the
page that is shown when the user converts or completes the conversion process. Rather
than enter the entire URL, we want to look for something distinctive in that URL that
will allow us to track our goal using only this page. Since none of the other web pages
in the Google Store have “SubmitOrder” in the URL, we’ll use this to identify our
“Order Complete” page.You’ll notice that if we select “Equals to,” type “forward-slash
SubmitOrder,” and click “Verify” at the bottom, we don’t see any conversion
data for this goal. This is because the SubmitOrder page is part of a longer dynamic URL. In order
to track this goal, we’ll actually need to use what’s called a “regular expression”
and enter the value “forward slash SubmitOrder” to indicate that the URL preceding it can
be variable. Now if we click “Re-verify,” we can see that the conversion rate is above
0, which means we’ll be able to track data. We’ll cover regular expressions more in
an advanced Analytics course. If you want to assign a monetary amount to the conversion
goal, you can flip the “Value” toggle to “On” and type in the amount that each
conversion is worth. You would only use this if each conversion was worth a consistent
amount to your business. For example, if each newsletter sign-up was worth 1 dollar to your
business, you could set a goal value equal to “1.” Since we’re tracking Google
Store order completions and each order is a different amount, we’ll leave this Value
set to “Off” for now. If we wanted to track actual revenue made from purchases,
we would need to turn on ecommerce tracking, which we discuss in our Ecommerce Analytics
course. Once you’ve verified your settings, flip the Funnel switch to “On” to add
the funnel steps. Each funnel step represents an action on your website that needs to be
taken in order to accomplish the Goal. In this case, we’ll need to include a unique
part of the URL for each page the user has to view in order to check out and make a purchase.
We can name each step in our funnel and add the unique part of the URL. If a step is required
to complete the goal, move the “Required” toggle to “Yes.” For example, if we only
wanted users who entered the funnel on the first step to show up in our funnel visualization
report, we could set the first step to required. Note that the Goal completion numbers in the
Conversions report will not be affected by the funnel you’ve set up, even if you’ve
made some of the steps required, as these steps are only reported in the funnel visualization
report. Once you click Save, you’ll see the Goal appear in the Goals list. To see
your Goal metrics, navigate back into the Reporting view and under the “Conversions”
reports, click “Goals” and then “Overview.” More importantly, you can now view goal data
in almost all of your other Google Analytics reports like the Audience and Acquisition
reports. To see the related funnel visualization, under Conversions, click the Funnel Visualization
report. Scrolling down, you can see user activity in each step of the funnel and how many users
proceeded through each step. If you see users dropping off dramatically at a particular
step, you may want to investigate further. There could be technical issues with this
stage of the funnel, preventing users from proceeding. In addition to creating your own
custom goals, the Analytics Solutions Gallery offers many Goals built by other users that
you can add to your Analytics account to use for your own business purposes.
