How to Configure Google Analytics Goals and 10 Success Tips

The success of your marketing and advertising initiatives will ultimately depend on how effectively you understand the visitors to your website. Performance analysis involves more than just looking at user behavior indicators like bounce rate, duration on site, and pages per session.

Due to a lack of a call to action and poor site usability, you can unwittingly be suffering from high traffic generation and low site engagement.

This lack of intelligence can easily be solved via the introduction of goal set up in Google Analytics. Before we set up goals in our account, let’s take a look at what makes a good goal and how we define our own individual website success.

Determining Your Site Goals

Setting up goals in your analytics platform is rather easy; the difficult part is having all decision-makers agree on the objectives of the site. Through collaboration, your team should determine how the website needs to help the company achieve its overall goals.

More importantly, does the website achieve its goals?

If not, goal tracking in Google Analytics (GA) will help you understand if your site is helping you to move forward or causing a lot of confusion for your users. In your mutual consideration of site goals, it’s important that all parties understand the difference between key performance indicators (KPIs) and site goals.

A site goal is the overall end result that you desire from a site user’s journey through your sale. This may be a sale, a lead generation submission, a web chat session, etc.

Key performance indicators are metrics that help us understand whether we’re moving closer to reaching a goal (i.e., items added to a cart, video starts, clicks to chat, or contact an organization). It is fine to monitor KPIs via event tracking in GA, but these should not be tracked as goals.

Before departing the meeting room, identify what these goals are worth to your organization.  For example, determine how many leads reach a sale. What is that sale worth? What are your profit margins?

Now that you know what a goal conversion is worth, you can gain a better understanding of the return you are seeing from your digital marketing and advertising efforts.

10 Google Analytics Goal Tracking Tips to Get Ahead

1. Use Real Time Analytics to Test Your Goals

Do you have a lack of confidence in your goal tracking set up, even though you verified your goal in initial setup? Completing a goal action on the site and then immediately reviewing real-time reporting will show you if your goals are firing appropriately.

Your goal conversion will not show up in real-time reporting if you filter your company site traffic.

Make sure you are working within an unfiltered analytics property.

2. Monitor Your Goal URLs

This is the surefire way to understand if you are tracking only the true goal URLs or if you are accidentally recording non-goal URL pageviews as goals.

3. Filter Landing Page Views to Goal URLs to Assess Tracking Inaccuracy

Not including a robots meta tag or excluding goal URLs can leave these pages indexed in search engines and appear as goal conversions when they are really confused site visitor entrances.

4. Utilize Reverse Goal Path for Funnel Testing

This section of Google Analytics is helpful for understanding whether users are following the exact funnel flow you have designated for a specific goal. Also, assigning a funnel to an existing goal will help you understand the common pathways to a goal that should ideally be funnel steps.

5. Use, Peruse & Obsess Over Multi-Channel Funnel Data

For most sites, a conversion is rarely won on the first visit. Often, users do not re-enter the site via the same channel. Where you saw a visitor entering the site from Facebook the other day may also see them returning through Google today before they become a conversion.

Custom modeling attribution allows you to assign values to multiple channel touchpoints in a multi-visit conversion funnel vs. simply crediting the last touchpoint by default.

6. Set up Goal Alerts

Google Analytics provides the ability to set up goal alerts (e.g., specific goal percentage increase/decrease in comparison to another time point). These can either make your day or ruin it. Either way, you’ll be glad you were tipped off to a conversion success or emergency.

7. Play with Your Data

Having goals configured allow you to slice and dice data in ways that help you understand what your users are doing on the site. It will also help you to strategize conversion rate optimization needs and usability issues that may exist on the site. For example, Advanced Segments provide the ability to segment analytical data for those who convert into specific goals, all goals, or those who do not convert. This can help to understand user flow differences between converters and non-converters.

Beyond this, review how goal data differs between device types, channels, landing pages, demographics, and much more.

8. Geographically Verify Your Data

In the initial goal setup instructions, we talked about setting up goal funnels so that you can help to ensure that your goal accrual is valid based on previous page steps endured by the visitor. However, it is worth mentioning that you will also want to review your goal generation by country, or in some cases, by state. Many solely do business in the US, or even more locally.

Taking a look at where your goals are coming from by country or state can help you to understand if there may be goal engagements accrued not worth tracking.

One way to help clean your data for the future in this regard is by way of account or view-level filtering to restrict tracking of specific countries or states.