How To Set Up Google Analytics Goals

Are you wanting to optimise your website for conversions? To do this, you’ll need to track conversions through setting up a goal in Google Analytics. This could be quite tricky for beginners, however what if there’s a simpler way?

Tracking pageviews as well as visitors in order to see how much traffic you’re getting is extremely important right? WRONG. Finding out if your website actually assists your company is MUCH more important.

Knowing significant metrics such as:

• Leads,
• Trial sign-ups,
• Account creations,
• Newsletter signups,
• White paper downloads, and
• eBook downloads.

…are really what you should be tracking. However, how are you able to do this with Google Analytics?

Well, that’s what we are going to demonstrate to you in this article.

Google Analytics doesn’t tell you how your organisation is doing without some extra set-up. You have to tell Google Analytics that it needs to keep track of what’s critical to your organisation– and you do this with goals.

In Google Analytics, you have four ways to track goals:

• URLs,
• Time,
• Pages/visit, and
• Events

What Are Goals in Google Analytics?

Goals in Google Analytics give you the opportunity you to track particular user interactions on your site. These user interactions can be anything involving form submissions, product purchases, collection of leads as well as more.

When a website visitor does the particular action that you’ve defined as a goal, Google Analytics records that as a conversion.  Let’s have a look at how to set up goals in Google Analytics.

Where to Find Google Analytics Goals

This is how you can begin setting up your goals:

• Navigate to your Google Analytics standardised reports.
• Click on the “Admin” option in the top right-hand side of your screen.
• Click on the “Goals” button.
• From one of the Goal sets, click on “+ Goal” (goal sets are merely for you to easily group goals) as well as to set up a new goal.

First name your goal. This name will appear all over Google Analytics so you need to make sure the name is sufficiently clear that you can promptly remember what’s being tracked.

The “active” or “inactive” alternatives allow you to control if the goal is working. If you ever would want to turn the goal off, select “inactive.” You won’t have the ability to delete your goal, you can just deactivate it. This is because Google Analytics permanently applies goals as it compiles the data for your reports. In other words, Google Analytics can’t go back and remove goals from historical data.

Use the power of segments in order to expand the questions you’re asking as well as paint a more comprehensive picture of your visitors. Not merely “what pages did they visit?” or “where did my users come from?” Include questions such as:

• What age group of visitors will be more likely to finish goals on my website?
• Do mobile or tablet visitors bounce more frequently as opposed to desktop visitors?
• Did first-time visitors convert more before or after the big site facelift?

If you find that segments you’ve created or downloaded from other sources just aren’t fitting, you can (and should) clean house at least once every six months to reduce clutter that can cost you time.

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