Goals and Funnel Reports

Image: adselwood

So you have your website running, your content is great and people are flocking to your site to sign up. Wouldn't it be nice to see how many people are signing up? How about optimizing the sign-up process? This is where goals and funnel reports come into play.

If you have a specific page which will serve as your goal (i.e. a thank you page) you can set up a goal in Google Analytics. We can also track the pages leading up to the goal and set a monetary value to it as well. Setting up a goal funnel is easy to do! Just edit a profile and you'll find where you can set up your goals. Set your goal to active, and let's get started!

In most cases, head match will work fine. If you have dynamic content appended to the end of your URL (for example, thankyou.html?id=19234kad3) just put thankyou.html as your goal URL.

You can set a monetary value in "Goal Value", and you will be able to see your efforts monetized in the reporting.

The next step is setting up your funnel. This is not necessary, but it can provide a lot of helpful information as to where you lost your customers going from the product page through the check out and eventually to the goal/thank-you page. Defining your funnel will only apply to the Goal Funnel report. A good first step is the shopping cart. You can set your product page as the first step too if you like.

If you are wondering about that required step checkbox, that requires your visitor to see that page before entering the funnel process. If they do not view the first page before viewing the goal page, then they will not be counted as a conversion. However, this will only apply within the funnel report. Outside of the funnel report, goal conversion numbers will reflect anyone who has seen the final goal page, regardless of the step-wise process you set up.

That's it! You can make more goals if you like (up to 4 per profile).

Beyond setting pages as goals, there should be other goals for your website. Landing page bounce rates, time on site, pages per visit. Things that will let you know that you are succeeding in engaging the visitor. You can find benchmarking data under the Visitors tab in your reporting. This will compare your site with similar sites. Or you can set your own benchmarks based on past performance. After all, every website is unique!

For something like a blog,measures of success can be a little difficult. A few good metrics are comments, visitor frequency, RSS subscribers, and perhaps your "About Me" page. With Wordpress and some other blogging platforms, number of comments can be easily monitored on your dashboard.

That about sums it up for goals in Google Analytics. Help me out with my goals and leave one in the comments!