Setting-Up Google Analytics Goal Data

Continuing in a series of posts about Google Analytics data, today we're going to talk about the goals data.  This data is important because it allows you to track how well you're achieving your objectives, such as getting visitors to a certain page, signing-up to your newsletter, and buying.  Before you can use it, you have to set-up it up.  This is easy to do.  

Let's quickly walk through the steps:

1.  First, click on the "Analytics" link in the top menu and when the profiles for each of your sites pop-up, you'll see the "Action" column on the right side.  Click on the "Edit" link for the site you want to set-up your goals for:

2.  You then see the option to set-up a funnel and goals:

Under the "Settings" column on the right, hit "Edit" for G1 (Your first goal).

3.  You're then asked for the following information:

Here's how to fill this information in:

Active Goal:  Do you want this goal to be tracked at this time?  Most likely, you want to set this on "On."  You can turn it off later if you want.

Match Type:  This is in regards to the URLs (or pages) you want to track visitors' progress through.  The first type is "Exact match" where the URL has to appear exactly as you specified.  You most likely want to choose this.

The next type is "Head match."  You should select this option if your URL is largely the same, but each visitor has a new ID at the end, such as http://www.yoursite.com?ID=23 where "23" is a different number each time.

Finally, the third type is "Regular expression match."  This is when your URLs will vary widely from user to user.  This match type is one you are least likely to use.

Goal URL:  This is the page the visitor visits once a goal has been achieved.  It's your "Thank You" page.  What this URL is depends on the match type you selected.

Goal Name:  Give your goal a name, such as "Sale" or "Newsletter sign-up."

Next, you can decide if you want the URLs to be case sensitive and you can set a goal value or how much the action taken is worth to you.

After you've selected this information, you can set-up your funnel (it's optional).  A funnel is simply the steps a user must take before a conversion takes place.  For instance, for a sale to take place, the visitor may have to visit your landing page "http://www.YourDomain.com/LandingPage.html followed by the shopping cart page "http://www.YourDomain.com/Order.html" before he or she reaches "http://www.YourDomain.com/ThankYou.html."

In this example, we can find-out how well our landing and order pages are doing their jobs.  This can be important because our landing page may work, but visitors may not be proceeding past the order page.  You can then troubleshoot and work on solving the road-block.

Without tracking this data, you would not know a road-block exists here.

Here's what it looks like:

Check the "Required Step" box if you want step one to be a required step for a goal to be counted.  For instance, if you're driving traffic to YourDomain.com/LandingPage.html, then you don't want to track visitors who ordered by coming in through YourDomain.com/index.html (your home page).

After that, you can save your goal.  You then have the option of entering several more goals that you want to track for that website.

When you've set-up your goal(s), then you can head back over to the reports for your site and view your data as it comes-in.