Goals in Google Analytics are a way for us as marketers to measure the success of our digital campaigns. They let us know if a specific action is resulting in conversions or not, thereby allowing us to optimise better. For example, you may have a goal of getting 10 leads from your website per month. Once you get that number (or exceed it), then it’s safe to say that your marketing strategy is working. In short, you can use goals to verify if the steps you are taking for traffic generation and conversion are paying off or not.
Goals work by sending a hit, whenever your site visitor performs an action that fits within one of your predefined goal criteria. It’s really simple – as soon as you perform an action, a hit is sent to Google Analytics. The only thing you have to do is make sure that the goal definition criteria are correctly set.
Another useful feature of Google Analytics goals is that you can import them to your Google Ads account. This is the best way of ensuring that your PPC campaign efforts and results are integrated into your overall digital marketing strategy in the most holistic way possible.
Google Analytics goals are flexible, especially if used in conjunction with Google Tag Manager which allows you to track an enormous range of custom events occurring in the DOM and assign them to conversions and values in Google Analytics. For instance, you can assign events to specific button or link triggers, which is particularly useful for affiliate site webmasters.
Let’s look at how to set up goals in Google Analytics. In the following example we’ll look at how to set up a simple thank you page goal without any Google Ads or Google Tag Manager integration to keep things simple:
Step by Step Guide
1. Select what property and view you want to create a goal for at the top left.
2. Click the “Admin Gear” icon at the bottom left and click goals in the popup menu.
3. Click +New Goal.
4. Name your goal, pick an ID (if in doubt leave it on ID1/Set1), choose the type (destination is the most common and easiest one to use). Click continue.
5. Set the goal destination.
For a simple thank you page goal, enter the last part of the page’s URL, rather than the full URL and set it to Equals to. Advanced users have the option of using Regex. You can also assign a monetary value to a goal but in this case we’ll leave it blank because we’re creating a simple lead generation goal and we don’t know the value of each lead. Funnel is another option for advanced users and we recommend leaving it off until you’re more comfortable with Google Analytics.
You can click Verify this goal to test how many times it would have triggered in the past 7 days. Make sure that you have generated traffic to the page within the last 7 days for this test to work properly.
