Goals in Google Analytics lets you specifically track how often users complete important actions on your website or app. These important actions include product purchases, lead form collection, and form submissions. Before setting up goals, you would have to define what goals mean to you and your business. Each business has its own unique goals and objectives that bring meaning to the data collected.

To get started follow these steps:

1.Click the admin gear icon at the bottom left to open the admin panel. Click ‘Goals’ under View, then Click “New Goal”.

2.Enter the name of your goal. Something descriptive is best like ‘Contact Form Submission’.

Choose a goal ID and slot (if in doubt leave it on the default one).

Choose a goal type. If you’re unsure of which goal type is relevant for your goal, choose event as it’s the most flexible.

 

Destination goals

Destination Goals track where your user ends up after performing a specified activity, such as filling out a contact form. Your Destination objective is triggered when a user views the set html page you’ve defined. Thank you pages or confirmation pages for prospects who have filled out a certain landing form page, for example, are ideal for monitoring with goals.

The URL you choose should be a page that your prospects view AFTER they’ve done the conversion activity you want them to do (for example, select the Thank You page URL that appears after your user has filled out a contact form). You don’t need to provide the entire URL; only the requested URL is required.

As for value, it’s best to leave this off unless you have a specific revenue tied to a user landing on that URL.

Funnel is best left off unless you have an advanced understanding of both Google Analytics and your users’ journeys through your site. It allows you to set prerequisite URLs that users must land on before the destination URL in order to trigger the goal.

 

Pages/Screens Goals

Pages/Screens Goals track the number of pages or screens a user visits every session to determine how engaged your prospects are. Set a minimum amount of pages every session (for example, 3 pages) that you want prospects to see. Each time a user spends more time per session than you selected, it will be tracked as a conversion.

 

Event goals

You can use Event Goals to track particular interactions with your website content, such as playing a video, downloading a PDF, signing up for your newsletter, or simply arriving on your page via an external link. To create an Event Goal, you must first create an Event using an Event Tracking code for the specified interaction. This helpful tutorial will show you how to set up Event Tracking. After you’ve set up your Event Tracking code, you can set up your Event Goal by following the steps mentioned below.

 

Set the category

Defining a Category allows you to organise a collection of things that you want to keep track of. This is important if, for example, you want to bundle all of your videos together. Your Category field may be anything like ‘Videos’ in this example.

 

Set an action

The interaction you want your user to have – for example, ‘Play’ or ‘Stop’ for a video – is referred to as an action.

 

Set the label

Filling out the Label allows you to provide additional information about your Event. For example, if you’re tracking a video, this would be a great location to keep track of the title.

 

Set the value

It’s recommended that you only assign a value to an event if you have a fixed revenue that a user trigger that event will generate.

Conclusion

Be cognizant of using intuitive names when naming your goals. Also, take note that changing the settings of your goals will also change the conversion data from the point of change. This change will not be applied on historical data, and might create confusion when comparing past and current data. Give your goals some thought before setting is up. Good Luck!