Tapping into the world of Digital Analytics -> Tracking Results with Google Analytics
By: Dusan Stojkovic
Tags: Digital Marketing, Google Analytics, Data, Analytics

One of the most important elements of any marketing success is the ability to set the right goals and effectively track and measure them. Having the right data will fuel you to make a better decision, come up with better insights, or be able to evaluate better how your current campaign is performing.

In this article, I will focus on what are the best ways to utilize Google Analytics. Before we jump in, you might wanna check some of the previous articles I wrote that cover more about the basics of what Google Analytics is and how to use it:

What are the goals inside of Google Analytics?

All right. Let’s talk about goals in Google Analytics. Using Google Analytics could be overwhelming at times, as it is able to present and show you a lot of different information. However, one of the most essential features it has to help you better understand the performance of your marketing activities and your website is the Goals feature of Google Analytics.

Goals inside of GA can be applied to specific pages or screens your users visit, how many pages/screens they view in a session, how long they stay on your site or app, and the events they trigger while they are there. Every goal can have a monetary value, so you can see how much that conversion is worth to your business. Using values for goals lets you focus on the highest value conversions, such as transactions with a minimum purchase amount.

But before going into technical details of how goals inside of GA work, let’s talk a bit more about the process of choosing and understanding goals.

Before setting up the Goals

The very first thing to think about, before we dive into the different types of goals in Google Analytics and everything else that’s available, is to first think about what a goal should be.

Most people, when they think about the different types of goals in Google Analytics, they mostly are thinking about goals that are some sort of completion where they’re completing a process. So, it’s either the prospect becomes a lead and maybe that’s the completion that you’re looking for, or maybe it’s they purchase something, and that’s the completion that you’re looking for. Don’t get me wrong, that is an important goal. But almost everybody races toward this and there are more than just these completion goals. There are other types of goals that you need to be aware of.

For introducing which types of goals are crucial to track for a marketing process, Mercer suggests something which he calls the ACE model. So, what this is, this means ACE goals stands for Aware, Complete, and Engage.

An awareness goal reflects the first phase of the customer journey. In the checkout example, the awareness goal is viewing the product detail page. If you’re trying to capture leads, your awareness goal might be someone on Facebook or LinkedIn clicking an ad or link to a blog post. In both cases, the customer becomes aware of your product or business.

An awareness goal can also be more specific such as a customer seeing a particular offer you’re making. In this case, the customer might land on an opt-in offer to become a lead or land on a sales page to purchase something.

Engagement goals are an important part of the customer journey because engagement is how a customer transitions from awareness to completion. In the offline world, engagement might be someone walking into the shoe store and trying on shoes. Similarly, online customers need to engage with the product you want them to buy or the action you want them to take.

An example of an engagement goal in Google Analytics could be tracking specific events in the buying process, a specific product offering page, or even a specific amount of time that users spent on a specific page.

Completion goals are the ones marketers naturally think of as goals. In the offline world, completion is when the person buys a pair of shoes. In the online example, it would be someone registering, leaving contact information, or finalizing the purpose of visiting the specific page by taking the desired call to action.

Setting up Goals in Google Analytics

Now that we know how to choose and define goals, in order to start working with the goals, it’s important to understand what is the process to follow in order to find them and set them up inside of your GA account console. Here are simple steps you can follow to do that:

After signing into your GA account, select the Admin Account at the top of your screen

You will be presented with three separate columns ‘Account’, ‘Property’, and ‘View.’

In the ‘View’ column (it’s the last column) select ‘View.’

Click the red ‘+ New Goal’ button at the top of the table.

Select the template option for using one of the pre-defined templates, or custom option for using your own parameters

Understanding different Goal Types

In order to choose the most important Google Analytics goals for your business, you first need to determine which of these goal types works best for what you want to measure. Here is a quick overview of 4 types of goals Google Analytics uses:

Destination Goals

Destination goals allow you to set a specific page as a goal. They display in Analytics as conversions. You can have as many destination goals on your site as you want, and every time a user visits one of those pages, it’s counted as a conversion for your goal.

These goals are most commonly used to track form submissions and other actions that send users to a thank you page. Although you can’t track form data itself in Google Analytics, counting the number of visits to a thank-you page gives you a way to track those conversions.

Setting up Funnel Goals

Goal Funnels allow you to set up defined points you would like to measure for how users move through your site in order to complete your desired goal. It’s super handy for seeing the exact point where users abandon your funnel so you know what pages need investigating and fixing.

Goal funnels are only useful when you need users to follow a series of particular pages before completing your Goal. For example, something like a landing page won’t require you to set up Goal Funnels as users will usually move from the landing page straight to the thank you or confirmation screen. However, if users are moving from a checkout process to make a purchase there may be many steps you’d like to track along the way to ensure your pages are optimized for conversion.

Duration Goals

A duration goal tracks how much time someone spends on a page.

If you’re looking to measure engagement, these goals are a good way to track visitors who browse your pages, read your content, and learn about your company.

Unlike traffic, which measures all visits (even those that only last a few seconds), duration goal completions represent people who are actively engaged with your site.

Pages/Screens per session

Pages/Screens per session goals are another way to track engaged site visitors. Instead of counting conversions based on how long a visitor spends on your site, they’re based on the number of pages a user views.

Event Goals

Event goals are based on specific user interactions that you’ve already set up as Events on your site.

These interactions include watching a video, downloading a piece of content, engaging with interactive elements, and more.

Now, let’s practice

All of this theoretically might seem overwhelming, so the best next step would be jump right into practice.

You don’t have your website you can practice on? Don’t worry, Google got you covered.

You can set up your demo account and practice following this link.

Some useful materials you can use to dive deeper into the topics touched here:

A.C.E. Goal Planner: https://measurementmarketing.io/go/acegoalplanner

Destination Goal Examples: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1116091

Session Duration in Google Analytics: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1006253

About the Program

About CXL — CXL Institute is a leading training provider on all things data-driven marketing. You can learn more about CXL by visiting this page.

About Digital Analytics mini degree — The Data Analytics mini degree at CXL is a power-packed program to learn in-depth skills for the Google suite of analytics tools to become a data-driven specialist who can set up any needed tracking and turn data into insights and money. You can learn more about the mini degree by visiting this page.