Video transcript
This video will show you how to set up goals in your Google Analytics account.
First off, a goal is what you want someone to do whenever they get to your site. If for example you’re selling stuff on your site, then the goal would be the visitor getting to the purchased products download, or thank you page after of course they’ve made their payment.
Another goal example would be if your site is for say an offline tree trimming business and you offer a free tree trimming estimate and a free guide to maintaining your tree after being trimmed. All the visitor has to do to get that stuff is to enter their name and e-mail address and phone number and after doing so, they’ll be directed to the download or thank you page to get that free guide and then wait for you to contact them for the estimate. In this example, the goal is whenever the visitor ends up on your thank you page and gets that free download for maintaining their trimmed tree.
The first thing that you want to do before even logging in to your Google analytics account is define the goal that you want to track and the path from beginning to the end or the entire final process. Now for the sake of simplicity, this demonstration will be a sales page at the beginning or the mouth of the funnel and then ending with the goal or the download or thank you page.
Let me demonstrate. In this example, I have the domain or the website here and on this website, there might be several different sales pages and several different niches, each one having their own thank you page. For example, the niches might have their own individual e-mail captcha form. Each one of those will have their own thank you page to give whatever free carat that they dangled to get that e-mail address captured in the first place. likewise with the sales page, there might be several different sales pages here, each one having their own individual thank you or download page, and it’s a good idea to track each and every one of those individually. You’ll see what I’m talking about here in just a second, but here’s the sales page. Typical sales page, you got pretty pictures, you’ve got a buy now button, somebody shows up here and likes what they see, hit the buy now button, goes through the payment process, boom, lands on the thank you page.
This is the goal. This is the page we’re going to be tracking. So let’s go ahead and log into our Google Analytics account. I’ve already logged in to my Gmail account when I click on sign in; it’s going to take me directly to my GA account. If you have not logged into your Google account of some sort or another, then a box is going to pop up here asking for your login credentials.
At this point, click on the link to the profile that you want to create the goal in. I’m going to go with the sales process. Over here on the left side bar, you have the conversions down here at the bottom and that is where you can see the goal information of those goals you’ve created. Over here on the top right corner is where you actually go to create the goal. Click on admin. Now you choose the profile that you want to create that goal in. A little bit of information to know before you go further. You are only allowed 20 different goals for your profile. Once a goal is created and activated, you cannot delete it ever. So if at some point down the line you find that you’re running out of those 20 goals and you need more, you might feel tempted to go in and edit one of those goals which you can do. The problem with that though is that all the reports generated from that point on containing that edited goals and information will be a little confusing. So you want to do your planning process ahead of time.
You can go ahead and delete a profile which would delete all of the goals within that profile, come back and recreate an entirely new profile with the same name and then you’ll have 20 goals to create again, that’s fine and dandy, but keep this in mind too. The information from the goals are not retroactive. As soon as you create a goal, it will only start generating information from that point forward no matter how long you’ve had your Google Analytics account on this particular domain, a goal is not going to provide you with retroactive information, so keep that in mind whenever you’re considering deleting a profile just to create a bunch of new goals.
Okay, that said, let’s click on this profile and move forward. Now you come up here and click on goals. By the way, right here you can see that you’ve got 20 goals remaining. Click on create a goal and based on the scenario that I’ve described, this top one is what were going to go with. Come on down here and click on next step. Give it a name. And the type based on what I have described so far. Destination is the one that we’re going to be tracking. The duration or pages per visit are pretty good to track if say you’re trying to sell advertising in your site. Click on next step. At this point, we want to put in the destination URL here and that’s this guy right here. Now, you have to choose which of these 3 options you want to use in the method of tracking this. Now, myself, I usually go with begins with because most of my sales pages have security built in to make dynamic of which called dynamic thank you page URLs. In other words, it’s this thank you page URL here with a whole bunch of special characters, letters, and numbers at the end that make this URL expire after a certain amount of time and makes it very difficult to pass around all the black Ad sites out there. The one thing that is constant is the beginning, right there. So if I use the begins with option, then I’m good to go.
Otherwise, I take a chance of this not being tracked. Now for more information on this, or in this other stuff, come on up here to the top right corner and click on help. In doing so, I want to let you know that the help documentation has not yet caught up with the newness of this particular goal setting screen because this is brand new. As of this recording, this is only a couple of weeks old. The documentation not so much.
Let me show you what I’m talking about. Let’s go ahead and do a search in here for goal details destination. Click on search. Click on destination goal examples. And come on down here. A lot of the information is going to be right in here but what I want to demonstrate here is match types. See where it says exact match, had match, or regular expression match, these 3 items one, two, three, are these 3 items right here. Because about a week or so ago, this did not say equals to or begins with, it said, exact match. This said, had matched, and this one here still says regular expressions. So the definition they’re giving you here and the examples are giving you here are referring to, equals to, begins with, and regular expression respectively.
Aside from that, most of these other help information is actually helpful. So let’s go ahead and close this out and the value and funnel, it says optional but it really does add to the information in the reports if you have these on. Now, the value for sales item is pretty simple. Just put in the purchase price. Let’s say, this widget is going to cost 10 bucks. If you’re tracking e-mails, then the industry adwords is about a dollar per subscriber. Even when you’re a typical e-mail marketer, so if that’s what you’re trying to track, then just still a dollar there. I would say, do not leave it blank. I mean, it will work if it it’s blank it’s just that the report that you get based on this particular goal will look a little bit funky, so with the funnel, I want to add that as well and mine is kind of a simple funnel. We’ve got the sales page here. That’s step one. Give it a name and put it in the page URL, and click on, “Yes, like this to be required.” And then any other steps, not speaking about the goal because you don’t want to put this in as one of the steps. That’s the goal, so this is our goal right here.
If this were an actual site that I’m tracking and all of this information were actually the stuff that I wanted to track, then I would click on Verify This Goal and it would give you based on the last 7 days, a percentage of the conversions which is kind of funny because goals are not retroactive. Remember me saying that? But, for demonstration purposes, if you click on verify this goal; they will give you the conversions based on the information in your GA account for the last 7 days. Weird. If they can do it for the last 7 days, why can’t they just do it for the last year or so or however long you’ve had your GA account.
Okay, commentary over. Click on Create Goal, and we’re good. We now have our goal created and you got 19 left under this particular profile. How does this help you out that you’ve got the goal created?
Come on back to Reporting and if this were say, a month or 2 down the line and this were say, an actual site that I was tracking sales information on, then I will be able to provide you with details over here under the goals, but this is the information that you’ll get from your site once you have your goal created and it will take somewhere between, I don’t know, 5 to 20 minutes or so depending upon what you’re tracking before you’re getting the information.
Of course, if you’re tracking sales, you’re not going to get a whole lot of information until you get sales, but one thing that you will get though is goal flow. This is very cool. Now, since I don’t have anything up here on this particular goal or this particular domain to actually demonstrate this, I want to show you one from one of my other sites and this is just being an image. You’re not getting the true benefit. Once you have yours set up, you’ll have all of these information down here based on the different steps within the funnel because that last item, the funnel, that was optional, this is what I put in there as far as the steps: Step 1, step 2, step 3, and step 4. That’s all the details pertaining to each one of those steps. Step 1, step 2, step 3, and step 4. And each of these little red lines here are the drop offs. If there are no numbers in here and you can barely see right there that there’s a zero. There’s a zero there which is good.
Because if there were numbers in here, then that will tell you this, something here made these people drop off at this point and kept them from going on to the next step. If you got 00, 20, or 30 in this drop off, then that tells you that everything is cool up to this point here. Something in this particular step is making people want to leave. So if it’s that point, you want to investigate further into this section or this element, or this step to find out what might be making people leave and fix it. A very cool tool to help optimize your sales process.
As you hover over any one of these elements, boxes will pop up with a ton of information. So that’s just one of the cool things about the goals and the reports you can get from the goals, is all these information you can gather which hopefully, will be beneficial in helping you optimize your entire process of gathering leads or generating sales.
That’s going to bring us to the end of this video on Creating Goals in your Google Analytics account. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.
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