How to improve your Google Analytics goals

There is a lot of tracking in Google Analytics, which you have to do a little bit more than just implementation of UA-code on your pages. One of these features is the “goal”. The purpose of the function in which you can follow one of the following:

• how many people achieve their hand,
• how many people will remain in place for a minimum amount of time,
• how many people have viewed a minimum of pages on your website,
• how many people caused the event(for example, watching a movie).

We noticed that people often have problems with setting these goals in Google Analytics. Not only are they getting stuck on as , to set them, but also to which targets configure. Especially the latter really requires some thought. I'll try to walk you through the thought process in this post, which is also what we do with our new service setting your goals Google Analytics .

Why Make Goals?

Gates gives a lot of additional and valuable information. With goals you can track whether people are doing on your website what you want them to do. There are always some things that people can do that you can use, so keep track of how many people are doing that is priceless.
But that's not all. After you set up goals, you can create multiple steps, if you enable the “funnel” on:

Use a funnel Option

funnel is essentially a process people go to buy one of your products, or to subscribe to the newsletter. You can set up as many steps as you want, but I think that the only reason to add a step is when it is not required. If the step is not required, it is not part of the funnel, because people can also come from other sites. People will have your site seen by a specific product before you actually add it to cart and buy. But the best is yet to come! After configuring the gateway of the funnel, you can actually see how this goal does in “Funnel Visualization”. It is very graphical and easy to picture of what is happening with your goal to understand: As you can see, it shows how many people came each step, how many people went through to the next stage, and how many people were falling at every step. This makes it very clear where you can improve things in your chimney. And it shows the rates and overall conversion rate funnel. How's that for useful?

Imagine

If you have a shop, usually have a lot of products. When this amount is increasing, it will be difficult to keep track of how each product is doing for the sale. Configure your goals from the chimneys as already indicated above, gives an insight into how products are doing, as well as showing how the related parties are doing. You can check if the product page is actually getting people to add this product to your cart. And when people add the product to the shopping cart, you will be able to see how many of them actually bought product in the end. I can see everything in the visual pathways.

How to make goals?

You can create goals in the 'admin' in Google Analytics. Admin tab is located in the upper right corner when you're logged in to Google Analytics. Make sure that you have the appropriate account and view selected. When you click Admin, there will be three “columns”, of which the most right will look like this: You can click on targets where I lit it. If you have not yet created any goals, you will see this: As you can see, you have a default 20 goals. To get more, you have to pay, unfortunately. Click to create a goal will give you this screen: Making the purpose of using the “destiny” allows you to aim for the people always end up on a page. For example, if you have a contact form, a contact form is the confirmation page, you can keep track of everyone who entered the confirmation page. “Time” allows you to track anyone who has spent more than the minimum amount of time can be set to your website. “pages / screens to visit” doing the same thing as “Duration”, only the hits. When people hit the threshold of the minimum number of views is set, will be counted as the end of the pitch. “Event” goal is the hardest. This requires real-coding, as events have been created earlier. However, they are quite strong, if you've set them up. This way you can track how many times a video played on your website, for example.

Goals regular expression

When creating goals “destiny”, you will find you have these options: “Equal up “is simply this. URL of visits must be exactly fits to the URL you put there. So if you have any campaign variables or sub, it will not count against the goalie “starts” is exactly the opposite :. Everything from entering a URL will be counted toward the created target. hardest but there is a “regular expression” the target. At the same time, it is the most efficient and accurate possibility of three. A regular expression, or regex, a string of patterns that, if you know how to use them can be very specific in its orientation. Let's say you have an online store with over 20 products, so you can “t fit them all in your free Google Analytics account. What you can do is to create a score for each brand are selling, using regex goals. Your task will be simply target a confirmation page after the order. And, if you want to track brand was Yoast, you can add a line regex so . *)(*.)

// Yoast /

This expression is simply writes everything from / Yoast / in the URL. need to be aware that every step in the expression and regularly funnel should be written in the regex. should also be remembered that the regular expression does not fit into any other purposes, or is it just to be counted twice.

What goals should earn?

“I do not have too much data” that no one, ever. course, people will say it from time to time, but you get my point of view. If not, here it is: try as many useful purposes as you can think of. And there is one very important word in this sentence: useful. There are literally millions of things you can think of to set up goals for, but most of them will probably be completely useless on its website and / or company. And there comes the real thinking. You have to think about what you want your visitors do on your site. Let me give an example, what would be good targets for the online store at all:

• target for each product you have in your online store, or if it has more than 20 products:
  • regular expression purpose of each category of product / brand.
• gateway to newsletter signups
• overall goal for sales.

Of course, you can be more specific, following, for example, how many people have viewed the video of the product, or how many people are left to review the product. It all comes down to thinking about what your site is about, and what you want to do on it.

Assign values ​​

Assigning values ​​to your goals is important to be able to distinguish their goals. If you do not assign a value to your goals, you simply can not see which of the objectives is the most profitable target. There are three ways in which you can assign values ​​to your goals :. The actual values, the mean values ​​or relative values ​​

Current Values ​​

Let's say that it offers several services, all of which have a price. People can hire for these services, and they have to pay in advance . In this case, you simply assign the price as the value of each gate representing the service. In this way, you can just see how many times the objective has been completed, and thus one of your service was successfully required. In this case it is important that people have to pay in advance, otherwise you'll run into trouble. Because even though the prices of their services are always the same, if people do not have to pay immediately end goal(order of service), there is always the possibility that you just will not pay.

Average values ​​of

When people do not have to pay in advance, or offer services or products that may have different prices(such as our plug), or the specific purpose of generating leads, you must assign values average. Average values ​​must be calculated in three different ways on three options I mentioned.

1. when the prices of products may vary, just take the average order value of last year(at least one month). This way you will have a general estimate of what each order you will receive an average.
2. When people do not pay in advance, there is always a percentage of people who simply will not pay, even after requesting the service. You need to learn what is percent. If the service costs $100, and 40% of people will not pay, you assign the value should be set to $60.
3. Items that have no direct value to them, such as newsletter subscription shares or social media, you can still make money in the end. This is what people call “Lead Generation”. The best way to assign relative values ​​would be if you knew keeping exchange rates. This means that we know how many shares of social media, for example, you sell one of your products / services. If it is 1%, it means each share with a $100 service will be worth $1.

Relative Values ​​

If you make goals for things that do not really make money, you can assign relative values. The relative values ​​are simply values ​​that indicate which targets are worth more to you. So, if you prefer people signing up for the newsletter on your Facebook page like, you can assign a value of 2 goals newsletter and Facebook as the goal value of 1 Or, if you think that twice as much is too much, you can assign the value 3 and 2 These numbers are of course completely done, but it still helps to distinguish each goal.

Do not take this much time?

It all depends on how big the site, of course. However, if you own an online store with many products, the answer is simple: yes. Although it may be difficult to find the time to set it all up decently and properly, in the end it will always be worth it! Of course, you can always ask us to set your goals for you. Google Analytics is not exactly known for its usability, so it can save a lot of time. We also guarantee the objectives will always be set by Google Analytics Qualified Individual. There will be no conflict between the objectives, and we also assist in the process of thinking what to track and how. So save yourself time and thought i have us set your goals

Summary

So there are a few tips that I have for you:

1. Think about what you want your targets, especially if you're on a free Google Analytics: Your objective space is limited;
2. Use the funnel. This makes the data of your goals much more insightful;
3. If you understand regular expressions: use them. They will give you much more power and specificity than any of the other options;
4. Add value to your goals, so you can actually compare the performance objectives;
5. Let us set your goals and save time

Set them!

There is really no longer an excuse to avoid the creation of your goals! In the end, you'll be amazed you ever without, so get cracking! have some nice goals set up yourself? Let me know in the comments This post originally appeared on Yoast and will be re-published with the consent of
The image on :. Schatzyo by Shutterstock

Thijs de Valk

Thijs de Valk is a behavioral scientist with a degree in Pedagogical Sciences. He turned to work in the geek Yoast. He fills his days with the customer service, website and convert opinion.

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