Google Analytics Updates to Goals

It is very significant to evaluate how people communicate with your website so as to check conversions, leads and user behavior. Google Analytics provides three types of tracking tools for understanding these interactions − E-commerce tracking, Event tracking and Goal tracking. E-commerce tracking is used to measure performance of your sales, while event tracking is used to evaluate a user’s behavior or actions on-site.

However, in addition to sales and user behavior, you need to measure if a visitor performed an action that could affect your bottom line. Conversion results when visitor performs a desired action such as submitting an online form. If you have an ecommerce site, your goal is achieved when a purchase is completed. Google Goals allows you to measure such interactions including media plays, social connections, the amount of time spent on a screen, newsletter sign-ups, or a minimum purchase value. You can set up individual goals to track each activity. Whenever a goal is converted, it is logged into Google Analytics account. You can find out how much the conversion affects your business by assigning a monetary value to each goal. The conversion rates in Goal reports can help you to improve your SEO efforts and marketing strategies.

Google has now announced several updates to Goals to make it easier for you to measure and track all these activities in a much better way with a new set-up flow, new templates, and new verification capabilities.

Setting-Up Goals

The steps for setting up Goals are same in new set-up procedure like going to Admin->Profiles->Goals. The only difference is with the presentation with new visuals making it easier to complete the steps.

Introducing Templates

Google has now added new templates to make goal set up easier than before. 20 new Industry Categories have been added to Google Analytics. The templates are organized into four business objectives, such as Revenue, Acquisition, Inquiry and Engagement. You can choose the industry category based on your business from the property settings. When you select a template, it will pre-fill the set-up flow with values specific to your industry. Users can also create custom goals.

You can choose any of these objectives according to the purpose of your goal. However, a ‘Revenue’ goal may not always imply a direct sale. It could be a completed checkout for an online payment or the successful submission of a lead such as appointment scheduling, depending on your business model.

The new templates can help you to add actionable goals more quickly. They also make it easier to find goals that can actually fulfill your business objectives.

Verify Goals

Once Goals have been created, it allows you to check your Goal set up before saving it with a verify option provided at the end of set up flow as shown as below.

On clicking ‘Verify this Goal’ you can see what the conversion rate would have been for past seven days if this goal had been set up. Feedback is instantly available so that you can decide whether to create that goal by clicking the ‘Create Goal’ button or modify the Goal configuration you are considering.

The significance of this update is that you can measure the goals from the moment you define them. This was not so in the past. If you had made a mistake while defining a goal and if someone converted it, there was no way available to measure it. Now, you can test your goal setup based on data over the past week. You know that your goal has to be redefined if the goal was converted but your verification does not indicate this. This preview is available for newly created goals.

Goals Overview Report

The Goals Overview Report available under ‘Conversions’ section makes us understand how often a goal conversion does happen. Google Analytics has added more features to examine correlations between goals or visualize each goal’s performance over a period of time. You can examine the relationships between goals as shown below:

This type of analysis can provide you with a comprehensive view of user interactions and helps you use your marketing resources more effectively.

In addition to Goals overview report, you can look at Mutli-Channel Funnel reports. It now includes off-site interactions that a visitor may have had with your business before completing an online goal.

Analyzing conversion goals is important to find the traffic sources that are actually driving revenue. With more accurate measures of conversion rates, you can adopt the right online marketing strategies to maximize your Return on Investment (ROI). A professional SEO company can provide you with effective conversion optimization services and make a difference to your conversion rates with Goals.