This is the first part in our Google Analytics 101 series. This introductory series will help novice Google Analytics users learn how to set up and view goals, funnels and flows.

Google Analytics: Intro to Goals

Goals help you measure actions or objectives on your site. When setting up a goal in Google Analytics, you have four measurement types to choose from:

• Destination – example: thanks.html
• Duration – example: 5 minutes or more
• Pages Per Visit – example: 3 pages
• Event – example: played a video

The most basic type of goal you may wish to create are visits to a success page, typically the “thank you” or “confirmation” page on which a user arrives after submitting a form or purchasing an item in your store.

To begin setting up your Goals, log into Google Analytics, access the Admin section of the profile you wish to create a goal in, and under the Goals tab, select “Create a Goal.”

Here is the Create a Goal process step-by-step:

1. Name your Goal
2. Select the Type of Goal. We’ll use “Destination” in this example
3. You now have three destination URL types — “Equals to”, “Begins with” and “Regular Expression.” If you just want to measure visits to a page called “/thankyou.html,” select “Equals to”. If you want to measure “thankyou.html” in addition to “thankyou.html?id-1xyz” select “Begins with.” The regular expression feature offers you more advanced options, for example, measuring multiple pages.
4. There is no need to assign a Value or Funnel, so leave those two features off.
5. Click “Verify this Goal” which will help you identify if the goal is set up correctly. If there is no data, then you may have a typo in your URL.
6. Click “Create Goal”

Goals are not applied retroactively, so you will need to wait until Google Analytics compiles some new data to see Goal data in Google Analytics.

With your Goal set up and data flowing, you now have access to basic Goal reporting:

• Navigate to the Goals dashboard in Google Analytics to see the number of goal completions and the conversion rates based on site traffic.
• Goal conversion data also appears in other reports in Google Analytics, including Visitor Report, Traffic Reports, Site Search Reports, and the Events Reports. For example, looking Organic keyword data you can see a goal conversion rate for each referring keyword.

 

We hope this has provided a helpful introduction to setting up Google Analytics Goals! Next in this series, we will go over the basics of Google Analytics Funnels report.