By now, you’ve likely heard of Google Analytics. If you’re running a marketing program for your business, you’ve likely used it as well. This tool is extremely useful, but if you are not able to put in the time to learn it’s extensive capabilities, it can also be very confusing. No matter your skill level, learning to set goals in Google Analytics is essential to optimize your marketing plan. Read on to discover why.
What are Google Analytics Goals?
Google Analytics allows you to set custom goals to track actions on your website you would like to better understand. You can set metrics for what you would like to see from your users, and track the progression of these items over time. The platform offers multiple types of goals including the following:
Duration
Duration goals track how long someone stays on your website before leaving. This is a good goal type if you’re looking to track user engagement across multiple pages. You can set a goal time in hours, minutes, or seconds based on how long you would like users to stay.
Destination
A destination goal tracks how many times a user lands on a specific page of your website. This can be helpful if you’re looking to drive traffic to a particular page, and it is especially valuable when tracking the number of people who reach a conversion page such as an Order Confirmation or Form Submit page.
Pages per Session
Pages per session goals are similar to other goal types, but rather than tracking time spent or visits to a particular page, this goal type tracks how many pages an individual user visits in a single session on your website. If you’re trying to increase user exploration on your website, this may be a good goal to set.
Event
Event goals should be set if you’d like to track a specific user interaction on your website that Google Analytics does not normally track. For example, if you want to track the time someone spent watching a video or how many times someone clicked on a click-to-call button, you should set an event goal for that action.
Why Do Goals Matter?
Understanding what goals are can help you in the set-up and measurement process, but to truly get the most out of your goal tracking, it is vital to understand why goals matter. Google Analytics offers lots of information about user activity on your website, and setting specific goals can streamline that information to help you see the metrics you truly care about and measure them against your ideal user experience. When setting goals you can track the metrics that are most important to your business, and optimize the backend of Google Analytics to work in the ways that are best for you.
66% of all websites using analytics technology use Google Analytics.
Looking to better understand how to track your traffic and engagement to generate leads? At KWSM, we develop carefully crafted lead generation strategies designed to convert website visitors into potential customers.
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