Google Analytics Goals

Introduction

  • Objectives: Long-term outlook.
  • Goals: Short-term aims.
  • Specifics: The action steps of goal settings.

Goals

Goal conversions are the primary metric for measuring how well your site fulfills business objectives. A goal is a website page which a visitor reaches once they have made a purchase or completed another desired action, such as a registration or download.

Once you have set your goals, you'll be able to see conversion rates and the monetary value of the traffic you receive. You can also define a "funnel path" for each goal. A funnel path is the path you want visitors to take to reach a goal. Defining a funnel path allows you to monitor how frequently visitors who begin a conversion process actually complete it. more in funnels

Setting up Goals

Goals > Set up goals and funnels > Add goal

The information you need to enter to create a new goal are:

  • Goal Name: The name of the goal.
  • Active Goal: If you wish the goal to be active or not.
  • Goal Position: The position of the goal.
  • Goal Type
    • URL Destination: You only need to the webpage. Not the whole domain.
    • Time on Site
    • Pages/Visit
  • Goal Funnel: For every goal URL, there is a logical way that users reach that goal. A funnel is used to measure how often users take the logical path to the goal URL. If they deviate from that path frequently, maybe that path is not the best for the users.

Goals Menu Options

Total Conversions

Total number of conversions and breaks it down by day.

Conversion Rate

This is usual the same as the the total conversions. But total conversions is based on numbers. Conversion rate is based on the number of conversions as a proportion of the total visits for that day. So for example 40 conversions out of 120 is a rate of 25%.

Goal Verification Path

This will list all the pages of a completed goal.

Reverse Goal Path

This shows the pages visitors landed on leading up to a completed goal. This is useful for seeing which pages are funneling more conversions, and for those results showing, which landing pages are funneling those conversions.

Goal Value

Which days are more profitable.

Goal Abandoned Funnels

Overview of the number of people who enter the goal conversion funnel, but exit without completing a goal. You can quickly see how many potential conversions your site is losing and again compare over the time period you have selected.

Funnel Visualization

Diagram that visualizes a funnel. At each stage, you can see how many visitors enter at that stage, how many visitors are continuing in the funnel from the previous stage, how many visitors leave at that stage without completing and where they are going.
This is useful for analyzing things such as checkout processes and seeing where users abandon their shopping carts and where they go.