Goals in Google Analytics How to maximize conversions

How many users subscribe to the newsletter? What kind of users, those who visit your website through mobile or live in a certain country, convert more? What social networks generate more conversions? Through which source of traffic do you get more sales? Which visitors generate more sales, those coming from the newsletter or Facebook?

These questions you can answer if you work with the goals of Google Analytics.  A goal allows you to measure an activity completed on your website or application. In this way, they will help you to measure the success of your business. Once the objectives are applied and analyzed the data that we report, what we really need to consider is: what actions do I have to make to improve the data obtained?

Examples of targets in Google analytics

• Subscribe to a newsletter
• Sending a contact form
• Make a purchase/order made, we can analyze with a funnel conversion to analyze step by step the purchase process and eliminate bottlenecks.
• Visit a specific page
• Add a product to the cart
• Downloading a document

Properly configured your objectives will allow you to measure the effectiveness of your website/app and your marketing campaigns.

We recommend you to analyze carefully what are the objectives that consider most relevant or priority. Answering questions such as: What business objectives do we have? What marketing strategies are we going to develop to fulfill them?, will help us to determine our objectives.

How to set up targets in Google analytics

The objectives are configured at the level of view/profile. To do this, we entered the administration panel of Google Analytics and then in objective profiles:

When we go into targets, we get the ones we already have configured. To set up a new one, enter “+ New target”.

When entering, we will observe two options:

1. Objectives from a template in which we will find predefined objectives by Google analytics with the most common goals for a company based on revenue, acquisition, consultation and interaction.
2. Customized objectives that allows us to configure our goals based on 4 variables.

In this article, let’s explain how to create and configure custom targets.

When we enter to personalize, we will display the following screen:

In the description of the objective, we recommend to put a name that allows us to recognise the objective in a simple way, because when we have configured for example 10 objectives, it will be easier to recognize it.

The objective Id allows us to group the objectives by tabs, in total there are 4 groups of objectives.

Next, we see that there are 4 types of objectives:

Destination

When a user visits a specific URL on a particular Web page. For example, the thank you page for your purchase or a thank you page when you fill out a form.

The configuration is very simple, as we see in the following screen:

In the Destination tab, we write the URL of our target, in this case, is the “Gracias. html” page that tells us for a specific Web page, that the user has made a purchase.

* In this section you do not have to write the entire URL, only that part that corresponds to the reports we see in Google Analytics.

For example: www.digitalmenta.com/gracias.html, we’ll just put the highlighted part in red.

The value and funnel conversion options are optional. In this case, we have attributed a value of €1 each time the target is met.  The conversion funnel option has been left off since we will explain it in later articles.

Duration

The duration objectives measure the time a user spends on a Web page. For example, if we have an ecommerce, we may find it interesting to know how many visits are more than 3 minutes on our website. Or, on the contrary, we can know how long it took a user to fill out a form and optimize it to make it faster to fill.

Its configuration is very simple, we only have to specify the time that the user should be on our page to fulfill the objective.

In similarity to the previous one, we can add a monetary value.

Pages/Screens per session

This objective will be fulfilled when a person has visited the number of pages determined, as many as we have defined. How many more pages you visit, the more likely it becomes.

To do this, we just have to define the number of pages:

Event

An event is an action that a user performs on our website/app, such as Reprducir a video or downloading a PDF. In order to measure an event, we must first insert the tracking code on our Web page.

As an example, if we want to set up an event to measure video playbacks, the goal would be as follows:

• Category is the object we are going to track, in this case, videos.
• Action is a parameter that is used to name the interaction that the user is going to perform, in the case of the example shown, we count the video reproductions.
• Tags are additional information that will help us recognize events. On occasion, we have several events and assigning a name to a label, it will help us to identify it better. In this case, “ad 1”, a useful name if we have for example 20 ad videos. We list them and thus we know which one converts better.
• Value is a numeric value. This objective will measure when users view the video more than 10 seconds.

And created our goals, it’s time to put them into practice and analyze the data!

Some tips on goals in Google Analytics:

• The objectives have no retroactive character. The data is displayed from when the target has been created.
• Targets cannot be deleted.
• Each Google analytics view allows us to create up to 20 goals. If we want to create more goals, we recommend creating them in an additional view.

And now it’s your turn have you already created targets in Google analytics? Tell us the experience!