Last week at our Marketing CoPilot Workshop, we talked about using the Goals tool in Google Analytics to measure website conversion. A lot of attendees had never set up a goal or goal conversion in Google and asked for advice on how to do this.
What are Goals?
In Google Analytics, Goals measure how well your website achieves your target objectives. A goal represents a completed activity or a conversion point that contributes to your business results. For example, a goal could be downloading a whitepaper, requesting a demonstration, watching a video, viewing five or more pages during one session, etc. Goals provide you with an large amount of valuable information that allows you to track if people are doing what you need them to do on your website in order to understand their buying journey.
Defining Goals in your online content marketing
Defining Goals in your online content marketing is a fundamental component of any digital marketing reporting. Setting up Goals allows Google Analytics to provide you with critical information to use in reporting on website conversion/performance as well as website ROI. This information is critical in evaluating the effectiveness of your online content marketing and marketing campaigns.
Goals can be created based on tracking one of the following actions:
- Destination: Treat a pageview or a page loading as a conversion. For example: If someone submits a form, the confirmation page could be the “destination”.
- Duration: Treat sessions that last longer than a specific amount of time on page as a conversion. For example: 10 minutes or longer spent reading your blog or About Us page.
- Event: Treat user interactions with your website as a conversion. For example: watching a video or clicking “Get Started”.
- Pages/Session: Measure user engagement by treating the number of pages per session as a conversion. For example: 5 or more pages have been loaded by one visitor.
What do I want people to do on my website?
Before you get into setting up goals, you need to determine what you are going to set up.
First, define what is the objective of your website?
- Education/thought leadership
- Lead generation
- Lead nurturing
- Selling
Second, list your current website conversion points and if they map back to your website objective(s). Determine if there is a gap between your website objective and the conversion points you have set up. Address that gap, if necessary by adding different website conversion points to support your website objective.
Third, define which type of Google Analytics Goal your website conversion points are classified as. Are there things you want people to do that aren’t explicitly conversion points, such as time on page, pages/session?
It’s your job to ensure that people clearly understand what you want them to do on your website and that you have the proper conversion points set up before you add the complexity of Google Analytics Goals.
How do I set up Goals?
You can create Goals in the “Admin” section of your Google Analytics dashboard. The Admin tab is found in the top right when you’re logged into Google Analytics. Make sure that you are adding Goals to the right account and view. You want to ensure your companies IP address is filtered and you are only tracking prospect/visitor data and not your employees for example.
- Sign in to Google Analytics
- Select the Admin tab and navigate to the desired account, property and view
- In the VIEW column, click Goals
- Click + NEW GOAL
- You have 2 basic options for creating Goals:
- Using a Goal template
- Creating custom Goals
- Choose your goal type
- Configure your goal and test
The Results
Once you have goals set up properly on your website, there are many different types of data that you can pull based on what your website objectives are.
- Number of goal completions
- Reverse goal path; the pages people clicked through before completing goals
- How people came to your site before completing goals
- Goals completed by new versus returning visitors
These various pieces of data can be used to test your website conversion points, determine where your prospects and visitors are in the buying process and which marketing campaign is driving the most conversions and qualified leads.
Now that you have Google Analytics Goals down pat, you are ready for The Content Marketing Bootcamp. Learn how to create content that engages prospects at the top of the sales funnel by creating digital content that converts.
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