How To Use Google Analytics Goals And Funnels

How to Use Google Analytics Goals & Funnels

Every website has a main objective. To obtain the objective you set goals.

Those goals are broken into steps that have to be taken in order to reach the goal which gets you one step closer to fulfilling your objective.The process of going through each step is your funnel.

Goals allow you to see the conversion rate and monetary value of your traffic.

Funnels allow you to monitor how frequently your site visitors start the conversion process, complete it, abandon it and at what point they abandon so you can work on ways to improve your return on investment (ROI).

Some examples of goals might be tracking how many people completed your sales process and reached the thank you/download page.

It might be monitoring what percentage buyers take you up on your upsell offer and where in the process the rest abandon the offer.

For this demonstration, we will be using Google Analytics goals to measure how well our about page works at sending visitors to our services page.

You will need:

1. To have your goals (up to 20) and funnel figured
2. To know the URLs for each page in your funnel (up to 10)
3. To know the value of your goal (optional) – you’ll find an explanation further down.
4. An existing Google Analytics account with the tracking code installed on your website.

Step 1: Choose Your Profile & Navigate to Goals Setup Area

Log into your account and from the View Reports dropdown, select the site in which you want to set up your goals.

Select Goals from the left sidebar.

In the Goals Overview section, click the Set up Goals & Funnels link at the bottom.

Step 2: Set Up Goal(s)

In the goals section, you have the option to add up to four sets of conversion goals. You can then add up to 5 goals per “set”. Click Add Goal next to Goals (set 1) to get started.

You’ll have several places to fill in to get your goal set up. Let’s quickly go through each item…

Goal Name: Name your goal something you’ll quickly recognize

Active Goal: Make sure your goal is turned “On” so it will track. Turning it “Off” will stop the tracking but not delete the goal.

Goal Position: This allows you to control the order in which a goal appears in your report. It also lets you move a goal from one set to another without having to set up a completely new goal.

If this is the first goal you’re setting up, from the drop-down menu, select “Set 1, Goal 1”.

Goal Type: There are three types of goals; URL Destination, Time on Site and Pages/Views.

Once you select the goal type you want to set up, a “goals details” box will open, allowing you to enter more details about your goal.

Match Type: You have three options for how you want to match your goal…

• Exact Match – An exact match of every character in your URL – without exception According to Google, you’d use this when your URLs are easy to read and do not vary.

• Head Match - This matches the identical part of the URL string you specify. So you can specify only part of the URL and it will only match that part.

Google suggests you use this option if your website has dynamically generated content, use the Head Match filter and leave out the unique values.

• Regular Expression Match – With this option you can create wildcard matching. This could be useful when you’re tracking multiple items from within a folder such as download links.

For example, if you had multiple downloadable products in a folder called “downloads” that was housed in a folder called “members” you would enter /members/downloads/ in the regular expression field and it would track ALL of the files within that folder.

Case Sensitive: Are the URLs you entered above case sensitive? If so check this.

Goal Value: If your goal completion has a dollar value, enter it here.

Example: If your product sells for $100 and you know that 20% of the people who visit the page will buy, you could assign a $20 value to your goal.

If you’re going to add a Goal Funnel, click the plus sign. If you’re not, click Save Goal.

Step 3: Set up Funnel

We chose to do a URL Destination goal so here we will enter the URL to the first page of our conversion funnel.

This page should be a common page that all users working their way through your goal will land on – typically not your product page

Name the step so you can easily recognize it in the reports.

If this step is required to complete the conversion process, check the box.

Important! If you select this, any users reaching your goal page without going through this page will not be counted as conversions.

Repeat the process to set up the remaining steps in your funnel & click save when finished.

We only have one page for our funnel and one goal so we’re finished.

Once your finished setting up your goals and funnels, it’s time to wait. How long you wait depends on how busy your site is and how long you want to track everything.

Step 4: Checking Stats

When you’re ready to check your stats, log into your account, select the appropriate profile and then click Goals as you did in Step 1.

The first page you see will be your Goals Overview page. We set our goal & funnel up on March 28th so as you can see, there are no stats prior to that time.

From the above page, you can get many views of your stats.

Dates: In the upper right corner you’ll see the date span. You can select the drop-down arrow to change your date range. We changed ours to March 27th so we had a better view of just the dates being tracked.

You can also check stats by hours, days, weeks and months by clicking the icons directly below the date as shown below in the green box.

Goal Conversion Rate: Clicking the Goal Conversion Rate tab will allow you to change the view of your graph. You can view one at a time, compare two or compare one site to another (providing you have more than one site set up).

Advanced Segments: Clicking the “All Visits” above the date will allow you to choose what segments you want to view. You can also create new segments customized specifically for you.

Goal Verification: Clicking Goal Verification in the sidebar will bring up your main stats and show you the page URLs being tracked along with their individual stats.

Reverse Goals Path: Clicking Reverse Goals Path in the sidebar you’ll be able to see where your traffic came from and where they went to, to arrive at that destination.

Goal Funnel Visualization: Clicking Funnel Visualization in the sidebar will give you a visual look at your pages. Ours is not reading correctly because we only have on page in our funnel. You must have more than one in order for it to show correctly.