Smart Goals In Google Analytics – Maximize the value of Google Analytics (GA) with Goals and measure what matters most to your business. Learn how to create each of the five types of goals Universal Analytics offers.
Your website’s performance is more than just organic traffic and clicks. When you configure Google Analytics goals, you get access to important information about it
Smart Goals In Google Analytics
In this guide, I’ll outline the basics of Google Analytics goals and show you how to set them up to gather insights into the behavior of your site visitors.
What Is Google Analytics And How Best To Use It?
Google Analytics supplies marketers with hundreds of metrics and tools to track and analyze website visits. It can be overwhelming to sift through all the data and decide what’s really important—but that’s exactly where goals come in handy.
Google Analytics targets tracking visitor engagement data that is most important to you. Goals measure specific actions, such as when a visitor clicks a specific button, views an order confirmation URL, or scrolls to the bottom of a page. These completed actions (called goal conversions) provide valuable information that allows you to evaluate your digital marketing campaigns and tailor your SEO strategy to drive better results.
After signing up for an email list or order confirmation page, visitors to your site can click ‘Thank you!’ Destination targets track when a specific target URL, such as a page, is reached. This data can be used to see how many visitors sign up for emails, place orders, form submissions, etc.
You can define a destination target as a static URL (eg “/thank-you.html”), a dynamically generated or variable URL (eg “/checkout.cgi?page=1”), or a funnel, which is one. A series of URLs visitors click on in a particular order. When a visitor loads these URLs, it counts as a conversion.
How To Set Smart Goals (+ Examples And Templates)
Duration goals are triggered when a visitor spends a certain amount of time on your site during a single session. When configuring a duration goal, specify the exact number of hours, minutes, and seconds a session needs to last before it is considered a conversion.
Than visit for a few moments before exiting. Comparing sheer traffic values to duration conversions is a way to compare quantity with quality.
When used in conjunction with duration, pages/screens per session goals help you paint a more complete picture of how visitors engage with your site. Do people spend too much time on a page before clicking away? Do they visit multiple pages in quick succession? You can use your targeting data to see patterns in visitor behavior – and tailor your site strategy accordingly.
Event goals are a catch-all option for measuring visitor behavior. Google Analytics users can define events anytime a visitor performs a measurable action on the site, such as:
With Goals, Fast Beats Smart
To track these, you first need to define events using Google Tag Manager. Events can be difficult to set up, but when used in conjunction with other Google Analytics goals, they are a powerful way to gather detailed information on more granular visitor interactions.
Google launched Smart Targets to help advertisers get more value from their digital advertising data. Powered by machine learning, Smart Goals analyzes campaigns to see which are most engaged to count them as conversions.
Smart Goals AI looks at 30 different metrics to find high-quality sessions – which Google defines as visitors who engage the most on your site relative to your overall ad traffic. It’s a great tool for advertisers looking for better ways to optimize their campaigns and understand what engages visitors the most.
To create Destination, Duration, Page/Sessions, and Event goals, you’ll want to follow these first few steps, then scroll down to Goal Type for additional steps.
Google Analytics Goals And Conversions Ideas
Let’s say you want to track how many visitors land on your “Thank You” page after submitting an email form.
1. Create a new goal, and give it a name that reflects what it tracks (eg “Contact Us Submissions” or “Email Signups”).
3. Enter the specific URL path you want to track — no need to include the root domain. For a specific URL, that might be “/thanks.html”. If the URL is dynamically generated, choose ‘Begins with’ or ‘Regular Expression’ from the dropdown box and input the fixed part of the URL.
4. Click ‘Verify this target’ to check if your destination target is working correctly. This verification will only work if the Google Analytics tracking code has been in place for at least seven days and you’ve visited the target URL for users during that time. You can also complete a manual form submission to test your Google Analytics goals manually.
Track Smart Goals Automatically [free Tool]
1. Create a new goal, and give it a name that indicates what it tracks (like “Engaged Users” or “8-Minute Heroes”). Then select ‘Period’ as your target type.
2. Enter your target number of hours, minutes, and seconds in each field. Each time a visitor reaches or exceeds this threshold, it will be counted as a conversion.
3. Click ‘Verify this goal.’ This will only work if your GA tracking code has been around for seven days and at least one user has hit your target period.
1. Create a new goal. Enter a name (eg “engaged users” or “at least 10 pages”), and select ‘pages/screens per session’ as your target type.
Guide To Set Up Goals In Google Analytics
3. Click ‘Verify this goal.’ This verification method will only work if the GA tracking code has been on your site for at least seven days and at least one user has reached your target number of pages/screens in a single session. .
Event goals require some additional steps. Before defining an event as a goal, you need to set up event tracking on your site using Google Tag Manager. Click here to view Google’s guide to events at GTM.
For this tutorial, let’s say you use GTM to create an event that is triggered when a user downloads a file from your landing page. Now, I can set up the target transform to fire when that download event occurs.
3. Add event terms — Category, Action, Label, and Value. Making a goal requires only one condition. See Google’s breakdown of each. (In this example, your category would be “Downloads” and your label would be “Product Brochure PDF”.)
The 10 Most Tracked Google Analytics Metrics [original Data]
4. Click on ‘Verify this goal’. This will only work if your GA account has event data for the past seven days to check.
As I mentioned earlier, Smart Targets is a machine-learning tool designed for those with a Google Ads account. In addition to connecting your Google Ads account to your Analytics account, your ads must be driving a certain amount of traffic to your site for Smart Targets to work. (See Google’s requirements to learn more.)
When creating goals in Google Analytics, you have the option to equate conversions with a monetary value. How you value each conversion is up to you. One way to do this is to divide the cost of a new customer by your conversion rate. So if the average customer purchase is $200 and 5% of customers who land on a particular page convert, you can create a destination goal with a monetary value of $10 ($200 *.05).
Since Universal Analytics will sunset next year, it’s a good idea to start using Google Analytics 4. You can use both platforms in tandem. This will allow you to start pulling data into your Google Analytics 4 dashboard and learn the platform. Google Analytics 4 uses ‘events’ instead of ‘goals’ among other differences. To automatically migrate your global analytics goals and convert them to Google Analytics 4 events, follow these steps from Google. You can learn more about the different metrics in GA4 vs Universal Analytics here.
Creating Smart Seo Goals For Your Enterprise Business
The ebook helps you better understand what you can do with Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Business Profile, and more.
Download this guide to learn how to best use the free, powerful tools Google offers to improve your SEO process and performance. It’s not that I don’t fully support dreaming big and trying to be as good as Michael Hyatt. On the contrary, you definitely need to have big dreams, goals and aspirations.
The kind of goals that allow you to benchmark your progress and know whether or not you’re doing what you’re doing will move you in the direction of your larger, less tangible goals. Or more importantly – if your blogging is even paying.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. I’m going to show you how to measure it.
Powerful Features Of Google Analytics
I want to walk you through but a handful of goals that I believe every blogger needs to track using Google Analytics. They are really quite simple, and more advanced bloggers will want to dive deeper if necessary.
Well, first, every blogger should have some basic metrics to measure how well they are doing in bringing people to their content. These aren’t actual Google Analytics goal type metrics, they’re more or less just metrics that you want to keep an eye on and maybe just a mental goal that you want to improve on each of them.
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