Using Google Analytics To Chart Success #2 – Setting Goals
This blog entry was posted on February 15, 2009.
In a previous blog post, I wrote about Google’s free tool to check out every stat under the sun for a website, Google Analytics. Today, we’re going to dive a bit deeper and try to use Google’s amazing tool for a specialized purpose. While looking at where in the world your website visits are coming from, the browser and OS of your visitors and at what resolution your visitor’s screen is set at is pretty entertaining, we’re going to utilize Google Analytic’s powerful tool to track strategies and increase profits.
Let’s say you run a blog, and after taking a look at a couple of weeks of data, a glaring problem is that nobody is contacting you. You can see some traffic, but you have hardly anyone contact you via your contact form. While making a conscious effort to call for more correspondence in your postings, you can automatically see how many times visitors used your contact form and easily see which day they occurred and continue to use that strategy to encourage people to contact you.
Setting up a goal requires a “Goal URL.” Luckily, after somebody fills out your contact form it takes them to a page signifying success. Use this “success” page as your “Goal URL” and make the “Match Type” an “Exact Match” to be able to track when visitors reach this page.
Google Analytics also allows for more in-depth tracking of goals, including what’s called the “funnel.” Essentially following users step-by-step (or in this case, url-by-url), it tracks when during the process a visitor left the site and much more.
This could be useful if you’re using Adwords to run a pay-per-click campaign; you can use landing pages as a starting point to see if a visitor follows the process you’ve set up from first page to sale successful page. Using this “funnel” process, you can determine which Adwords campaigns are successful and which are costing you money without providing any results.
I’ve really only scratched the surface. Almost anything is possible using the “Goals” tool in Google Analytics – you can set up goals looking to improve conversion rates, “quality” visits, as well as the rate of people leaving after a small amount of time.
Does anyone else have great key performance indicators they would like to share? Any additional insight?
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Related posts:
- Using Google Analytics To Chart Success
- Google Analytics Does Report Less Visitor Traffic
- What are your Web Design Goals?
- Is Your Blogging Effective?
- What are the Keys to Blogging Success?
Filed under: Internet Marketing,SEO Strategies
This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 8:07 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, SEO Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.No Comments
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I have a couple of favorite KPIs I like to track:
1) Branded / non-branded search term referrals. What percentage of traffic is finding your site with non-branded keyword searches?
2) I like to set up a custom segment for PPC visitors (for clients who are running PPC campaigns) and show if PPC visitors are:
a) sticking around longer than the overall average
b) looking at more pages than the overall average
c) how many PPC referrals are hitting those goals that you outlined
Comment by Christian — February 16, 2009 @ 1:34 pm
Wow! Great insight. You’ve just cited very critical points here. Thanks for the information.
Comment by Justin Brooke — February 19, 2009 @ 4:57 pm