- Now you know I told you in a past video
that you should install Goals in your Google Analytics.
This is the single most important part
that you can do after installing
the tracking code on your website.
But which goals should you choose?
That's what we're going to discuss in this video.
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Now today we wanna talk about what goals
you should be putting into your Google Analytics.
Now for my past videos you know
that I'm very adamant about,
you should be installing Goals.
Why?
Because it's very important that you give your data context
so if you have more page views,
if your bounce rate goes up and down,
what does that actually mean?
Well Goals will give you that goalpost
of where your data is going.
So if you have more traffic,
does this traffic actually convert?
So maybe you have already attempted
to put in goals into your Google Analytics
but just don't know where to start
because goals are actually kept pretty open
and you can define whatever you want
as a goal in Google Analytics.
So today we wanted to discuss
how you can go about solving this problem
of what you should be putting into
Google Analytics as a goal.
Now the first question that I really want to answer here is,
what is actually a goal in Google Analytics?
Now as you might know once you install
the Google Analytics tracking code,
your Google Analytics receives data
and these are in the form of hits.
Now a hit can be a page view, an event,
or an e-commerce transaction that comes into your account.
Once the data is in your account
you can classify it as a goal.
So a goal is really just a classification of the data
that you have anyways in your account.
You can classify a page view so when a
user comes to a certain page as a goal conversion.
Or an event can also be a goal in Google Analytics.
You just need to define it in the admin section
that this is a very important interaction
for your website and you want to define it as goal.
Why is that so important?
Well in Google Analytics itself we have many reports
and you might have seen the report column of goals
or conversions on certain reports
and this really gives you context about your data.
So if you're looking at the sources where
your traffic came from, you can always
glance over to the goal section
and see how many of these people
who came through a given source, actually converted.
So Goals really flow throughout
the interface of Google Analytics
since you should really install them.
So how can you go about finding out
what you should be installing as a goal?
Now before I give you a bunch of tips on
what you can define as a goal in Google Analytics.
I actually wanted to take a more holistic approach
and there is a measurement model by Avinash Kaushik
that actually talks about this.
How can you devise the goals from your business objectives?
So where you would start is actually finding out
what are the business objectives,
what are the objectives of the organizations.
From there you would break down the actual goals
because every organization would first look at,
what goals do we want to reach
as a whole as an organization?
How does that break down to our website?
What is the purpose of our website?
and then on the website on the different sections,
maybe on the website.
You would actually define different goals for them.
So for the business objectives,
really ask yourself why do we exist as an organization
and what purpose does our website have?
And once you go on the website bases,
you would look at the different objectives
and see how they support our global objective.
There might be creating awareness,
generating leads, generating revenue,
or engaging customers to interact further.
Now ideally your website has a purpose
and the different pages and the different interactions
that you can undertake on your website
actually support these objectives.
So from there we can break down
what we should actually be tracking
and what we can then define as goals.
On a page-by-page basis we are already
tracking page views with Google Analytics.
Now we just need to identify the pages that are
very important to us, the goals that a normal
website visitor should be reaching.
So on an e-commerce context that would, for example,
be the thank you page
or the order received page.
For a business website it might be the contact us form
and the actual thank you page of the sent form
or for publisher website that might be that
somebody clicks on an advertising.
So as you can see they are vastly different interactions,
different pages that you might be looking at,
and defining as a goal in Google Analytics.
And that's why it's such a custom process to go through
in order to set up efficient goals.
And once you have to find these macro goals,
these bigger goals that actually support
your organization's objectives then you might
be wanting to break this even further down,
finding steps that lead up to that macro conversion,
and these are also called micro conversions.
So in a case of an e-commerce shop,
they need to all go through a checkout process.
This is something you might be putting into a goal.
So you can segment down later further
once you look at your traffic
and can say okay this user made it through the checkout
or the second step of the checkout,
and didn't complete our macro goal in the end.
So maybe we can retarget him as well later on.
So that might be something that
you want to put in as goals as well
but be aware that these are
not as important as your macro goals.
It's your bigger goals so you should prioritize them down
in terms of what you put in first and then look at second.
Now the last question that might come up is there
something like too many goals in my Google Analytics?
Obviously there is a limitation
to how many goals you can put in.
In the standard version of Google Analytics it has 20 goals.
Now obviously you could build up a new view
and then put in more goals but in the end
the question really is about how much data can you handle
because you are classifying
more data points in your Google Analytics
and I'm always a fan of a very lean analytics implementation
where you have the tracking data available
to make good decisions and don't get overwhelmed.
And it's no use to track everything
and look at all the data
and have all the data available
but rather have the data that is
meaningful to your organization,
to you as somebody who would analyze these results.
So in this case I would say less is more.
Now in the end if you have mapped out your goals
with the structure of the measurement plan
and have to find your business objectives,
your macro and micro goals,
and now you want to implement this into Google Analytics.
You actually need to look at the capabilities
that Google Analytics has available
because there are obvious goals like click interactions
which we could classify through events.
Or we have certain pages that the user would visit
that is classified through a destination goal
but maybe there's also a goal like somebody
calling a certain number on your website which
is obviously hard to track with Google Analytics alone.
You would have to have a third-party software
that might be able to track that in Google Analytics.
In which cases you could also look at the micro conversions
that go into the system.
So how many people have got to that contact us page
where the actual phone number is displayed?
So that's where you could look at the trend
and see how many people looked at that page
and then maybe converted or didn't convert.
So it gives you an idea of the actual conversions.
It's really about finding a goalpost
where you can see your numbers go up or down
and then correlate the numbers
that you have in Google Analytics towards them.
Now if you don't have goals in Google Analytics yet,
I would encourage you to definitely put some in there.
Just think about the purpose of your website
and what are the interactions the pages
that should be visited by the user.
Then try to input them in the admin section.
There is a whole nother level of configurations
that you can do in those goals.
Don't get overwhelmed by them,
in the easiest part you would just
put in a destination goal so a website
that the user should visit,
and then you would count that user as converted.
You could obviously work with event tracking as well
or other different mechanisms of defining your goal
but don't get overwhelmed.
We just need one or two or three good goals
in our Google Analytics to make more sense of the data.
So I'd encourage you to try this out
and put this into your system if you haven't yet.
Now if this helped you out then please
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Now my name is Julian, till next time.