Let your performance do the thinking.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Once you’ve successfully figured out how to set up Google Analytics on your blog, you’ll probably want an idea of how well your blog is performing against expectations. In other words, you know you’ve got some readers out there, but you also want to know how engaged they are. Are they commenting? Sharing your articles with their friends? Signing up for your weekly newsletter?
Whatever you want your readers to do on your blog, it’s time to find out if that’s actually happening… It’s time to set up some goals.
Where to begin
- Log into your GA account and click on the Admin button at the top of the page.
- Select the view to which you want the goals applied and click Goals.
- Click the +NEW GOAL button.
- At this point, you’ll have a choice of whether you want to use one of GA’s templates or create a goal from scratch. The decision to use one or the other doesn’t affect your data in any way, as the templates are really just tips on how to organize your goals. If the categories don’t seem to fit the framework you’ve got going on in your head, choose Custom.
Types of Goals
After giving your goal a name, you’ll need to choose between four different types of goals:
Destination Goals
Destination Goals allow you to keep track the number of hits to specific URLs. If every person who signs up for a newsletter gets directed to a Thank You page afterwards, that’s the URL you will choose. Confirmation pages also work well here.
Use the dropdown next to the open field to designate the match type:
Select Equals to for a very specific URL. If you make use of utm parameters or unique IDs that get appended to the end of the URL, those pageviews won’t count toward your goal calculation. In these cases, you’ll want to select Begins with instead. Just make sure that all subpages, if any, should be counted as well.
Another option is to use a Regular expression, which can get a little sticky if you’re a GA novice. In this case, it would entail using special characters to capture patterns in your URLs in order to target a very specific range of pages. Google’s help page on regular expressions is a good resource if you choose to go down this route.
Regardless of what type of goal you’re creating, you have the option of assigning that goal a monetary value.
While this is an optional step, doing so can provide your non-ecommerce initiatives with some interesting data – especially if you have some notion of, say, how often a lead generated on your blog will result in sale somewhere else, either online or offline. Even if your services don’t have an actual value associated with them, you can still make a guess at what their relative values are (e.g., someone reserving a spot at my next event is worth twice as much to me as a request for more information). These values aren’t set in stone, so play around with them as you get a feel for what motivates your blog.
Finally, if you’ve chosen a Destination Goal, you also have the option of specifying a Funnel, or the path that you expect your readers will take to get there.
The data will appear in the Goal Flow and Funnel reports and can give you insights into whether there are any problems with the process. Maybe your readers had second thoughts about providing their email address, or maybe something on one of the pages confused them and led them off the beaten path. Enabling the Funnel option will help you identify those pages that need to be fixed.
Duration Goals
Duration Goals are pretty straight-forward and allow you to track how many of your readers stay on your site for more than the minimum amount of specified time.
It’s important to note, however, that GA doesn’t actually collect data on when a user leaves your site; only when the last page on your site loaded. While this feature can skew engagement stats toward pages with a high exit rate (rendering page-level analysis a little sketchy), time-on-site information is still valuable along other dimensions, as well as for spotting trends over time.
Pages/Screens per Session Goals
Pages/Screens per Session Goals are very similar to Duration Goals, but instead of tracking how much time people are spending on your site, this goal tracks how many pages are being viewed.
If you think consuming three pages worth of material on your blog qualifies someone as an “engaged” user, then there’s your target!
Event Goals
Event Goals are the trickiest of the bunch, but also the most powerful. Setting up event goals requires some knowledge of coding, which we typically suggest you leave in the hands of a semi-skilled developer or web analyst. If you’re feeling adventurous though, check out Google’s Event Tracking Help Page for guidance.
Almost any action you can take on a website can be tracked with events – social shares, PDF downloads, video plays/completes, clicks to business partners, and so on. So once the right JavaScript has been added to the element you want to track, you’ll need to specify the Category, Action, Label and Value conditions.
You can use as many or as few of these conditions as you need to effectively lump together or distinguish between the different events on your site. For example, you may feel that there are two categories of actions that users can perform on your blog: (1) signing up for a newsletter and (2) everything else. These would be your categories. But among the “everything else”, you would also like to differentiate between PDF downloads and video completions. These might be your actions. But among the PDF downloads, you want know which PDFs in particular are the most popular. The URL for those PDFs would then be the label.
Again, the conditions themselves are determined by the event tracking on your page. You should work closely with your chosen web analyst or developer to figure out the categorization scheme that works best for you.
And that’s it! Overall, it’s a pretty simple process with a few technical pieces here and there. If you run into any problems setting up your goals, or you have any questions about what you should be tracking or how to do it, just drop a line in the comments section. I’d be happy to help you out!
