WHAT IS THE GOAL:
Goals are a measure how well your website fulfills your target objectives. They are a measure of whether people’s actions are helping you achieve your ultimate goal or not. Defining your goals is an essential component of any analytics measurement plan. Through goals we can map data in Google Analytics to key performance indicators (KPI) that we define in our measurement plan. Google provides you with critical information for example the conversion rate for your application or website, if you configure goals properly. Without such critical information it is difficult to track your marketing campaigns and online businesses effectiveness. Every goal fulfillment has a monetary value. As in they bring in profits for us.
There are four types of goals and they are described below:
- Destination or funnel goals: with these goals you specify the path known as a funnel, that traffic is expected to take. Each time a person goes to your specified URL, they trigger your goal. Funnels help you see the number of people moving through your marketing process. You will know if some of your pages are all together abandoned by people when moving through each page.
- Duration goal: these define sessions that last for a specific amount of time. The amount of time individuals spend on your site is tracked by duration goals. For example ten minutes or more spent on a site. Each time a viewer comes to your page, the Google analytics tracking code sends a timestamp to Google analytics servers. Someone visits a page a timestamp is collected, they go to the second page a second timestamp is collected. By comparing these two timestamps, we come to know how much time a viewer spent on a particular page.
- Pages or screens per session: a user may view a specific amount of screens or pages before fulfilling your goal. This goal keeps a track of the number of pages a visitor sees before leaving your website.
- Event goal: an action defined as an event is triggered. You can track anything using this goal such as external links, time spent watching videos, downloads, widgets usage and social media buttons. Any element that visitor clicks on can be tracked by event goals. To use this type of goal, you need to have event tracking instigated on your website.
The fulfillment of these goal types leads to conversion which is indicated as goal value in your conversion report. Using destination goals, time, pages visited and events you can track essential metrics of your website. It’s better if these metrics are closer to activities that generate revenue. Some of the things that you should definitely start tracking are leads, account creations, trial signups, newsletter signups, E-book downloads, and White paper downloads and anything else that aids you generate income.
