How To Setup Conversion Goals In Google Analytics

How To Setup Conversion Goals In Google Analytics

What is a successful business without results?

Whether it’s a newly-launched marketing campaign, daily social media efforts or a new promotional video, tracking your business efforts is important in order to know how they’re performing.

With Google Analytics, you have the ability to set and track conversion goals, allowing you to measure how your site is meeting your target objectives.

Developing organizational goals is something that every successful business does. Furthermore, it is an absolute must when it comes to your business’ website and tracking conversions.

From tracking certain pages a person visits on your site to what their behaviour is like while there, you are able to measure and analyze what does and does not work for your business using Google Analytics’ Goals feature.

This blog post will show you how you can set up and track goals with Google Analytics.

(RELATED: How To Setup Google Analytics)

Step #1: Login to Google Analytics Reporting Dashboard

Sign into your Analytics account at analytics.google.com, click on your website and go to the “Reporting” tab on your dashboard. Once you select the appropriate website after you log in, you will automatically land on this tab.

From here, click on “Conversions” on the left side menu bar and select “Goals”. Then, click “Overview”.

If you do not yet have any goals set up, you will get this message:

Click “Set up goals”.

Step 2: Set your conversion goals

Click on the red button titled “+ new goal” to add a new goal.

There will be three sections for you to complete before you can start tracking a new goal: Goal setup, goal description and goal details.

A) Goal Description

In this section, you can specify what type of goal you’d like to set up. For example, if you wanted to track how many people completed an online payment, you would select “Make a payment” under the Revenue section. Or if you wanted to see how many visitors signed up for a class or scheduled an appointment through your website, you would select the “Register online” option.

For the purpose of this blog post, we are going to use the “Contact us” option as an example. This allows us to track how many people viewed our phone number, directions to our business and filled out a contact form on our website.

B) Goal Setup

Now that we know what we want to track, it’s time to get a bit more specific in telling Google what we want to do. In this section, you’ll first be asked to set a name for your goal. Once you’ve come up with a name (ex: Contact us) you must determine how you want it tracked.

You have four options to choose from; destination, duration, pages/screens per session and event.

A destination type is best for when a visitor is taken to a specific page after performing the action. For example, once a visitor completes a submission form to contact us, they are redirected to a “Thank you for your submission” page.

As you can see in the picture below, each option can be selected based on what you want to track (how long they spend on a page, how many pages they view, and whether or not they watched a video).

C) Goal Details

The final step in setting up a conversion goal is to complete the goal details section. Here, you can post the URL you want to track. In our case, we want to see how many people complete the submission form on our “contact us” page, so the URL we want to enter will be where visitors are redirected once they hit submit. For example, this could be a /thank-you.htm page. 

You also have the option of assigning a monetary value to the conversion you want to track. Additionally, you can opt to specify an exact path in which visitors are taking to enter and exit this page. This is a great way to see how effective some of your pages are at directing people to this area of your site.

Once you are satisfied with your goal, hit “Save”.

Step #3: Monitor your goals

Now that we’ve successfully set up conversion goals, it’s time to wait and start tracking. To view all of your current goals, simply go to the “Admin” tab on your Analytics dashboard and select “Goals”. This will display all of your conversion goals for your tracking and editing if needed.

If you want to have us review your website and give you a free 30-minute consultation where we show you how to generate more local customers from your website, click here.