What is a Goal?
In life you have goals. What do you want to achieve by the time you are 30, 40, and 50? Where do you want to love? What kind of contributions do you want to make to society?
Just as we all have goals in life we must also have goals in business in order to be successful. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics provide us with a platform to set some goals, measure them and report on them. We can set our goals and review them periodically to make sure that our websites are performing the valuable task they are made for, generating business.
“A goal is a Web site page that helps generate conversions for your site (with some extra code, they can even be file downloads or on-page actions).” (Lesson 6, 2013). According to Google Analytics, “Goals” can help you to measure how well your target objectives are being fulfilled (Google, 2013).
Some samples of goals can be:
Thank you
page (after someone completes something, download or sign up)- Confirmation page after order
- About Us page
- A specific
page such as a news article
Goals are also grouped in sets
automatically and you have the ability to categorize them in to functional
groups.
How Many Goal Types are there?
There are four different types, URL
Destination, Visit Duration, Pages/Visit, and Event, and each can be useful
depending on your business goals and objectives.
URL Destination – The
location that you want people to get to such as mysite.com/veryimportant (the location
that is the goal)
Visit Duration – How
long are people spending on your website (you can define what is an acceptable
amount of time)
Pages/Visit – This is
useful to determine how many pages people need to visit on your site for it to
be meaningful to your business.
Event – What
action do you want your visitor to complete? (Lesson 6, 2013)
What is a Filter?
“Filters are applied to the information coming
into your account, to manipulate the final data in order to provide accurate
reports. These filters can be set up to exclude visits from particular IP
addresses, to report only on a subdomain or directory, or to take dynamic page
URLs and convert them into readable text strings. Google Analytics provides you
with three predefined filter parameters based on either Include or Exclude
filtering logic.” (Lesson 6, 2013).
There are three predefined filters each
with an exclude/include feature.
1. Exclude/Include
only traffic from the domains – for specific domains
2. Exclude/Include only traffic from the IP addresses – single or multiple
addresses
3. Exclude/Include only traffic to the subdirectories – for a specific
subdirectory of your site
In addition you can create custom filters
depending on your needs. These include:
1. Exclude
Pattern – matching file lines are ignored
2. Include
Pattern - matching file lines are the only ones included in reports
3. Lowercase/
Uppercase – makes fields either uppercase or lowercase
4. Search
& Replace – does just that, searches and replaces
5. Advanced
– you can build a new field by combining other fields
Why
Should You Use a Filter?
Filters should be used to exclude
internal traffic from your reporting to give you a more accurate overview.
Also, they are great at tracking activity for a specific directory. Finally
they are useful at tracking subdomains and comparing reports (Google, 2013).
What is a Funnel?
“A
funnel represents the path you expect visitors to take on their way to
converting to the goal. Defining these pages allows you to see how frequently
visitors abandon goals, and where they go. For example, funnels in an
e-commerce goal may include the first page of your checkout process, then the
shipping address info page, and finally the credit card information page. “
(Lesson 6, 2013).
Google says that funnels
show how your marketing channels work together to create sales and conversions.
This can be incoming blogs, paid search, advertising, etc. The funnel shows how
these channels get people to your site and what they do from there (Google,
2013).
Following the conversion paths as well as
the sequence of interactions that lead up to each transaction and conversion
generates the reports. The channels included are:- Paid and organic search (on all search engines along with the specific keywords searched)
- Referral sites
- Affiliates
- Social networks
- Email newsletters
- Custom campaigns that you’ve
created, including offline campaigns that send traffic to vanity URLs”
(Google, 2013).
Wrapping
it up
As you can see Google Analytics offers myriad options for your business. These three we looked at today, Goals, Filters and Funnels can help you to drill down to understand some basics where your people are coming from as well as determining whether or not your website is doing what you want it to do.
These can track your most important elements and help you to see if and when you need to make some adjustments in order to help your customers complete their conversion cycle.
References
About Goals. (2013). Google. Retrieved December 3, 2013 from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1012040?hl=en
About View Filters. (2013). Google. Retrieved December 3, 2013 from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033162?hl=en
About Multi-Channel Funnels. (2013). Google. Retrieved December 3, 2013 from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1191180?hl=en&ref_topic=1191164
Lesson 6: Successful Approaches in Google Analytics. (2013). WVU IMC, P.I. Reed School of Journalism. Retrieved December 3, 2013, from https://learn.wvu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_group=courses&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2FdisplayLearningUnit%3Fcourse_id%3D_1678_1%26content_id%3D_102553_1%26framesetWrapped%3Dtrue
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