Google Analytics Goals:

Your website exists for a reason, and it is not just to get visitors. Visitors are great, but what you really want is: customers. Or leads. Or people who sign up for your newsletter. Or watch your videos. Or download technical specifications. Or whatever it is that your website exists for people to do. There may be a variety of actions that your guests can take, but your focus for measurement should be on those actions that have the most direct relationships to your business success. Every site is different, and Google Analytics doesn’t know what your trying to do – so you have to tell it.

This may take some thought, but it is (generally) not complicated. You probably have a dedicated ‘thank you’ page that visitors see when they complete a purchase or download a document or sign up for email alerts. All you need to do is enter this URL in the goal settings and it is done. Some cases are more complicated, but there is almost always a way to set the goal, using ‘virtual pageviews’ or other means as necessary.

Also, keep in mind that Google Analytics has the ability to track the level of visitor engagement as a goal. So if your main objective is to get guests to spend time on your site, or to visit lots of pages (so you can sell impressions to advertisers), these can be set up as goals by setting thresholds of time or number of pages. Any visitor who exceeds the threshold is considered to be a conversion, so now you can track sources or content that lead to the highest value in terms of time spent and/or pages viewed.

And speaking of value, you can also assign dollar value to your to each of your goals. Even making educated estimates will provide you with another dimension of measurement that can support your decision-making in terms of maximizing the value of your site.

In some cases, it may well be worth modifying your site in order to be able to track your goals better, if that’s what it takes. After all, if you don’t know how many visitors are accomplishing what you want them to do, how are you going to make decisions to improve the site?



Conversion rates for various referring sites: it's not just about volume.

Advanced segments:

The ability to segment visitors ‘on the fly’ is one of the things that gives Google Analytics an advantage over other, more expensive analytics programs. Using ‘Advanced Segments’ you can zero in on, for example, visitors that arrive via search engines and observe their behavior. What are the trends in search engine traffic relative to overall visitors? What pages are they landing on? If bounce rates are high for these pages, what can be done to better match the content with searcher intent?

Things really get interesting when you combine advanced segments with goals, enabling you, for example, to focus in on visitors that completed your goals. How is their behavior different from average visitors? Are there particular pages or types of pages that these visitors are seeing more than the average visitor? If so, maybe it would be worth making this content more prominent.

In addition to the ready-made segments, you can also create your own custom segments by selecting or combining different criteria and then save these segments for future analysis. This way, instead of just looking at visitors as one big generic lump, you can hone your site for customer segments that matter and ensure you are attending to their needs.

Of course, there are a variety of other under-used Google Analytics features, like advanced report filters, custom reports, not to mention the power that comes from extracting data from Google Analytics via the API. But chances are that more fully leveraging Google Analytics goals and advanced segments will make it easier for you to stay one step ahead of the competition.


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