Google Analytics - Setting Goals for your website

Hi Learners,

In our previous posts, we focussed on how to work around the Google Analytics account structure to suite your business needs, then we went through the steps of creating views & filters for your website. The next important setup for you as a marketer is setting up "Goals" on Google Analytics.

What are "Goals" in Google Analytics?

If you want visitors on your website to take certain important actions, like fill up a form, subscribe to a newsletter or interact with your Live Chat App on the website, you definitely want a way to keep track on how many visitors actually ended up meeting your website Goals. By setting up Google Analytics Goals, you are doing just that.

Steps to Setup Goals on Google Analytics

Step 1 - Visit Admin section on your GA dashboard and select the property.
Step 2 - From the View drop-down, choose the view you want to set the Goal for. Then click on Goals under that view.

Step 3 - Click on the Red button that says "+New Goal"

Step 4- Identify your Goal type (Revenue, Acquisition, Enquiry, Engagement) Analytics provides many options as templates under these headers. You can also choose to set up a "custom" Goal option to setup your own Goal. (In this case we want to see how many visitors spend more than 2 mins on our website.

Step 5 - Click on "continue" and give your goal a name (something that defines the nature of your Goal. For this goals its "2 mins +", Choose the Goal type from the list, in this case "duration" and hit continue.

Step 6 - Fill the goal details from the assigned toggle boxes to set the duration as 2 mins
Step 7 - Verify the Goal (Google gives you an estimate of goal performance, based on your past data.
Step 8 - Click on Save and Finish.

Goals are the cornerstone of data that you see on your website. You can create upto 20 Goals for every view in Google Analytics.

Hope the above steps were easy for you to follow. Do leave your comments and opinions on this blog. In our next blog we will learn about setting Audience segments that will help you understand your site audience better.

Happy learning.

Mitul