Google Analytics conversion report section will TRACK user actions. This data is invaluable when deciding what is working and what isn’t working on your website or in your funnel.
Maybe you are converting users to leads or leads to customers or both. In any event, let your Google Analytics Conversion report know what it is you consider to be a conversion (goal) and then Google Analytics collects the data.
Whether you are promoting a freebie or selling an online course or product there are steps your visitors must take to get to that end goal you have for them.
Creating these steps as goals in your Google Analytics conversion report will allow you to track your users’ actions and gives you the ability to go back and optimize those pages to increase conversion rates.
In this blog post we’ll dive deep into the 4 different types of goals you can set up in Google Analytics Conversion report. If you need to learn the basics of Google Analytics before we jump into this particular report, be sure to check out our post on Google Analytics Basics.
Let’s talk about goals.
Urbandictionary.com defines goals as:
So whenever you hear a Gen Z or a millennial say Goals!, they’ve probably heard or saw something they would want to have.
- Saw a skinny pic your favorite influencer posted on IG? Goals!
- Heard your friend Gina gained 10k Twitter followers? Goals!
- That new mansion your second-degree cousin bought last month? Goals!
Meanwhile, in the world of Google Analytics, the word “goals” also has some semblance of meaning to how it’s used by youngsters these days.
Here’s the completely unsexy, boring-ish definition of ‘goals’ in analytics land:
A goal represents a completed activity, called a conversion, that contributes to the success of your business.
To further demonstrate, here are examples of goals in marketing…
- A customer purchasing a product in your e-comm store? That’s a goal!
- A stranger signed-up for your email list? That’s a goal!
- A website visitor dropped by to read 5 of your content pieces? That’s a goal!
In other words, these are the things that matter to your business – and is therefore something you need to track how often they are happening.
Tracking your business “goals” is critical to its success because…
You can’t fix what’s not working until you know what’s not working.
As a business, you need to know what exactly is going on with your website.
Essentially, that means tracking important metrics like your opt-in conversion rates, your sales, ebook downloads, leads and a few others.
Take for instance, if you’re launching a list building campaign on your website, you won’t know how attractive your opt-in bait is – unless you actually track the number of people who opt in. Once you see that the data shows an abysmal opt-in rate, you can then promptly optimize and maybe add a bit more TLC to make it more desirable to prospects. If on the other hand, you see that it’s being grabbed by site visitors like it’s the best thing since sliced bread – then you’re certain you’ve built a solid lead magnet.
That’s the beauty of Google Analytics. It helps you decide with absolute certainty what you need to do without any guesswork.
So let’s dig a little bit deeper about the ‘goals’ that a Google Analytics Conversion Report can track for you.
Pro Tip – Goals are not retroactive so they need to be set up as early as possible.
There’s actually 4 types of goals in GA, and it’s outlined in this unseasoned table brought to you by Google’s analytics help page.
Here’s a brief primer of what each goal type is about:
1. Destination
This goal type is best used if you want to track how many people arrive at specific URLs, i.e your thank you page, confirmation page or check-out pages.
A visitor that arrives at these designated URLs you want to track could mean different things, depending on the actual metric you want to track. For e-commerce stores for instance, a destination tracker to all your site’s confirmation pages means you get to monitor your sales – by assigning a monetary value every time a user reaches the checkout page.
Other metrics that work best with this goal type are stuff like your email sign-ups, ebook downloads, trial users and a lot more.
2. Duration
This simply tracks the amount of people who stay in your site for a specific amount of time. Say hypothetically, you’d want to know how many people stay in your site for at least 5 minutes. Or you can also track the number of people who stay in your site for less than 40 seconds.
Neil Patel suggests this goal type is perfect for support pages/websites. If you look at data points in two different time frames, a decrease in the number of people who stay for more than 5 minutes may mean that your efforts to optimize your copy for clarity is successful – in a sense that people spend less time on the page.
3. Page/Screens per session
This goal type works quite similar with duration goals, except that you’re tracking the amount of people who visit a certain number of pages in your website. For example, you may want to track the number of people who visit 5 pages, or less than/more than 5 pages.
Pages goal types are also great for support pages/sites since you get to track how easy it is for users to navigate your site – before they find what they’re looking for.
4. Events
Use this goal type to track ‘events’ like a user downloading your ebook, a new click to an external link or a video watched for an x amount of time.
Event goals are extremely useful in instances where you’re trying to measure how effective a blog is in getting people to click to an external site, or when you’re trying to gauge how engaging a video on your website is based on the time users spend watching it.
Again, there’s loads of stuff that you can track and measure with this goal type.
Google Analytics Conversion Report Key Takeaways
Google Analytics, as unsexy and boring-ish as it sounds, is critical for tracking the most crucial metrics that can make or break a business.
And beyond measuring the traffic coming into your site, you can also gain a helluva lot of insights about how users behave in your website. From stuff like what visitors click or don’t click. What they watch. The amount of pages they visit. The duration they stay in your site. Your email sign-up rates. And even your sales!
Want to better understand the results of your marketing efforts?
