Why Setting up Goals for your Website is Crucial for your Business.
In a previous blog, we outlined 5 tips for making the most of your Google Analytics. One of our tips touched on the idea of setting Goals for your website.
So first off, what is Google Analytics?
Just so we’re all on the same page, let’s have a quick overview of what Google Analytics is.
Google Analytics is a service offered by Google (on a freemium basis) that tracks and reports website traffic and activity. Amongst other things, you can use it to:
- See how many people are visiting your website or specific pages on your website
- Track what kind of content people spend the most time looking at
- Count how many people download any content you offer
- Or measure how many people buy products from your website.
Safe to say it’s almost an essential part of having a successful online business.
So what are Goals?
Goals gives you the tools to track how well your website or app is meeting your objectives. Each Goal represents a completed activity, what Google calls a ‘conversion’. And each conversion contributes to the success of your business.
A typical Goal for an ecommerce website would be to sell ‘X’ amount of products. However, there are a range of other tracking options too.
- A marketing company could value gaining contact information through a form
- A mobile gaming app company could want to know how many people complete a level on one of their games
- A company selling technical products might want to track how many people download the PDF specs of their products.
Each one of these Goals can be assigned a value, which lets you track and add up each completed goal into a total amount.
For example, if the gaming company know that 50% of the people that complete the first level of their freemium game go on to buy the full game for £2, they might assign a Goal value of £1 (50% of £2) to tracking how many people finish that level.
You can then view the total Goal value, giving you an insight into how much a certain interaction or section of your website is worth to your business.
Why should you use Goals?
Setting up goals is a vital part of measuring and tracking your online presence. Properly configuring Goals lets Google Analytics provide you with critical information such as a number of downloads or page visits.
Without goals, you won’t be able to properly measure or track how well your online business and marketing campaigns are doing.
With a number of goals set up, especially if they have values assigned to them, you will be able to analyse what certain portions of your online activity mean to your business.
By setting up a range of goals you’ll begin to have a good idea of where people go on your website, how much time they spend there and what they do.
This in turn will give you the ability to tailor your content to reflect your visitor’s behaviours.
Another reason to set up goals is find out which goals are not performing well. This could to relate to the design of website and the customer journey.
Where can I learn more?
Google itself has lots of free resources for learning more about Google Analytics and Goals:
