Knowledge is Power 

Google Analytics’ goals, funnels and filters reporting provide a more detailed look into a website. These metrics help track visitor’s behavior against business goals (Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism, 2013). It is imperative that business and digital goals are aligned to achieve success.

Goals

“A goal is a web site page that helps generate conversions for your site,” (Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism, 2013). Goals are instrumental in measuring objectives. (“About Goals,” n.d.). For example, a goal can be an order confirmation page displayed after a sales transaction (Sparks, 2010). Another example is an email sign-up confirmation page after a visitor has signed up for a site’s email newsletter. Goals reporting can help monitor performance by tracking the following information:

·         Conversions (goal completion).

·         Goal value (assigning a monetary value to a goal).

·         Audience Overview as it pertains to goals (“About Goals,” n.d.).

There are four types of objectives you can choose for a goal: url destination, visit duration, page/visit and event which are described below (“About Goals,” n.d.).

Url destination- This goal keeps track of specific urls. A goal is triggered when a visitor lands on the specific subdomain.  This is perfect for thank you pages, confirmation pages and PDFs. Keep in mind that this tracked at the subdomain level (Lofgren, 2012). For example, I have a blog, christinelara@blogspot.com. I do not have any subdomain pages, but if I did, I would be able to set a url destination goal. For instance, if I had an ebook I wanted to sell on my blog, I would track the sales confirmation page which theoretically would be christinelara@blogspot.com/ebooksaleconfirmation. Google Analytics would track the /ebooksaleconfirmation subdomain. If goal completions were reported as zero, this would mean that no one is purchasing my ebook and I need to devise a way to market it to increase sales. 

Visit duration- This goal tracks how long visitors are on a page. The site administrator can determine a set number of pages for this activity. In Google Analytics, you have the choice to make the threshold greater than or less than a specific time.  For example, to measure engagement, choose “greater than” and to measure how fast your support site provides helpful information, use “less than.” The time selected should be realistic or it might skew results. An average is five minutes. “For the best data, have a time that not everyone reaches but some people do. If too many people activate the goal, you won’t be able to figure out how to improve your site. The same thing will happen if only a few people reach it,” (Lofgren, 2012).

My site is a blog so I set my time at three minutes. People do not typically spend a lot of time on blogs so I do not expect a lot of visitors to meet this goal. Plus, I do not have a lot of content since it is a new blog. If I had a more complex site with a lot of content and ecommerce capability, I would set it at five minutes. If I saw that most traffic did not hit this goal, it would lead me to think that the content was amiss or that referrers were not driving the correct traffic to the site. This might indicate my search engine optimization strategy needs some tweaking.

Page/Visit- This goal tracks the number of pages each visitor sees before exiting the site. Each visitor is tracked for the amount of pages they view per visit. The goal is completed if they are above or below the number set. I set the number at two for my blog (Rocheleau, 2012).This goal can be a bit tricky. If visitors are spending too much time on your site, it could mean your site is engaging or it could mean that users are spending too much time because they cannot find what they are looking for. This number alone cannot provide enough insight to make a complete analysis (a funnel visualization can provide more data). The exception is support sites. In this scenario, people typically do not spend too much time on a site because they find what they are looking for and leave (Lofgren, 2012).  

I have a blog with one page so I do not see visitors viewing more than one page at this point. Even when the blog grows, I do not anticipate users reading a lot of pages. Blog readers typically come to the site, read the latest post and leave (“Bounce rate demystified,” 2010).

Event- A visitor can trigger an action you have defined as an event (“About Goals,” n.d.). Just about any element visitors interact with can be set up as an event. Some event examples are: external links, downloads, time spent watching videos, social media buttons and widget usage (Lofgren, 2012).

I have found events to be very useful on sites that have a lot of content and are not ecommerce-oriented. Events are useful for tracking actions since there is not a sale measure success for the site. For instance, I used to work for a company that would continuously promote partnerships on the web. It would be a challenge to measure the effectiveness of the online partnership because we would post an article which would include at least one external link. Sometimes we would include external links to registration forms for a contest or to an interactive experience on the partner’s site within our own content. They only way to track external traffic would be to set up an external link as an event. An event goal would be important to implement for a blog since blog content tends to include a lot of offsite links (due to reciprocal link building).

Funnels

“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,” (Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism, 2013).
Every site defines a conversion differently. It can be a sale, a newsletter sign-up or ebook download, to name a few. Whatever it is, a visitor must go through steps in order to complete this goal. “A funnel lets you specify a path you expect traffic to take to reach a destination goal. When you specify steps in a funnel, analytics can the track where visitors enter and exit the path on the way towards your goal, giving you valuable insight about your site,” (“About Goals, n.d.).

According to Eric Fettman on the Kissmetrics blog, funnels can help:

·         Determine what steps are causing customer confusion or trouble.

·         Figure out what language or copy might be altering our customer’s emotional behavior during checkout or sign up.

·         To be aware of bugs, browser issues and other technical nuisances (2012).

For example, say you wanted to track the path that leads people to sign up for email updates. First you would set up your url destination goal which would be the email update sign-up confirmation page. I recommend assigning a goal value so you can put a dollar amount to the action. Before saving the goal, select the option of adding a funnel.  Add the urls and names for the funnel steps. For example, the first step you might want to track is the page that explains what is included in email updates. The second step would be the form to sign up. If you saw that you had a lot of visitors to the url in the first step but most of the visitors did not sign up, this might indicate a few issues. Maybe the description what the email updates entail is not well written so people do not move to the next step. Or maybe the link to the actual sign-up page is broken, stopping users from signing up. Whatever the case might be, this can help you asses any problems with this process (Fettman, 2012).

Filters

“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 (Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism, 2013).

I have created a filter to exclude tracking from my domain so that I can get a true picture of site traffic. Until I created this filter, most of my traffic was coming from my domain. This is a common practice; otherwise, you will see that a decent amount of site traffic is generated from your domain or a range of domains. At work, we are constantly on our site troubleshooting and testing. Internal traffic only clouds the true picture of visits to the site. Most importantly, filters help further segment data.  Data can be diced and sliced to show visitors by country or by new or returning visitor to see how each subset behaves on the site. If you have a site and a blog that is linked up to the site, you can use a filter to show only blog traffic (Lewis, 2011).

As a site grows and becomes more complex, goals, funnels and filters are important to help ensure you are meeting objectives. These metrics provide profound insight as to how an audience is interacting with your site. Armed with this data, you can improve the user experience and achieve success.

References:

“About Goals.” (2010). Retrieved from http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1012040&topic=1007030&ctx=topic

“Bounce rate demystified.” (2010). Kissmetrics.com. Retrieved from  http://blog.kissmetrics.com/bounce-rate/

Fettman, E. (2012. The Google Analytics funnel conversion guide. Kissmetrics.com. Retrieved from http://blog.kissmetrics.com/conversion-funnel-survival-guide/

“How to apply a Google Analytics filter for quality results.”(2009). Begginerblogger.com. Retrieved from http://www.beginnerblogger.com/google-analytics-filter/

Lewis, A. (2011). The benefits of multiple Google Analytics profiles. Koozai.com Retrieved from http://www.koozai.com/blog/analytics/the-benefits-of-multiple-google-analytics-profiles-and-filters-722/

Lofgren, L. (2012). 4 Google Analytics goal types those are critical to your business. Kissmetrics.com. Retrieved from http://blog.kissmetrics.com/critical-goal-types/

Lofgren, L. (2012). Why you shouldn’t set pageviews and time on site as goals in Google Analytics. Kissmetrics.com. Retrieved from http://blog.kissmetrics.com/pageviews-time-on-site/

Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism, West Virginia University. (2013). Lesson 6 – Successful approaches  in Google Analytics. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu

Rocheleau, J. (n.d.) A guide to: goals and funnels in Google Analytics. Honkiat.com. http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/google-analytics-goals-funnels-tips/#Thinking_About_Great_Goals

Sparks, D. (2010). Google Analytics in depth: goals and funnels. Sixrevisions.com. Retrieved from http://sixrevisions.com/tools/google-analytics-in-depth-goals-and-funnels/