Launching your business website is an exciting development. However, it can be difficult to determine how effective your website is in promoting your business and whether you should consider making any changes. Google Analytics can help. Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to track all sorts of metrics, including the demographics of your visitors, how much time they’re spending on your site, and what links they use to navigate through it.
One particularly effective way to use Google Analytics is by creating goals that allow you to track specific behaviors on your website. This tool allows you to see how well you’re doing within those parameters, providing you with concrete evidence confirming whether your current strategies in pursuit of said goal are sufficient.
Decide Upon a Goal to Track
The first step in the process is determining what sort of goal you’d like to pursue. Keep in mind that in order to take advantage of the goals feature in Google Analytics, your goal has to be something that Google Analytics can actually observe. In other words, your goal should reference a specific metric measured by the tool.
Additionally, you’ll want to focus on goals that will actually help you grow your business. Tracking the number of pageviews will tell you how popular you currently are but will offer no guidance on how to improve. Instead, consider a goal that will allow you to measure your success while revealing areas of opportunity. For example, you could attempt to figure out where your conversions are coming from by monitoring how users who signed up for your services accessed the site. This, in turn, can help you decide where to focus your marketing to increase the number of conversions.
Setting Up Goals With Google Analytics
Once you have a goal in mind, the process of creating that goal in Google Analytics is relatively simple. While signed in, follow these steps:
- Click ADMIN, and make sure you’re in the correct view
- Locate the VIEW column and select GOALS
- Click NEW GOAL
At this stage, you should have the option to create a custom goal, a smart goal, or use a goal template. Review the existing options to verify whether they apply to your situation, and select the most appropriate one. Note that you can only have a maximum of 20 goals active at a time.
Track Google Analytics Goals With Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager offers users a way to tag certain behaviors and actions on your website. This allows you to monitor very specific actions on your website and funnel that information over to Google Analytics, to be recorded in your goal. To work properly, you need to fill in two pieces of information, that trigger that causes the tag to be applied, and the tag itself. The trigger should be the action you’re trying to record, such as clicks to offsite links or instances where users pull up their virtual shopping cart.
The next step is to create the tag and name it after the behavior you’re tracking. Here, you’ll also be able to select the tag type, which would be Universal Analytics under Google Analytics, along with the appropriate tracking ID. This ensures the data gets sent to the right place.
How Using Goals Can Help You Improve Your SEO
By creating goals that are SEO-related, you can get a much more detailed picture of your current SEO. More specifically, tracking how many leads are generated by search engine results can help give you valuable data in regard to your Return on Investment (ROI) and SEO. This information allows you to determine how many users are finding your website through search engines while also confirming how those users affect your conversion rate.
If you discover the rate is low, consider why there is a disconnect between your SEO and ROI. It’s possible that your keywords are attractive enough to draw in visitors, but once they arrive, they are not finding the corresponding content.
Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager can both be incredibly powerful tools to track and report behavioral data on your website if used correctly. However, to obtain actionable feedback, it’s vital that you first put effort into determining what kinds of triggers and goals will be most beneficial. If you’re having trouble getting started or would like some guidance with setting up your tags, contact us for further assistance.