Google Analytics is a powerful tool for managing the performance of your website and something I use daily on my SEO campaigns. Using Google Analytics fully, including the goals section, can help you to develop your site. However, to make the most of the information being collected setting up Goals in your analytics account is important as creating a Google Analytics account for your website and looking at it once a month is not really enough. Using goals and goal funnels in Google Analytics can help you improve your website.
A goal in Google Analytics is a measurable outcome on your website. For example the completion of your contact form or signing up for your newsletter both make good measurable goals for Google Analytics. To be able to track your goals in Google Analytics there must be a completion step for your form. The best way to do this is to ensure that you have a thank you page on your form. A thank you page should have a unique URL for example www.yourdomain.co.uk /contact-form-thanks.html and each action on your site should have a thank you specific for the action. This will mean you will end up with a series of thank you pages similar to the below:
www.yourdomain.co.uk /newsletter-thanks.html
www.yourdomain.co.uk /contact-form-thanks.html
www.yourdomain.co.uk /quick-quote-thanks.html
These pages will become the basis of your goal. However, to ensure that you are able to track your website fully this is not really enough. If you just add these pages as goals with no further information in the goal all you will know is that 153 people completed your contact form. However this on its own is not a really meaningful statistic.
Adding in a goal funnel is where Google Analytics is able to provide information to help you improve your business. A goal funnel shows you the path people take to complete the action you have set up. For example to reach the Contact form thank you page a visitor to your website has to view the Contact form, complete their details and press the submit button. So to create a goal funnel for this page you add a step to the goal which is the Contact Form itself. Once you have done this Google Analytics can then show the number of people who have visited the contact form against the number of people who completed it.
Using goal funnel data you can review the effectiveness of each form on your website. If you have had 3000 visitors to your contact form but have only received 100 completed forms this would seem to be indicating that the contact form is not working for your visitors. Knowing this enables you to make improvements to your contact form or perform A/B testing on the form layout to increase the number of conversions you get on this form.
Used across the site goals can enable you to ensure that you are encouraging visitors to view the correct pages on your website and making it easier for them to perform the actions, such as contacting you, that you want them to.
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