por Google Analytics has several ways to make your life easier when measuring and monitoring your projects. Goals in Google Analytics are one of the ways Google knows what you specifically want to track and what data is important to display.
Goals in Google Analytics
The objectives in Google Analytics are Google’s tracking of user actions within the website that you have entered into the tool. Google allows us to keep a count of any type of conversion that may be relevant to our organization.
Using goals in Google Analytics allows you to see the performance of your page and will help you understand the effectiveness of the strategies you have implemented to improve your metrics.
Some examples of actions that can help you are:
Complete forms within the website. Download content, such as PDFs, eBooks, or any type of content you can offer. Enter the process checkout.
In order to convert these actions into objectives, it is necessary that the action be fulfilled through visits or events that are created.
Example of objectives
Imagine that you are an eCommerce that has sales of household items. One of your objectives is for users to become part of your email list to receive information about discounts or news, but also for them to be part of the newsletterwhere you will show them decorating tips or projects to develop at home.
Every time a user enters their email and clicks subscribe, the interaction is measured as an event. In this case, in order to make the number of subscribed people an objective, we would have to define an objective that keeps track of how many times this event has occurred.
Once you have this, it will be much easier to check and track the data.
Why use objectives
You already know that you can put your own goals in Google Analytics, but maybe you don’t know exactly what you should use them for. There are some basic uses that are usually given to this tool:
Newsletter: As we have seen in the previous example, one of the ways in which this type of objective tool is usually used is to know how many people do a specific action. In this specific case, it would be how many people are interested in receiving our content.
Leads: the leads are users who have interacted with you in some way and have the potential to become customers in the future. In this case, you can make goals in Google Analytics that track how many people have completed a form or some other action that could lead them to convert.
downloads: This is a good way to find out what your customers are interested in. If you offer to download any content, such as PDFs or eBooks, Having a goal of how many downloads there are in a period of time can give you clues about what you need to improve or what you are doing well.
Time on site: This is a basic metric, but it’s worth having it as one of the goals in Google Analytics. Know which pages users spend the most time on and exactly how much time they spend It can help you know what to improve or what is not of interest to your users.
Business objectives: Any type of objective that your company or organization specifically has is something that you can add to your Google Analytics to be able to do a more detailed follow-up.
Types of objectives in google analytics
It can be said that Google Analytics has 4 base objectives that you can use to configure your projects. These are:
Destination
This is one of the most used types of objectives in Google Analytics.
Target goals track specific URLs within your website in detail. When a user enters the URL, Google Analytics will register it as a compliment within the tool.
Generally these types of objectives in Google Analytics are used for thank you pages, confirmation pages, or pages that come directly after an action that the user performs.
For example, with thank you pages you can know exactly how many people took an action, whether buying or subscribing to a newsletteramong many other options. Always keep those URLs accessible at the end of the process to ensure that the data you get is accurate.
Duration
These goals are usually tracked depending on how many people stay on your website for a specific period of time. Each user is a session and each session has a time; If you pass that threshold, Google Analytics will take it as a goal met and record it. You can set the goal as long as you want.
These types of objectives in Google Analytics allow you to obtain the information necessary to create marketing strategies. engagement and improve retention times.
When choosing how long the limit will be for the goal to be met, you should set realistic goals and make sure it is not too high or too low. If you don’t do it this way, it’s more likely to make it difficult to create strategies that actually work.
Pages per session
This objective goes along the same path as the previous one, however, instead of tracking the time users spend on your page, It is a tracking of the pages they visit once they are on your website.
These types of objectives in Google Analytics are related to the depth of the session, for example, if you want to create this type of objectives you can do so by configuring a number of pages that the user must view before Google Analytics takes it as an achieved objective.
Event
Events are a little more complicated to explain, but the general idea is that they are the specific actions that we measure using events. Before you can create these types of goals in Google Analytics, you must create the events that will serve as their basis. These events can be all user actions, such as downloading content, playing a video, clicking a button or going to a page, among others. It’s up to you what you want to put as events.
In order to do the events, you must add JavaScript code that connects so that Google Analytics starts tracking.
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