subject: Setting up Goals in Google Analytics [print this page] Setting up goals is a key skill in Google Analytics (GA). Without goals your website is without direction, without focus.
A goal in analytics is an action on your website that you want a visitor to take. It could be a purchase, a software download, a newsletter signup, or spending a specified time on site.
Once you have set up goals, you can accurately gauge the effectiveness of your website.
The steps to set up goals in GA are as follows:
1. Set up a new profile for your website if you don't want to mess around with the main one. Click on add profile to do this.
2. In the "Overview" page of GA, click on "Edit".
3. You will see the goal section in the middle of the next page (Profile Settings). Goals are divided up into 4 sets of 5 goals; in all, you can set up to 20 goals. Usually a set would be around a specific type of goal, such as time on site or pages viewed; each goal in the set would be to measure the people staying for a certain time on site, or viewing a certain number of pages.
4. Click on "Add Goal".
5. You will be sent to the "Enter Goal Information" page. First give your goal a name. Keep this related to the goal and fairly short.
6. Set the goal to "active" or "inactive". Goals can be set up in advance, for campaigns that are not running yet; this is where you would set the goal to not run yet.
7. Next set the goal position i.e. which set it will be in.
8. If you are setting up a one-off goal just set it to goal 1 set 1.
9. Select goal type. This can be a destination URL, time on site or pages viewed. For most standard goals (sign-ups, purchases) you will enter a destination URL here. This has to be a unique URL that is not accessible from any where esle on the site. It is often a "thank you" page.
10. If you click on URL destination, then a drop down menu will appear. Here you must first choose a match type. Choose "Head match" if the destination URL has no dynymic paramaters. Choose one of the other match types if your destination page URL contains dynamic paramaters.
11. Enter the goal URL, and define whether the URL is case sensitive.
12. Enter the goal value. This is the value you assign to each goal achieved by a visitor on your site. Use this to calulate ROI. For goals such as time on site and pages visited, leave this blank.
13. Underneath this you will see info about goal funnels; leave this for the time being, this blog will cover this at a later date.
