Goals and Funnels In Google Analytics
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Justin Handley - Conversion Guy
By Justin Handley – Resident Testing, Tracking & Conversion Expert
So you’ve signed up for a Google Analytics (GA) account, you’ve pasted the code into your website, and you are tracking visitors. Congratulations! (And if you haven’t done this, and don’t have a better tracking solution in place, now is the time to start!)
This is the first big step you can take towards understanding and improving the conversion rate on your site. In this article we are going to take a look at goals and goal funnels as they are tracked in GA.
Warning: I’ve recently had several clients who have had issues with goal funnel reports in Analytics, especially if you create them incorrectly and then edit them. Before I get started here are a couple of pointers on this.
- Try to get it right the first time. Seriously – take some time to think about your goals, and use the techniques I teach below to define what the best funnels are to track before you set up your goals. Why?
- You can’t delete goals! It’s true – for some absurd reason, you can’t get rid of a goal once you’ve set it up. The best you can do is delete all of the steps of the goal and change the name back to something like “Blank Goal”. Then you can repopulate it with steps later, but sometimes the previous goal had 5 steps and the new one has only 3. Which leads us to…
- Sometimes you end up with extra steps in your goal. Whether it is because your took the action in step 2 or sometimes just randomly, a blank step shows up in your goals. I think that having one blank at the end of a goal sequence is normal in editing mode, but if you see it in your reports, make sure the field doesn’t have a space in it, and then move your goal to a different place. You can move it right back, just move it from Group 1, Goal 2 to Group 2, Goal 3 or something like that, save, and then move it back. This usually takes care of these issues.
- Google doesn’t provide support. Analytics is a free service, and it isn’t supported in any real way. There are forums, where more often than you would hope questions go unanswered for months. Email to Google often gets no response, so you are left with hiring a consultant or just dealing with what is broken.
Now, it may sound like I’m trying to warn you off of Google Analytics, but I’m not. I use it, and I love it. As far as I’m concerned it is the most full featured free analytics application out there. Now that we have that out of the way, back to goals.
Make Sure You Have Conversion Pages
To make GA work properly for tracking the success of your goals, you need to have “Success Pages”. So, when someone places an order successfully, they should get redirected to a page on your site that says “Congratulations – Your order has been processed” (or whatever you put there).
When someone successfully signs up for your email list, redirect them to a page that thanks them for their signup. It is by using these page’s unique URLs that you are going to be able to track the success of your campaigns in Google Analytics.
Lets say you have a pop up window with an opt-in box that closes immediately on popup – there are ways to register events on a click (so when someone clicks to submit the form), but you’ll have to look those up on your own – that is more advanced than belongs in this tutorial.
Defining You Goal Funnels
Once you’ve got this done, all of the information from Goal reports can be gathered manually, and sometimes it is the best idea to do that first, before you actually set up goals. The easiest way to do this is to log in and go to the Dashboard.
On the left click on “Content”. On that page there is a content report called “Top Content” – Click on “View Report”. Here you have a list of the most visited pages on your site (If you really just set up GA, it may take a few days to get enough data here to mean anything).
Hopefully, your conversion success page will be in this list. If it isn’t, that means you’ve never had a successful conversion – go out and make a sale right now! Then come back and keep reading. If it is there, click on it in the list, and you’ll get the stats for just that page.
On the right side you’ll see a link called “Navigation Summary”. Click on that, and you get to a page that has Entrances on the left and Exits on the right, arranged from top to bottom by the percent of users that arrived at your page or left your page from another page.
Now, simply click on the top page in the left column – this will be the page that the most people landed on your success page from. If it is a sale thank you page, this will most likely be the order form. On that page, the top link in the right hand column (Exits) should be your Thank You page and the % of visitors that made it there.
Right here is an interesting piece of information – you now know the percent of people who hit your order form and leave it before placing an order. Make changes to your order form, track them, and try to bring the % of people who hit your order form and then the thank you page up as high as possible.
Start writing this down – so far we have:
Order Form > Thank You Page
Once you’ve clicked on the order form, look at the top of the left hand column again, and see what page is there. Click it. Let’s assume people get to your order form from a product page in a shopping cart. Now you have:
Product Page > Order Form > Thank You Page
Keep going like this until you end up on a page that has the highest % of visitors in the left column coming in as referrals from other sites. You’ve now got your on site conversion funnel and are ready to set up your first goal / goal funnel.
Setting Up a Goal and Funnel
Take the list of pages that you just made that are the most common path used on your site that lead to your thank you page, and click on the “Analytics Settings” button at the top left of the page.
- Next to the account you are working on click “Edit”.
- Scroll down, and under Goal Set 1, click “Add a Goal”.
- Give it a name.
- Choose the Goal Type “URL Destination”
- Depending on what type of site you run, your choice of match type may vary. Click the ? next to it and read what they mean. For most sites that are hand built or generated in WordPress or Dreamweaver “Head Match” is the best option. If you use software that dynamically generates URLs and uses sessions, you may want to consider “Regular Expression Match”, and if you need to track variables passed to the page, “Exact Match” might be the choice for you. I’ll assume you’ll use “Head Match”
- Put the URL of your thank you page in, without the domain name. If your goal page URL is http://mysite.com/success.html, simply put “/success.html” into this box.
- If your goal has a specific value, as in it’s always a sale for $19.95, put that in the Goal Value box. This isn’t necessary.
- Under “Funnel” create a Goal Funnel, and then from top to bottom put the pages that you generated in the above exercise into these boxes. Something like:
/ > Home page
/shoppingcart.php > Shopping Cart
/product_page.html > Product Page
/order_form.html > Order Form
Then, the last page (the thank you page) you don’t set here – you already set it in the goal above, this is just the pages that lead up to that page.
Save your goal, and at the top of the page click on “View Reports”
On the Overview page you’ll see a list of goals you’ve created. Click on one of them, and then on the right side on “Goal Funnel”.
What you’ve achieved here is a single page report that gives you the same data you pulled earlier on using the “Navigation Summary” report, but in an easy to understand visual format. Starting at the top you have the first page your visitors hit, the % that continue on, and so on for every page they hit. This allows you to quickly and easily visualize on what page of your site you lose the most visitors before they become a sign up or sale.
Spend some time focusing on this page and trying to improve the results. Watch your numbers or use something like Google Website Optimizer to split test more accurately. By doing this over time you can easily double the conversion on your site or better.
Last tip – to get a weekly report, at the top of the Goal Funnel report, go to the top and click on “Email” and then “Schedule” and set it up so the report comes right to your email once a week so you can keep an eye on changes. Now – take a break, stretch, and enjoy knowing you are one step closer to achieving your Goals!
Justin Handley is the resident testing, tracking & conversion expert here at Online Marketing Today. Find out more about Justin, or you can view all articles & advice by Justin here. Be sure to rate this post, share the knowledge, and/or leave your comments below.
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