Google
Analytics offers businesses several ways to quantify the success of a website
by through the creation of goals, funnels, and filters. These three tools work in conjunction with
each other to outline what measure for success you are tracking (goals), how
consumers make their way to that goal (funnel) and whom you should include or
exclude from the results (filter).
Having established the basic principles of these tools, let us take a deep
look into step of the processes and examine how these tools can help provide
actionable information to businesses leaders.
The
first step of this process is to understand the goals for your particular
website. For example, an ecommerce
website might want to monitor sales conversions or at what stage in the
purchasing process a shopping cart is abandoned. On the other hand, a strategic consulting
website might be more interested in how many people share a link to its latest
seminar or how many times a whitepaper is downloaded. Lastly, a blogger or entertainment site might
be more concerned with overall visitor engagement and how long users stay on
the website or how any pages they visit before leaving. Each of these goals is valuable for different
reasons and not all of the goals are equally applicable to each website.
A great way to help define your goals is
to ask yourself what you are hoping the user to accomplish when they visit your
website. Here are some though provoking
questions to get you thinking about which goals make sense for your company;
·
“What information is most important for you to track? Is
this just for knowledge, or for potential changes of how your website flows?
·
Could you change anything in your design to influence visitorstowards completing these goals faster/easier?”
Once you have identified what
metrics define success for your website, you can begin to create your
goals. Google Analytics makes this step
very easy; the goals tab is under “conversions” on the left hand side of your
screen (as seen in the adjacent screen cap).
Once you click on goals, you will be taken to a screen where you can
fill in the tabs to create your goal (changing the settings depending on the
type of goal—URL destination, time on site, page/visit, and event).
Each specific type of goal has its own parameters
for measurement and Google will automatically help you establish these
depending on which type of goal you create.
Before
we move on to funnels and filters, it is important to further define the
difference between each type of goal and how they could be useful for different
types of businesses. The first type of
goal you have the option of creating is the URL destination goal. These are the most common types of goals
tracked and “thesegoal types simply track when a user enters a specific page on yourwebsite”. This type of
goal is useful for tracking if specific pages on your site are being
visited. If you choose a URL destination
goal, you will also be prompted for which type of URL match you consider a
success. Google allows you to check “exact match”, “head match”, or “regular
expression match”. These terms are
described by Google Analytics as:
•
Exact match—for standard, fixed URLs: An exact match is a match on every exact character in your
URL—without exception—from beginning to end. Use this when your URLs for your
site are easy to read and do not vary.
This option requires that the URLs you
provide for your funnel or goal exactly
match the URLs shown in the reports. There can be no dynamic (changing)
information in the URL such as session identifiers or query parameters
•
Regular Expression Match—for matching on
multiple criteria: A regular expression usesspecial characters to enable wildcard and flexible matching. This is usefulwhen the stem, trailing parameters, or both, can vary in the URLs for the samewebsite page.
For example, if a user could be coming from one of many subdomains,and your URLs use session identifiers, you could use a regular expression todefine the constant element of your URL.
Site duration
is another common goal, and this can be set up for any amount of time you
deem
a success. Google also allows you to
track “less than” or “more than” time segments.
This
feature is important for businesses to understand
how much time is spent on a site and if there are certain pages that are
leading to greater abandonment or engagement.
Another metric is the page/visit goal.
This allows businesses to “track the amount
of page views per visitor. … Each individual is tracked for the amount of pages they viewper visit and will only complete your goal if they are above or below thenumber you set”.
The last type
of goal to track is an event. This
allows you to easily track specific actions, such as downloading white papers
or forwarding on a specific link. This
is important for businesses because it shows “Which ones drive the most or least clicks?Which ones drive the most or least conversions?” . By understanding which “offers” (ads,
whitepapers, downloads, shares, etc.) consumers find most engaging/valuable,
the company can begin to target its content and offer more value to the
consumer, encouraging more frequent visits and long-term loyalty.
After establishing goals, you can begin to customize your tracking by creating funnels to track how the consumer is experiencing and using your website. Every customer has to click through your website to get to their end goal, and funnels allow you to see the journey they take and if there are any bumps in the road. To the right is a great visual of the funnel in Google Analytics.
“Funnels help us see
this process (or processes) easily, by giving us a visual representation of the
conversion data between each step. This allows us to:
The
last step of the goals process is to then include/exclude certain sources of
data. This
is
known as the filtering process. Google
Analytics makes it simple to block certain ISP addresses or to allow
others. This helps a business because it
can exclude internal work networks or employees from key statistics, making the
final data much more accurate.
Overall, Google Analytics makes it easy for a business to
create and track its goals over time.
This is important for a business leader because it allows for informed
decisions based on data rather than gut intuition or feeling. For instance, a businesses leader can gauge
the success of a certain campaign through the site visits or URL destinations,
or he/she can understand if a certain event (ex: downloading inforgraphic) was
a success based on the number of downloads. The funnel is also a crucial part
of the measurement process because it shows how consumers use the website and
if there is room for improvement (ex: making the pathway to achieving an event
easier through less clicks or reworking pages with short duration visits). All of these goals help the business leader
create better content and offer a better user experience, which in the end will
help increase goal completions (whether that is sales conversions, engagement,
etc.).
No comments:
Post a Comment