On previous occasions we have talked about the Importance of integrating Google Analytics into your website to learn about your data and metrics that help you understand if your website and marketing strategies are working.

And we also explain to you How to integrate Google Analytics into your website and in this way begin to obtain relevant data on the functioning of your website.

This time we want to talk to you about Google Analytics objectives, what they are, what they are for and how you can configure them to obtain the necessary data and evaluate all your digital marketing strategies.

What are Google Analytics goals?

Broadly speaking, a goal is an action that a user completes on our website (or application). These actions are transformed into metrics that Google Analytics can quantify and generate a pattern.

A goal can be many things:

• Complete a sale
• Entering data into a form
• Subscribe to a newsletter
• Visit a specific page
• Spend a certain amount of time on the website
• Download a document (either a book, a manual or a guide)
• Visit a certain number of internal pages

There are many actions that can be measured thanks to Google Analytics objectives and depending on the purpose of your website, you may be interested in measuring some more than others in order to achieve the goals set in your digital marketing strategy.

What are Google Analytics goals for?

Setting goals will allow us to know the performance of our website and diagnose whether it fulfills the functions for which it was created, discover new opportunities and correct what is not working:

• If the website was designed to attract customers, with the objectives we can see, for example, the number of people who fill out a form, or, in the case of virtual stores, see how many people complete a purchase.
• Websites are dynamic, meaning they change over time, with the goal of always getting better results. With Google Analytics you can check if you get better results with one design or another, or see the keywords that attract the most traffic, also discover new keywords that you hadn't planned on and start optimizing them.
• Like everything in life, things can go wrong, but they can always be corrected. If you know your website's metrics, you can identify where things are failing and make the necessary corrections. In this way, you will also be optimizing your website to ensure that it fulfills its functions.

What are the goals of Google Analytics?

When you create a goal, Google Analytics allows you to choose 3 ways to create goals:

1. Templates: These are predetermined goals that Google Analytics suggests to you, based on the type of business you run. These templates are useful when you don't have much idea of how to customize goals, and they can also be used when you see that they respond to what you are looking for.
2. Customized: These are goals that you can set to look at the metrics of something specific. They are useful when you want to analyze something very, very specific on your website.
3. Smart: These types of objectives are configured based on Google Ads campaigns, that is, you require a minimum amount of traffic from Google Ads campaigns to be able to activate these objectives; if you want to know more information about this, visit the help page from Google Analytics.

How do you set up Google Analytics goals?

Step 1

We enter our Google Analytics account and go to the administrator, then in the view section we will click on objectives, a window will open with our objectives (if we already had some established) and a red box that says "+ New objective" where we will click.

Step 2

You must choose whether to create a goal based on a template, a smart goal, or a custom goal. Since smart goals require certain special conditions to be activated, we will not cover them in this article.

If you choose a template, follow the steps provided and you will have your goal created. If you find that the templates do not fit your needs, choose the customize option. For the purposes of this article, we will explain how to create custom goals.

Step 3

If you create a custom goal, Google Analytics asks you to give it a name. Try to make it easy to remember, so that if you have many goals, you can identify it when you need it.

If you are very organized, you can add an ID to your goal, if you don't see it necessary, don't touch the tab, and Google will automatically organize them as you create them.

Finally choose 1 of the 4 types of objectives offered:

1. Destination: This type of objective is used to measure whether a user reaches a certain page on your website, which can be any page depending on your interests. It is very common to configure this objective with the “Thank you” page that is displayed when a person completes a purchase in a virtual store, or subscribes to our website; but as we said, you can link any page that you are interested in being visited.
2. Duration: As the name suggests, this goal is used to measure a minimum amount of time spent on your website. If you want your users to see your content and spend time on it, you can set this goal with a minimum amount of time, which is especially useful for blogs.
3. Pages/screens per session: This objective is used to analyze how many pages of our website a user visits in one opportunity; the more pages a user visits, the greater the chance of conversion. How many can you put? As many as you see necessary.
4. Event: This goal is triggered when a person performs a specific action on our website, usually when they interact with our content. For example, if they watch a video on our website, make a download, fill out a form in a pop-up. To track an event goal, we must insert the event tracking code first.

Step 4

You must add the relevant information, depending on the type of objective you have selected, so that it can collect the data:

For the purpose “Destination” First we will choose the URL that we want the user to reach, it is not necessary to put the entire URL, just the fragment that is after the slash, for example, /thanks.html

In the drop-down menu we can select “Equals” (that is, it must link to the page we selected) or “Starts with” (it can be any URL that starts with the extension we enter, which is useful, for example, if your website is about travel and has several pages with the prefix “flights”).

You can add a value to the conversion, that is, if a person reached that page, you can estimate a profit value, it is not necessary to activate it.

If you want to measure a conversion funnel, that is, if a person takes a certain route, you can activate this option. For example, for a virtual store, it is useful to know if the purchase process is effective or not, so activate this option and add all the pages that a user must go through to complete the purchase. It is optional, if you want to activate it, if not, no problem.

For the purpose “Duration”We just need to add a time value for the time spent on our website, this can be hours, minutes or seconds. And this objective will always be activated when the person spends a time greater than the one we select. You can also assign a conversion value if you wish.

For the purpose “Pages/screens per session” Select the number of pages the user should visit on the website, and this goal will be triggered when the user visits the number you selected. Like the previous goal, you can add a conversion value to it if you want.

For the purpose “Event” you must configure:

• Category: It is the object that we will track, for example, a document that we have on the website.
• Action: It is what the person is going to do with the category, for example, for the document, the action would be download.
• Tags: It is additional information that serves to identify the event.
• Worth: It is a value that tells us how many times the event has been performed. For a download the value would be 1.

You can set the value to be the same as what you entered in the value section, or you can add a different value.

Finally, regardless of the type of goal you selected, you must click on “check this goal” which makes Google analyze your goal and tell you if it is correct or not, if everything is correct click on save.

And that's it, you have your objective created. If you want to see the report, you must go to the Reports-Conversions-Objectives menu and the metrics for your objective will appear there.

It's very easy to set up your goals in Google Analytics and they're very necessary to know how your website is performing. If it's working or if something is failing, you can fix it. Start creating goals and getting the data you need to meet your digital goals.

Do you need help with the development of your website wave programming your virtual storeLet's talk!