Note: this guide was written for Universal Analytics, the previous version of Google Analytics. Since July 2023 Google Analytics 4 measures conversions through events and key events instead of goals, but the logic of defining what you want to measure remains the same.
Knowing your website’s data and metrics helps you find out whether your site and your marketing strategies are working. That’s why integrating Google Analytics into your website is so important.
In this post we want to talk about Google Analytics goals: what they are, what they’re for and how you can set them up to get the data you need to evaluate all your digital marketing strategies.
What are Google Analytics goals?
Broadly speaking, a goal is an action a user completes on your website (or app). These actions become metrics that Google Analytics can quantify and turn into a pattern.
A goal can be many things:
- Completing a sale
- Entering details in a form
- Subscribing to a newsletter
- Visiting a specific page
- Spending a certain amount of time on the website
- Downloading a document (a book, a manual or a guide)
- Visiting a certain number of inner pages
Many actions can be measured thanks to Google Analytics goals, and depending on your website’s purpose you may be more interested in measuring some than others to reach the targets set in your digital marketing strategy.
What are Google Analytics goals for?
Setting goals lets you understand your website’s performance and diagnose whether it fulfills the purpose it was created for, discover new opportunities and fix what isn’t working:
- If the website was designed to win clients, goals let you see, for example, how many people fill in a form or, for online stores, how many people complete a purchase.
- Websites are dynamic: they change over time to get ever better results. With Google Analytics goals you can check whether one design or another gets better results, see which keywords bring the most traffic and discover new keywords you hadn’t anticipated so you can start optimizing for them.
- As with everything in life, things can fail, but they can always be fixed. If you know your website’s metrics, you can identify where it’s failing and make the necessary corrections, optimizing your website so it fulfills its purpose.
What types of Google Analytics goals are there?
When you create a goal, Google Analytics lets you choose 3 ways to create it:
- Templates: predefined goals Google Analytics suggests based on your type of business. Templates are useful when you aren’t sure how to customize goals, and also when they match what you’re looking for.
- Custom: goals you can configure to look at the metrics of something specific. They’re useful when you want to analyze something very, very particular on your website.
- Smart: these goals are set up based on Google Ads campaigns, meaning you need a minimum amount of traffic from Google Ads campaigns to activate them. For more information, visit the Google Analytics help page.
How do you set up Google Analytics goals?
Step 1
Log in to your Google Analytics account and go to Admin. In the View section, click Goals. A window opens with your goals (if you already had some) and a red button that says “+ New Goal”; click it.
Step 2
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 activate, we won’t cover them in this article.
If you choose a template, follow the steps it indicates and your goal will be created. If the templates don’t fit your needs, choose the custom option. For the purposes of this article, we’ll 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 to.
If you like things tidy, you can add an ID to your goal; if you don’t see the need, leave that field alone and Google will order them automatically as you create them.
Finally, choose 1 of the 4 goal types it offers:
- Destination: this goal measures whether a user reaches a specific page on your website, which can be any page you’re interested in. It’s very common to set it up with the “Thank you” page shown when someone completes a purchase in an online store or subscribes to your website, but as we said, you can link any page you want visited.
- Duration: as its name suggests, it measures a minimum time spent on the website. If you want your users to see your content and spend time on it, you can set this goal with a minimum time; it’s especially useful for blogs.
- Pages/screens per session: this goal analyzes how many pages of your website a user visits in one session; the more pages a user visits, the greater the chance of conversion. How many can you set? As many as you see fit.
- Event: this goal is triggered when someone takes a specific action on your website, usually when interacting with your content. For example, watching a video on your site, downloading something or filling in a pop-up form. To track an event goal, you must first add the event tracking code.
Step 4
Add the relevant information, depending on the type of goal you selected, so it can collect data:
For the Destination goal, first choose the URL you want the user to reach. You don’t need to enter the whole URL, just the fragment after the slash, for example /thank-you.html.
In the drop-down menu you can select “Equals to” (the user must reach exactly the page you selected) or “Begins with” (any URL that starts with what you entered; this is useful, for example, if your travel website has several pages with the prefix “flights”).
You can add a value to the conversion: if someone reaches that page, you can estimate a revenue value. It isn’t required.
If you want to measure a conversion funnel, meaning a person follows a specific path, you can activate this option. For example, an online store can find out whether its checkout process is effective by activating this option and adding every page a user must go through to complete the purchase. It’s optional.
For the Duration goal, just add a value for time spent on your website, in hours, minutes or seconds. The goal will be triggered whenever someone stays longer than the time you selected. You can also assign a conversion value if you wish.
For the Pages/screens per session goal, select the number of pages the user must visit on the website; the goal will be triggered when the user visits that number. As with the previous goal, you can add a conversion value if you wish.
For the Event goal, you must configure:
- Category: the object you’ll track, for example a document on your website.
- Action: what the person will do with the category; for the document, the action would be downloading.
- Label: additional information that helps identify the event.
- Value: a value that records how many times the event has been completed. For a download, the value would be 1.
You can set the value to be the same as the one you indicated in the value section, or add a different one.
Finally, whatever goal type you selected, click “Verify this goal”, which makes Google check your goal and tell you whether it’s set up correctly. If everything is fine, click Save.
And that’s it: your goal is created. To see the report, go to Reports – Conversions – Goals, where your goal’s metrics will appear.
Setting up goals in Google Analytics is very easy and very necessary for understanding your website’s performance: whether it works or whether something is failing so you can fix it. Start creating goals and getting the data you need to reach your digital targets.
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