Key Takeaways
- Like it or not, Google Analytics is here to stay.
- Don’t be afraid to track actions that don’t necessarily equate to sales, sometimes we can get so bogged down in the revenue and ROAS we miss opportunities to scale by thinking outside the box.
- Your customers will tell you everything you need to know.
Google Analytics. The trusty companion and sometimes frustrating foe of every marketer & business owner. We love it for the insights it provides, the data it crunches and the trusted partner it can be. But if we’re honest, sometimes we also kind of hate it. The missing numbers, misattributed data & confusing reports can feel like cracking the Da Vinci code.
Love it or hate it, we can’t live without it. Google Analytics has been a staple in every business toolkit for years, from UA to GA4 it’s provided valuable insights to help understand your business, your campaigns & achieve your goals.
Putting aside our complicated feelings for a moment and let’s deep dive into a core component of Google Analytics: Goals.
Goals convey how each channel is performing and shine a light on any hidden UX issues lurking on your website.
Let’s look at some key areas that setting goals can give us valuable insights into.
Key Events
When setting up Google Analytics goals, it’s crucial to distinguish between Key Events (formerly known as conversions) and supporting metrics.
Key Events should represent your business’s most important actions, ones that align with your primary objectives such as, purchases or lead submissions.
These are actions that truly define success for your campaigns & ultimately your business.
Key Events could look like:
- Purchases - The ultimate conversion goal for an ecommerce business.
- Form Submissions - Actions such as form submissions or quote requests that directly tie in to your sales process.
These key events should remain your primary focus and the main contributing factor to your marketing strategy. By focusing on these goals, you’ll maintain clarity on what drives revenue & growth.
However, whilst keeping focus on Key Events to measure business success is important, it’s vital to set up goal tracking for supporting metrics too.
By doing this you’re giving your business insight into user behaviour, interests & unearthing areas for UX improvement.
Metrics such as page engagement, button clicks & time on site help paint a broader picture of your audience's journey, but they should be categorised differently than Key Events.
By treating Key Events as the foundation of your tracking setup and using supporting goals to provide actionable context, you'll create a balanced analytics strategy.
This ensures you're not only focused on the finish line but also uncovering opportunities to guide users along the path to conversion.
Let’s discuss in more detail what these supporting goals could look like for you.
Custom Goals
Custom goals are essentially tailor made tracking unique to your business. They give you the freedom to define your own metrics and track actions that might not fit into the predefined goal categories. These can look like:
- Engagement Goals - A goal that's set to fire when a user spends x amount of time on one of your web pages. This helps inform what content does & doesn’t resonate with your audience and inspires your marketing strategy.
- Button Clicks - Clicks on buttons like Learn More or Watch Video indicate active interest in your content and helps give further insight into successful content.
Custom goals appear in your analytics reports under the Events section, here you can track performance, analyse user behavior, and gain valuable insights into how these interactions contribute to your overall business objectives.
Goal Funnel
Goal funnels allow us to visualise the steps users take towards a desired action, highlighting any potential roadblocks or areas we’re losing value. A way to use this to your advantage for an ecommerce business could look like this -
In this case we would set up a goal that tracks product page views, add to cart actions, checkout initiations (entering shipping information) & finally purchases.
By analysing the funnel you can see where users are dropping off and identify areas for improvement, whether that's your checkout process, your payment options or your basket layout.
Goal Flow
While goal funnels focus on a specific conversion path, goal flows take a wider lens, showing the overall user journey throughout your website.
It shows how people navigate between different pages, where they enter and exit as well as any loops or unexpected patterns in behaviour.
An example of this in a lead gen context looks like noticing that the majority of users begin to enquire but then navigate to your blogs for more information before submitting a form.
This would highlight the importance of having up to date content on your website and inspire you to add CTA buttons within blogs to loop the user back to the form and avoid losing the lead.
By using this type of goal you gain a deeper understanding of user behaviour and can optimise your website flow based on reliable data.
They allow you to go beyond the standard confines of custom conversions and delve into the nuances of your audience, unlocking valuable insights that can drive significant improvements in your website's performance and your overall business goals.
Insider Tip
One common mistake many ads & analytics users make is setting up tracking in the advertising platform but failing to replicate this in Google Analytics. Without this mirrored tracking, you lose a crucial check point for troubleshooting and analysis.
This duplication not only helps validate your results but also makes it easier to spot discrepancies, understand how different platforms attribute & solve tracking issues.
For example, Meta's attribution framework means that their in platform tracking usually over inflates what ads are actually doing, whereas Google Analytics uses a more holistic attribution model and can be used to solve discrepancies and get a real view of Meta performance, giving you more confidence in your data and helping you make smarter, data-driven decisions.
Conclusion
While tracking the big conversions is key, understanding your audience's journey is equally as important. By delving deeper into how they interact with your website – what captivates them, where they hesitate, and what makes them click – you uncover valuable insights to personalise their experience, optimise for engagement, and ultimately, guide them effortlessly towards conversion!
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