Guide To Creating Goals and Filters In Google Analytics
The benefits of Google Analytics are unquestionable — it’s the most popular tool for tracking the detailed statistics of your website users’ behavior. It helps you understand their preferences and adjust your content strategy and marketing campaign accordingly.
The fact that it is a popular tool doesn’t mean everyone knows to to make maximum use of it, though. Let’s look into the things Google Analytics has to offer and dwell on a couple of them: Goals and Filters.
Goals are meant to show you the success or failure of certain visitors’ actions on your website and filters help you to filter out the data you monitor. Let’s go into more details.
What Are Goals in Google Analytics?
Goals in Google Analytics measure how often users complete specific actions.Goals show how well your site fulfills its purpose, how visitors are using your site and whether they take action on the items you are trying to get them to interact with. Goal contributes to the success of your business a lot, because it provides critical information, such as the number of conversions and the conversion rate for your site. This information allows to evaluate the effectiveness of your online business and marketing campaigns. Goals can be set up in a few different ways, all of which are found in the admin panel.
Types of goals in Google Analytics
There are four types of goals In Google Analytics:
- Destination
- Duration
- Pages/Visit
- Events
The first one is Destination. This goal shows whether a user has reached a specific page — for example, the order confirmation page: site.com/confirm_order. This goal can also lets you track the sequence of steps the user has taken on his way to this desired page (for example, added a product to cart — site.com/add_to_cart, visited the cart page — site.com/cart). By knowing at what point a potential buyer interrupted the buying process, you can understand what difficulties he faced, and make improvements accordingly.
The goal for keeping someone on your site for a certain amount of time is called Duration. Suppose you have a page with blog posts and people often visit these pages but may not read it. You can trace this, and know whether they read it or not. Set a goal for how long you think it would take to read an article, and use that to see if people are staying on the page long enough to meet that goal and make that association.
Now, let’s proceed to Pages/Screens Per Session goal. With the help of this goal, you can analyze how many pages visitors view on your web-resource. This goal can collaborate with the previous ones. A combination of Duration and Pages/Screens Per Session will showcase you if your content has a good quality, and how users are involved with your web-page.
Event goals allows you to get into the details. To be more specific, it lets you to track user’s interaction with almost every element on your resource. If you know all their clicks on the site (a form, a banner, etc.), it will let you understand at what point your potential customer leaves the site, analyze the reasons for this and make appropriate corrections.
How to create a goal in Google Analytics
In the admin panel of your Google Analytics account, select Goals, click Create a New Goal, then go to its Settings.
For example, you can create a special goal for which you can set the details: give it name, select its type (e.g. Duration), then choose other parameters (e.g. the time) that make this goal accomplished.
Enter the name of a goal and choose type of goal
Set up a goal details in Google Analytics and enter 'Save'.
About Filters In Google Analytics
Filters in Google Analytics are very important for any site, because they can track information only desired users. For example, you can filter out internal IP-addresses or traffic from your city. This will help you to control only those views that are useful for your company.
How to create a filter in Google Analytics
To create a filter in Google Analytics account administration panel, click "Filters". Create a new filter and set your preferences.
Conclusion
Make the most of Google Analytics and let it be your assistant. And if you need any help with Google Analytics or SEO optimization of your website, Drudesk is always there for you!