Introduction
Google
Analytics provides many different metrics about your website visitors. Audience
demographics, behavior and ecommerce information are just some of the useful
metrics available in GA. But what if you need information on a specific event,
like a conversion? Or what if you want to drill further down into your data? Or
what if you need to have more control over segmenting your visitors?
Well Google
Analytics has an answer to these questions, and they are goals, funnels and
filters. All three of these help you to better understand your website
visitors, and they are discussed further below.
Goals
Defining the
goals of a website is one of the best ways to track and measure the effectiveness
of your website. Goals should be tied to your business objectives that the
website is supposed to accomplish, whether that is selling a product or
gathering leads for follow-up sales calls. Goals can be set up in Google
Analytics to track exactly what is important to your business. All websites
should have at least one goal.
In Google
Analytics there are four types of goals that can be created and tracked: 1) a
URL destination goal, 2) a Time on Site goal, 3) a Pages/Visit goal, and 4) an
Event goal (Goals, 2012).
A URL
destination goal triggers a conversion when a visitor views a specified page on
your website after completing a specific activity, like filling out a form, downloading
a whitepaper or purchasing a product (Goals, 2012). As an example, we will use
a company that has a website with the purpose of collecting sales leads. The
main goal for this website should be users filling out the sales call request
form. This goal can be set up by going to the Goals section in Google
Analytics.
Time on site
and pages per visit goals are useful for measuring website engagement. If you
have content website and your objective is to get users to view as much content
as possible, a pages per visit goal would be a good one to track.
There are numerous
metrics that are tracked for each goal that is set up. Number of goal competitions,
goal value in dollars, goal conversion rate and total abandonment rate are all
metrics that are tracked for each goal. The source or medium for each goal
completion is also tracked, along with the goal completion percent for each
source or medium. This enables businesses and marketers to compare the goal
conversion percent for each source and medium that sent traffic that lead to a
goal conversion.
Funnels
For each
goal, you can define a funnel, which is the path you expect your website
visitors to take on their way to completing a goal (Lesson 6, 2012). There is a
report called Reverse Goal Path that can also provide useful information about
your website’s goal conversions. This report shows you how many users converted
from each path. This can help you recognize funnels that you had not previously
considered (Goals, 2012).
Multi-channel
funnels are another type of funnel that shows how different traffic sources
work together to create sales and conversions (About, 2012). I discussed the
multi-channel funnels report last week, including how calculating the Return on
Investment (ROI) of each channel can help you understand which channels are performing
the best.
I also spoke
about the importance of useing the multi-channel funnel report to spot trouble
spots in your business’s conversion funnel. Spotting the point where potential
customers are dropping out of the conversion funnel, and fixing whatever the
problem is, can instantly raise your websites conversion rates. For example, if
a lot of potential customers are dropping off on the page that asks for
shipping information, maybe there is something wrong with that page, or maybe
people think you are charging too much for shipping. Do some tests to find out.
Make a discounted or free over a certain amount spent shipping campaign to see
if that reduces the drop-offs on that page.
Filters
In Google
Analytics, filters allow you increased flexibility with your data by letting
you define what data is included in your report and how it appears. You can use
filters to customize reports so that the most useful data is highlighted. Some popular
uses for filters are removing traffic from internal company sources,
restricting data for a profile or user, segmenting data and customizing data. The
two types of filters are predefined filters and custom filters (Filters, 2012).
There are three
types of predefined filters: 1) exclude traffic from domains, 2) exclude
traffic from the IP addresses, and 3) include only traffic to the
subdirectories (Filters, 2012). As a best practice Google recommends excluding
all website traffic from inside your company because including this internal company
traffic will not give accurate measures of your target market’s website behavior.
Custom filters
offer you greater control of what data appears in your Google Analytics
reports. Exclude, include, lowercase/uppercase, search & replace, and
advanced are all types of custom filters. The exclude and include filters are
the most common filters used, and are often used to segment data by
geographical region (Filters, 2012).
By using
profiles and filters, you can customize your data views. For example, you can
create separate profiles with filters that segment traffic by referring source,
geography or user-defined variable. Google recommends always keeping one
profile with all your data, so that you always have access to all your data. Here
is a visual that shows the example segments created with profiles and filters
(Filters, 2012):
Using filters,
you can set up a profile that only includes traffic sent by Google AdWords. This
will help you to better analyze the website traffic that AdWords is sending
your way. Another custom filter that will help businesses make better decisions
is segmenting by geographic region. For example, say a company has four sales
regions— Northeast, Southeast, Northwest and Southwest, and they need to know website
metrics on each of these regions. Using filters is an effective way to segment
website visitors so that each segment may be analyzed.
References
About
this report. (2012). Multi-Channel Funnels. Google Analytics. Retrieved on
12/3/12 from www.google.com/analytics
Filters
in Google Analytics. (2012). Google Analytics IQ Lessons. Google Analytics.
Retrieved on 12/3/12 from http://www.google.com/analytics/iq.html
Goals
in Google Analytics. (2012). Google Analytics IQ Lessons. Google Analytics. Retrieved
on 12/3/12 from http://www.google.com/analytics/iq.html
Lesson
6. (22 October 2012). P.I. Reed School of Journalism. WVU. Retrieved on 12/2/12
from eCampus.
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