Greetings Web Africans!
Who doesn’t want their website to perform better? If you’re new to these Google Analytics posts, please be sure to read my previous posts on an Introduction to Google Analytics and Installing Google Analytics. Once you’ve got those covered, we can move ahead and look at something more interesting.
Too many people are focused on how many people are coming to their website or how long these people are spending on their website, but are these matters really important? Not really. Huh? Well, think about it, it doesn’t really matter if you have a million people coming to your website but nobody is buying anything or making an enquiry. Imagine having a million people walk into your physical store in a shopping centre, but nobody buys anything. You could brag about having a huge amount of foot traffic, but that’s not going to pay the bills or grow your business! I see the light bulb above your head – fabulous. Let’s solve this problem, let’s talk about goals.
A goal is a tracked action performed by a visitor to your website. This action may be a purchase, it may be a sign up to a newsletter, a file download, an account creation or the completion of an enquiry form. The action is your choice, you need to sit down with a pen and paper and decide what action you want a person on your website to take. Once you’ve done that, you can track these actions and that will provide you with an incredibly useful metric to measure the actual success of your website.
To access goals in Google Analytics, you nee to log into your account and click on the “Admin” button, top-right on the bright orange bar. Following this, look on the right for “Goals” with a little flag next to it and give it a click. Finally click on the “CREATE A GOAL” button and you’ll be presented with this:
Navigate your way to creating a new goal.
That’s it! Each time someone completes your enquiry form you’ll track this action.
Using this information as business intelligence is another whole topic on its own and we can visit that in the future. But, for now, if you want to view the goals you simple log into Google Analytics, click on “Conversions” on the left and then click on “Overview” under Goals. You’ll have to explore and click around a little to become familiar with it – once you are, you’ll see the huge benefit!
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