Based on what is important to you, create a list of the goals for your site. Keep in mind there are only 4 slots for separate goals and that goals are intended to help you watch key areas of interest, not your whole site. It is much better to concentrate on the few really important variables then many trivial variables.
To Set Up Goals in Google Analytics:
- Log in to your Google Analytics account, and go to the Analytics Settings page. This is the first page you go to once you have logged in.
- Click ‘Edit’ under settings. This will send you to a Profile Settings page, and then click ‘edit’ for the goals.
- In the ‘Goal Settings’ page you put the URL of your goal page in the top box. If you had an e-commerce site and your goal was to sell products, then your goal page would be the ‘Thank you’ page your site displays after somebody has successfully checked out.
- Name the goal page in the second box. This is what the page will show up as in other reports. You might want to call this page ‘Registration Confirmation’ or ‘Checkout Complete’.
- You then fill in the steps leading up to your goal page. This might be product category, product page, checkout cart, and receipt page.
- Set the goal value at the bottom of the page. For example, if an average successful sale is worth $500, and 1 in 10 submitted lead generation forms becomes a customer, then the worth of the submitted form is $50 ($500 / 10 people).
Now that you have figured out what is important, created a list of goals, and determined what will qualify as success, you are now ready to choose the reports in Google Analytics that will help you achieve your goals! For more help on how to set up goals, see Google’s help article “How do I set up goals?”.
