Setting Up Goals and Events in Google Analytics

One of the main functions of Google Analytics is to track goals to see how your business is performing. In most cases, you will look to set up a goal as a conversion or an actual sale on your website of either a product or service. But you don’t just have to stick to setting up goals as conversions on your site, as there are different types of goals you can set up.

You can also set up a goal for an event and this is something that can prove vitally important to your business. You can actually track all types of interactions as goals so that you can get a lot more information about your business. Our blog guide gives you some information about how to use events as goals in Google Analytics and how your business can benefit.

How to Create Goals

The first thing you will need to know is how to set up a goal in the first place if you already know how to do this then skip to the next section. To set up a goal you will first need to sign into Google Analytics and Click ‘Admin’ at the bottom of the sidebar. You will then see the option for ‘Goals’ where you should navigate to and click the red button for ‘New Goal’. From here you can proceed to create a new goal and you will have 3 options to choose from.

–          Using a goal template

–          Creating custom goals

–          Creating smart goals

You will need to decide what kind of goal you are looking to set up and whether or not there is a template for the goal you want to track. Once you have done this you will be presented with the opportunity to choose a goal type, at which point you should set it up as an event.

What Kind of Events Can I Track?

There is a wide number of events that you can track in goals to better understand the performance of your website. One of the easiest ways to track these events is by using Google Tag Manager, which fires tags in response to events. Some of the events that you can track as goals include;

Clicks on Links; this will mean that a tag is created every time someone clicks on a navigation item, to a buy page for example, that could lead to a conversion

Clicks on Specified Items; this could be something other a traditional link, such as an image, that someone might click on before converting

Time Intervals; this kind of event can be used in the event that you have an embedded video on a page or lengthy content and you want to track how long people stay on the page

Form Submits; you might also want to track how many times people are submitting a form on your website, to track a number of enquiries that you have

Why Use Events in Goals?

Events can be really useful to your business and allow you to track things other than conversions on your website. This can provide useful information and help you to understand people’s conversion paths and the actions they take before converting. You should make sure that you are using events to track visitors that don’t convert through traditional means like lead generation. It will also allow you to track interactions and influencers too to see where your conversions are coming from.

Setting up events in goals on Google Analytics can help you to grow your business and spot where your conversion path actually starts. This allows you to direct traffic to the right places on your website and hopefully improve conversions in the long term. If much of this article went over your head and you don’t know much about Google Analytics, then get in touch with us and we can help you get set up.