The Power of Google Analytics Goal Setting

Clicks don’t sell. That’s one of the phrases that I have heard repeatedly over the past ten years as data continues to help us increase the effectiveness and efficiency of our digital marketing campaigns.

And it’s true. But what is so often forgotten is behind each and every click is a real person who is on your website for a reason (be sure you are filtering out spam traffic, so you know you’re looking at real people within your analytics). Who are they? What are they looking for? How can we help them more easily find and accomplish the shopping behavior that both they and we are working towards?

That’s where setting up goals within your Google Analytics comes into play. Goals are measurements that you can set up to help better measure the behavior of the people behind the clicks. What are the actions that you want your potential buyers to perform on the site? What are the things people are doing that correlate to sales?

Start measuring product page views, form submissions, mobile click-to-call events, chat events, video plays… be sure to ask yourself, “What am I trying to accomplish when someone visits our website?”

Once you start tracking your goals, start to think of these people as your shoppers. One of the best functionalities within Google Analytics is the ability to segment out the people who have accomplished goals from your total site traffic. The data this gives you can help you quickly and dramatically optimize your website’s performance. See the images below and add your segment, then click on the Converters segment. These are the people who completed the goals you have set up.

How many shoppers are coming from each source compared to the total traffic? Pageviews. You may be getting a ton of people looking at your content, but how many of them are becoming shoppers? What can be done to increase that conversion rate? Device type. Cities. Compare your shoppers and your Converters with your site traffic, and continually learn more ways to make it easier for customers to buy from you and build a website that is that much more influential towards making a purchase decision.
Clicks don’t sell, but shoppers buy. Look at some examples below. Is your digital marketing agency using data like this to power your strategy? If not, start asking why… or start finding a data driven marketing partner.

Compare traffic sources.

Compare Pageviews.

Compare Device Types.

Set up goals. Measure behavior. Adapt and optimize. Win.