How to set up goal conversions in Google Analytics

You’ve set up Google Analytics on your site. The data is starting to flow in. So now what? 

Many people make the mistake of adding tracking code to the site and thinking that all the data they need will end up in Google Analytics. 

Sadly this is rarely the case. Google Analytics is an amazing bit of software but it’s not a mind reader.  

Once Google Analytics is set up, you’ll be able to see traffic and bounce rates, but you won’t be able to see leads, for example. In fact, you could be missing out on a ton of valuable data if you don’t take additional steps. 

Every business is different and you will inevitably need to measure different things.  So you need to tell it what you’re looking to measure. And this is where conversion goals come in.

Apologies to the football fans amongst you, but these goals have got nothing to do with football. A conversion goal is essentially confirmation that your objective has been achieved. So you need to think about the kinds of behaviours you want users to complete on your site. 

So an example could be: “I want users to reach my contact page”.

If you configure a goal to fire on your contact page, then it will fire when someone reaches your contact page and your objective is met

Anything that you can track in Google Analytics can be turned into a goal. For example: 

• Sales
• Newsletter signups
• View of content
• Link clicks
• Social shares
• Video views
• Scrolls
• mailto link clicks
• Livechat conversation

A good set of conversion goals would match well with your website objectives and business objectives. For example, there’s no point in setting up an outbound link click goal if you want people to stay on your site.

Setting up goals allows you to track conversion rates. Your conversion rate tells you how good your marketing is at getting people to do what you want them to do. This allows you to monitor your effectiveness as a marketer and optimise accordingly, this is also known as Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) by marketers. 

You can then analyse which devices and audiences or locations are resulting in the most conversions, and start to understand where opportunities lie. This can help you with allocating budgets and resources to things that are working and de-prioritising approaches that are less effective.

There is no ideal number. It completely depends on your business. 

E-commerce businesses might want to track lots of different goals. It could be adding an item to a cart, viewing cart, or completing transactions, for example. The goals could depend on your customer journeys or the number of products you sell, for example. 

 

Do I have the right data to set up a good conversion goal?

If you have just installed the basic Google Analytics tracking code then it’s likely that you will need some more specific tracking to power your conversion goals.

 

What is a good goal conversion rate for Google Analytics?

There is no “good” goal conversion rate, this is because some goals are more likely to be achieved than others. For example, it’s more likely that someone will click a link on a page than that they will buy a £100 T-shirt, so it’s all relative. 

 

How do I set up goal conversion in Google Analytics?

To set up goals in Google Analytics you need to identify where conversions happen on your site, is there a thankyou page URL that represents the end of a key journey? If so, you could use this in a destination goal, if not then you’ll need to set up some event tracking to get the data you need to create a goal.

Find out how to create goals in Google Analytics 4 here.

What is event tracking?

Event Tracking is a is way of recording visitor interactions with your website. You can set up event tracking manually on each element of your site (this is the old skool method) or use Google Tag Manager to automate your event tracking.

 

Why would you assign a monetary value such as $250 to a goal?

If you have a conversion on your site that isn’t a traditional monetary value (in other words, a completed transaction amount or sale) then you can assign a monetary value to it. This monetary value can be based on how valuable that conversion is to your business. This can help you to understand ROI of your marketing activity where there wouldn’t otherwise be a clear value to use in your calculation.

For example, if you knew that for every ten contact forms submitted you would get one sale in your pipeline, then you could set your goal value for a contact form submission to a tenth of your average sale value. 

Want to learn more about how you can set up accurate goal conversions on Google Analytics? Go here