What Goal Type Are You?

Talking about goals is an old topic in the world of analytics but one worth repeating. Enabling goals is one of the best ways to assess how well your site meets its business objectives. The hardest part for most website owners always seems to be identifying what goal type to use. A goal can be any activity on your website that’s important to the success of your business.  An account signup or request for a sales call are two examples of a goal. No website is immune from setting up a goal, especially if you would like to: 

1. Understand how much time visitors stay or, more importantly, do not stay on your site.

2. Try to minimize the amount of time people spend on a specific section of your site (ex. support section)

3. Move visitors from one time-based goal to the next (i.e. from 2 to 5 minutes, 5 to 10 minutes, etc.)

Every website should have at least one goal, especially now since Google Analytics allows for up to 20 goals.  Let's take a look at the different variations of goals to choose from. 

Time Based Goals

Time based goals can be set if you would like to measure a specific amount of time a visitor has spent on your website. Simply edit the goal by entering in the hours, minutes and seconds that you would like a visitor to spend on your site before a goal is counted. You can even track a time based goal if a visitor does not reach a certain period of time on your site simply by setting the condition to "less than". 

Pageview Based Goals

This is similar to time based goals except you are tracking goals when a visitor exceeds (or doesn't exceed) a certain number of pages. The same conditions apply, meaning greater than or less than and the number of pageviews you would like to set up as a goal for each visitor.

URL Destination Goals

Identifying a specific URL destination has alway been the traditional method of tracking goals in Google Analytics. To define a goal in Google Analytics, you specify the page that visitors see once they have completed the activity. For an account sign-up, you might set the “Thank You for signing up” page as a goal. For this type of goal, you can even enable a funnel to see where visitors have dropped off in the process. The trick here is determining the type of "match" for your URL. Google has three to choose from. I recommend visiting the following URL for more information on match types - http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en_US&answer=72285&utm_id=ad

Downloads

This is a variation from the other three goals but worth mentioning as many sites have downloadable files. The beauty of setting a download as a goal is that you can assign a value, just like the other three goals mentioned. The only difference being is that file downloads can occur multiple times during one visitor session whereas any other type of goal can only happen once during a visit. So, for example, if a visitor comes to your site and downloads 5 PDF files during a single session, and each file is worth, say, $5, then you would accumulate 5 transactions totaling $25.

Setting goals is not a difficult process but rather a thought process. With that said, keep the below points in mind and you will be on your way to successful tracking. 

• Consider organizing goals by function (i.e. by time, download, etc.)
• A visitor can only convert at each goal once per visit.  
• If you have multiple goals then consider consolidating into one profile in order view them all in one interface
• Creating new goals will not modify your historical data, only future data
• Add a value for each goal

Is Event Tracking One of Your New Year's Resolutions?

It's a new year and a fresh start. For some, that means resolutions and goals for 2010. Okay. I realize that dropping a few pounds and not smoking are ideal resolutions but what about goals for your website? To me, setting up a goal would be just as easy as not touching that piece of chocolate cake.

The process of establishing website goals begins with identifying and then tracking specific events on your website. Alas, most analytics programs, Google specifically, give us the ability to track a wide variety of events visitors take on websites and then act on those results to improve upon your website's performance.

The first of the two-step process begins with you, the site owner, asking questions in order to determine what event it is you would like to track. For example, if you have an e-commerce site then you would probably want to know how many sales were  generated last week or last month. That seems obvious. But, have you ever wondered how many people are clicking on Product A on the products page? For non-e-commerce related sites, you might ask yourself whether people are opting-in your recurring e-newsletter or downloading the latest e-newletter in PDF format.

Event tracking really depends on the specific goals and needs of your site, and what you want to track. Nonetheless, you should be tracking some type of event because when a visitor interacts with a video player or game on your website, no pageview is generated, thus making it difficult to measure.

Here are some common events that are tracked that do not generate pageviews:

• Clicks on links that take the visitor to another site
• Clicks on an image or button (ex. Facebook icon or ‘shop now’ button)
• Banner Ad clicks
• File downloads (ex. PDF)
• Page widgets
• E-commerce activity/shopping cart purchases
• Member functions (ex. tracking new member sign-ups, log-ins, etc.)
• Flash, Ajax and Javascript related contentPlay button on a video or audio

Tracking specific events, the second part of the process, is relatively easy. If you are using Google Analytics, then all you need to do is call the _trackEvent() method each time you want to register an event such as how many clicks to an external link or video downloads.  For example, if you want to track how many people clicked on the "follow us" Twitter icon/link on your web page then the code would look something like this:

onclick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Home', 'Follow', 'Twitter');" href="http://www.twitter.com/companyname">

The "Home", "Follow" and "Twitter" identifiers represent the category, action and label so you can view the specific results for this event right in your Analytics account. It's really that simple. For more information on setting up event tracking in Google Analytics visit:  http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html

Remember, event tracking is there to help improve your overall online sales and marketing goals and allow you to have a better understanding of your visitors' actions. Now, isn't this a resolution worth sticking with?

Web Site Success Comes With Goals, Not Design

It's amazing there are still business owners who just don't understand the fundamentals of owning a web site. With all the buzz about technology and social media, the primary focus always appears to be on web design. True, web design is important. Especially when it comes to branding. But good web site design and layout is not rocket science given the plethora of open source solutions and software available on the Internet.

Truth be told, the success of any web site will depend on more than just design. Besides, just having a web site isn't good enough anymore. If a business is spending money on a web site, shouldn't there be some talk about a return on investment? With no cookie cutter approach to count on, we can take a look at some guidelines for establishing goals to measure that return.

• Before you even start the design and development of your web site, ask what you want to accomplish with your web site and what type of desired result you seek not only for you but also for your visitors. 

• Describe what you want to accomplish with as much clarity and detail as possible. If your goal is to provide information to the public or generate product brand awareness, don't just state that. Write down exactly how you are going to provide information or generate product awareness. You should also state exactly how and when you will evaluate your progress.

• Break your web site goal(s) into smaller, obtainable minor goals. For example, if you sell multiple products organized in multiple categories, then establish a goal for each category or each product web page. This will help identify areas of strengths and weaknesses on your way to evaluating your overall web site goal. 

• Establish goals you know you are actually capable of obtaining. If the goal is to generate new leads but you get very little site traffic, then set your sites low. Be realistic. It's better to reach your goal regardless of how small than to not reach it at all. That will allow you to better determine what works or doesn't work. 

• Set goals by time and/or importance into specified target dates. For example, if you are trying to sell products for the holiday season or communicating the latest product or service information to customers, then make sure you note your start and completion dates.

• If your goal is to obtain new web site visitors and customers, then your site should be centered around the relevant keywords that new customers would use to search for your site. 

Whether it's increasing traffic, converting customers or just simply sharing information, having clear, established goals and objectives will prevent you from performing unnecessary analysis. It will also help you better understand your web site's successes and failures and allow you fix and improve your web site. Otherwise, you will never be satisfied with the results regardless of the design.