How to Set up Goals in Google Analytics and Track Conversions?

Your website visitors will take many different actions on your website depending on their choice.

Your prospects might submit the contact forms, subscribe to newsletters, submitting the lead form, sending a chat message, purchase a product, and do many more.

All of these actions are nothing but conversions.

You will have to focus more on sources and channels that are driving more leads and prospects for your business.

This is where things like conversion tracking come into the picture.

You can easily set up goals in google analytics and track conversions effectively through your google analytics account.

What are the goals of Google analytics?

Goals are actually the main actions and events performed by your website visitors.

Any type of business will have a  primary goal.

For example, the goal of the e-commerce business would be to get more online product sales.

Similarly, a B2B brand will have lead generation as its main primary goal.

For a beginner who is starting a blog, the goal might be to get more subscribers for the personal brand.

The Google Analytics platform can be used to accurately track all the leads, conversions, events, and actions that happen on a website at any time.

It helps you to do real-time conversion tracking for your website.

When you set up goals in google analytics you will be in a much better position to determining the exact path taken by your prospects to connect with you.

In simple terms, you can easily determine the sources and channels which are giving the highest number of leads and conversions for your business.

You could also get some useful additional data like conversion value, location, and other traits of the audience who performed the action (conversion), etc.

Steps to Set up Goals in Google Analytics

You will now practically understand to set up goals in google analytics.

Login to your Google Analytics account and navigate to the admin section.

Under Views, Select the Goals option in the third column.

Next Click on New Goal Button.

Select Your Goal template.

This could be any type depending on the action which you wish to track.

There are three types of templates

• Inquiries – If you want to track the inquiries of your website visitors or contact form submission then choose the inquiries option.
• Revenue – Or if you are an e-commerce business and want to track purchases and order then choose revenue template.
• Acquisition – To track the account signups on your website you can choose the acquisition template.

You will also have the option to choose a custom template.

After choosing the suitable template click on the continue button at the bottom.

Next, Enter the name of your Goal.

The choose the Type of your Goal.

Generally, we choose a thank you page URL as the final destination of our Goal in many cases like tracking lead submission, purchase order, etc.

If you think it is suitable then you can also choose the Goal Type as “Destination”.

The audience must be redirected to the thank you page after they finish submitting the form or after placing the order. They should be able to view the Thank you page.

You must add the thank you page URL correctly as the destination path for your goal.

Tracking other Type of Goals

If you want to track other types of Goals like Page duration of the audience session then you can choose “Duration” as the Goal type.

You could also track the number of page loads per session and video views as well.

For example, if your goal is to make your audience view four pages to achieve a conversion then you can select the Goal type as “Pages/ Screens per session”.

Next, choose the Goal details option.

Here you will actually be providing the inputs manually to track & set up goals in google analytics.

You will be asked to enter the final destination URL properly in the field.

For example, in my case, I have just easily entered the thank you page URL path correctly as in the required field.

You can choose to set a value for your Goal. This will be helpful in case if you are earning any revenue from your Goals.

After entering all the Goal details you can select the verify goal option.

This will help you to test and see if your goals are working properly and actively.

Click on Save Goal.

Set up the Goals in Google Analytics and Manage it

You can easily manage all your Goals. 

All the Goals that you create in your analytics account will be visible in the Goals section itself.

Depending on your requirements you can turn on or turn off your goals.

Remember that in one analytics account you can create only a limited number of goals around 15.

How to track the conversions and view the reports

To track your goals you will need to first navigate into the conversion section on the left side of your dashboard.

Choose the Goals option under conversion.

Click on the overview.

Choose Goal completions and select the Goal which you want to track.

You will now be able to view all the completed goals and the corresponding URL path or location as well.

For example, in my dashboard, you could see that there were 19 goal completions. It suggests that 11 conversions were recorded or tracked with the thank you page URL and 8 conversions had happened using the contact form.

Landing Page conversion report

You could also analyze which particular landing pages of your website are driving more conversions.

You can check the conversion report for each and every landing page.

Just navigate to the acquisition reports and choose the landing page as the dimension. This will easily give you the landing page conversion reports.

Tracking conversions across various dimensions

Also, by using Google analytics you can get breakdown reports of your conversion metrics across various dimensions.

For example, you can choose the dimension as the city and get the conversion report for every particular city from which your site got traffic.

Similarly, you could track and view the conversion report for devices, country, browsers used by the audience, etc.

Conclusion:

Properly setting up goals and tracking them will help you get clarity about the traffic sources and landing pages that are actually giving you the desired results.

You can craft your marketing strategy to get more conversions by tracking the conversion reports in Google analytics.

I hope you got some great information about setting up goals and tracking them in Google analytics.

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