Utilising Goal Tracking in Google Analytics

Small businesses need to save money. and one way they can do this is by understanding where their marketing spend goes. This is done through analytics goal tracking using Google.

By doing this, you can save that 50% of that marketing spend as often seen as wasted by most marketing professionals, and the way you can start off by doing this is understanding what your main goals and objectives will be from a marketing campaign. The reason we need to understand this before setting up goal tracking is because if you can imagine you’re there, you set up a whole marketing campaign and you suddenly realise that the thing you’re tracking has nothing to do with the marketing campaign and the successes you want to get from that.

So what we need to do first of all is to have a look at the overall marketing aim of the marketing campaign that you’re going to be putting forward. Once we have done that, we have to sort of look at how we can track this effectively using goal tracking technology, like the stuff in Google Analytics.

The reason this is so successful for small businesses is, obviously, because it’s free, and the three main benefits you get from this is that it will save your money, you can uncover marketing successes, and you can improve your marketing spend by using effective goal tracking to understand where your successes are coming from your marketing campaign.

Firstly, we’re going to look at the way you can track goals through destination URLs, and this simply involves tracking which pages are reached by users on your website. This can be done by simply finding a contact form success page that can track simple things like contact successes and then you can also look at the duration that people are on site.

This is where it sort of gets a little bit more technical. When you’re looking at duration, you want to ideally work out how long people have been on your site and how that can affect your bottom line. If you can imagine you’re a working to achieve sort of a great engagement with the audience, what you want there is a longer time on site, and you want to see that the visitors you’re getting to your site are highly relevant. This is perfect for duration tracking because you’re basically checking out exactly how long they’re going to be on site, and you can choose what sort of length, for instance seconds, minutes, or even hours that people will spend on your site and class that as a goal.

You can also track the number of pages they’re looking for. Again, this is quite similar in duration tracking. It can really help identify the amount of engagement, again, we’re having with the audience and how many pages they’re looking for.

Most people won’t come to your site straight away and go through the simple process of buying something, especially if you’re new business to them. They really want to know what you can provide and how trustworthy your business is. So this a good idea for pages. If they’re interested in your product, they’ll be desperate to see more about your business before buying.

And then again, moving on, there is also event tracking for goal tracking technology, and with event tracking, that can go down to such a micro scale, you can identify exactly where people are clicking on your site. For instance, if you’re looking to track a particular call to action and seeing the success of a button on your website, you can use event tracking, add a very simple code to it, and then you can track every sort of event that is triggered. Again, this helps with A/B testing and making sure your website is performing as you’re hoping for.

Again, the benefits of doing all of this is massively effective for your business. You can completely change the way you analyse marketing campaigns. The analysis is much clearer, the data is much more focused, and again it all turns back into that aim. If you’re not tracking the right goals, you’re not going to be achieving anything from goal tracking. But if you can work out the contact forms will directly relate to a success either in profits or a success in brand building, you can pretty much do anything you want with your website to work out how you are succeeding and doing this.

Again, if you want to know the full details of how to set this up from a technical point of view, you can go to the Koozai blog. We have many posts on there that sort of fill things out and what you need to include.