Where to Place Goals on your Site and How to set them up using Google Analytics

What we hear time and again (and is fact) – is it wise to invest in SEO and gain the top position of Google when users find it difficult to use your website and leave before completing a Goal (or an order in the real world)?

Goals are an important part of any SEO campaign. A site can be at the top of the search engines for their keywords, but if this does not result in conversions, e.g. the purchasing of products or more requests for services via contact forms, then the benefits of being at the top of the search engines are not being reaped.

What is a Goal?

This goal will allow you to track how many customers have contacted you via your online contact form.

Follow Ahmed – twitter.com/topnotchseo

In my opinion, the above goals should be implemented right from the outset when a site is launched and if that time has passed then as soon as possible. You may just be investing in SEO and it could be 6 months to reached page one of Google, however the sooner you find your websites weak points, the quicker you can fix them so by the time you reach page one and hopefully position, you make the most from each and every visit.

With the use of Google Analytics these factors can be tracked and measured. This post aims to give you examples of the most common areas where goals can be added to sites and gives you a step by step guide of how to set them up using Analytics.

Implementation:

• Once logged into Analytics you will see the “overview page” for the site.
• Select “Edit” under the actions column
• Navigate to Goal (set 1) and give the goal a name e.g. Contact form
• Set the Goal type to be “URL Destination”
• In the Goal URL enter the address of the thank you page e.g. /thankyou.html
• Give the goal a value of 1.0

For this reason rankings must go hand in hand with many other conversion factors. A good SEO campaign will look into a wide variety of issues such as usability to try and decrease bounce rate and make it easier for visitors to use the site and purchase its products or services.

In 2009, econsultancy researched the following:

Search Engine Optimisation isn’t all about rankings. Of course they are important, but there are other factors to consider such as the conversion rate of your website and for e-commerce sites, success will ultimately be measured by the amount of revenue made.

• Once logged into Analytics you will see the “overview page” for the site.
• On this page select “Add new profile”
• On the profile page select “Add a Profile for an existing domain”
• Give the profile a name E.g. Blog Visits and select “Continue”
• You will be taken back to the overview page from where you will need to edit the new profile
• Go to the “Filters” section of the edit page and select Add filter
• Give the filter a name e.g. Visitors to the blog
• In the filter type select the following, “Include only”, “traffic to the subdirectories”, “that are equal to”
• In the domain text box type /articles/
• Save Changes

Follow Gemma – twitter.com/seofocusuk

• Set up a new profile as explained previously but this time in the filter you will need to do the following
• “Exclude”, “traffic to the subdirectories”, “that are equal to”
• In the domain text box type /articles/
• Save Changes

This goal will allow you to track purchases and the checkout process as part of that purchase. With this goal in place you will be able to see if anyone is dropping out at any point in the checkout process. If this is the case you may want to make the process shorter.

Goal 2 – Visits Via the Blog

“39% of companies are dissatisfied with their online conversion rates, and 47% of companies believe lack of resources is the barrier to this.”

• Create a new goal in the same way as for Goal 1
• Set the goal type to “URL Destination”
• In the Goal URL enter the address of the final page of the checkout process
• Give the goal a value of 1.0
• In the Goal Funnel section select “Yes, create a funnel for this goal”
• Within here enter the URLS for every page of the checkout process
• Save Goal

How useful is the information collected?

Of course, Goal tracking is the first step and can really give you an insight as to if your site requires investment in Conversion Rate Optimisation. Although a first step, it can also bring to light some issues such as those listed above and a small change to how your site works will immediately increase your conversion rate – even if it may be 1%, as you will be aware, could mean thousands of pounds more in profits.

(In order for the goal to work, when the user submits your contact form they should be presented with a thank you page, informing them that their details have been sent). If your site does not already have a thank you page then one will need to be created).

• Discover your website conversion rate
  e.g. orders, enquiry’s, downloads etc.
• Discover where users are dropping out
  e.g. a long registration form
• Find popular blog topics
• etc!

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Implementation:

Ahmed’s View

Before answering this, it’s important to know some of the benefits it will bring:

This goal will allow you to track the number of visitors to your blog rather than the site as a whole

• If you need to invest in CRO
• Major issues on your site
• If position 1 on Google will be profitable without investing in CRO
• Even if your PPC campaign is working (to some extent)

Goal 3 – Checkout Process

Gemma’s View

Now that you have been through the three main Goals and know how to implement them, is it worth the little trouble to go through and implement them onto your website?

Follow Dave – twitter.com/davestopherseo

You can see by now the information collected is very useful and can help you determine:

Next you will need to set up another profile which excludes all the traffic from the blog so you can see what traffic is coming from the main site itself

Implementation:

I believe that using Goals and Funnels within Google Analytics is of high importance to achieve a successful SEO Campaign. These Goals and funnels can direct you in the right way to get more traffic to the correct pages on the website. Also this is brilliant for conversation tracking if you have a ecommerce website.

A goal is an activity that can be tracked on your site. This could be anything from downloading a PDF or purchasing a product. Below are three examples of the most common areas to place goals on site.

Dave’s View

These Goals and funnels overall can help you quickly find and resolve any major issues that could be reducing conversations whatever they may be.

Goal 1 – Contact Form