Goals
One of the most important things you can to maximize the potential of your Google Analytics profile is to set ups goals for your site (Logren, 2012). Setting goals is all about tracking conversions. And as Lars Logren puts it, “Conversions pay the bills” (2012).
Goals are essential to tracking the success of a site. There are four types of goals available in Google Analytics: the URL destination goal, the time on site goal, the pages per visit goal, and the event goal (Google Analytics IQ, 2011). Each of these goals can be used for tracking a specific type of conversion. For this blog, I’ve chosen to set up two types of goals for Adventures in Web Analytics: a URL destination goal and a time on site goal.
I’ll start with the time on site goal since it is relatively straightforward. The time on site goal might be very useful to a site like this blog where the bulk of user interaction comes from spending time on the site reading posts. If a visitor remains on the site for a certain amount of time I can assume that they are interacting with the content I’ve created. With this in mind I could set time on site goal to be reached after a visitor has spent five minutes on the site.
Another goal I’ve chosen to set for this blog is to track when a visitor views an individual post independent of the blog home page. I’ve done this by setting up a URL destination goal with a goal URL that accounts a visit to any post made in 2012 by setting the URL to ^/2012/.* with a regular expression match type (Figure 1). I realize that this will only work for the current year’s posts, but as of right now this seems like the simplest way to capture a view on an individual post beyond the home page.
Figure 1. Setting up a URL Destination goal to track the view of any individual post from 2012.
Funnels The URL destination goal provide a good segue into the concept of funnels. Funnels allow you to define a step-by-step progression through your site that leads up to your specified conversion goal (Google Analytics IQ, 2011). There isn’t a need to setup a funnel on a time on site goal, but a URL destination goal is a perfect place to do this because the destination URL could be a confirmation or thank you page that results from the completion of a sale or an email subscription.
Setting up funnels allows you to see how visitors are progressing through your site, and where exactly they might be exiting the funnel (Google Analytics IQ, 2011). For instance, you might find that 50 percent of your visitors exit your site after step 2 of 6, but that less than 10 percent exit if they make it through step 2. It would stand to reason then that you should find a way to improve step 2 to reduce the exit rate.
On my blog, I’ve set up a simple funnel along with my URL destination goal for a visit to an individual blog post (Figure 1). You can see that the funnel only has two steps. The first is a visit to the homepage and the second a visit to an individual post. This is nothing to complex. However, by setting up a funnel, I’ll be putting myself in a position to better analyze how visitors are interacting with my site and whether it’s a way I’ve intended for them to interact with it our not.
Funnels are much more powerful than I’ve made them seem with this example. The best execution of a funnel will have more steps and a conversion goal with a set value (Google Analytics IQ, 2011). This is something that I haven’t institute on my blog as of yet.
Filters
The final feature of Google Analytics that I’ll explore is filters. Filters allow you to do exactly what the name implies. They allow you as the account owner to set parameters on what data is displayed in a specific profile and how exactly it is displayed (Google Analytics IQ, 2011). With filters properly implemented you can do things like exclude internal traffic to your website, thus eliminating an inflation of metrics by your own employees. You can also change the way data is displayed so that you can more easily read your reports (Google Analytics IQ, 2011).
Before you implement any filters on your site, it is absolutely crucial that you set up a separate profile that maintains the raw data collected from your site. Once you apply a set of filters to one of your profiles, you are unable to go back and recapture that raw data after it’s been processed (Google Analytics IQ, 2011). Lars Logren even recommends setting up one further additional profile to test out new goals and filters without risking the integrity of your main profile(s) (Logren, 2012).
Needless to say, my first step in setting up a filter for my blog was not setting up the filter itself, but actually setting up an additional profile for the raw data. With this second profile in place I proceeded to set up a filter to exclude any traffic from my own IP address (Figure 2).
This simple filter of internal traffic should be the first filter you setup, especially with a blog. It is likely that you will visit your own blog over and over again, thus inflating your metrics. By excluding your own traffic, you can make sure that you get the most accurate portrayal of traffic to your site.
Figure 2. Filter setup to exclude traffic from my local IP address.
References
Google Analytics IQ. (2011). Google analytics IQ lessons. Retrieved June 20, 2012 from http://www.google.com/analytics/iq.html
Lofgren, L. (2012, April 2). The 8 Google Analytics features every site must have enable. Retrieved July 2, 2012 from http://blog.kissmetrics.com/8-google-analytics-features/
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