We all share the mutual goal of getting traffic to our website. But what do you want to come of this traffic? You want action!!! You want this traffic to buy a product, join a mailing list, request more information, and complete a contact form, of course.
Wouldn’t you like to know how these actions are coming about? What part of your wonderfully user-friendly, well optimized website is inducing these actions to be completed?
Here’s where goal configurations come in. Many people are using Google Analytics on their site, however they are not taking advantage of the goal configuration component. The concept is straightforward – capturing when and how a visitor to your website is completing a stated action. This is especially important if you are selling something on your site, because this is how you will determine your return on investment.
Now I’m going to skip over the Google Analytics basics (If you need to brush up on the basics, check out Google’s online tutorial) and take you straight though to the goals process. In the main Dashboard, click on the Edit link at the right and you will come to the Conversion Goals and Funnels screen.
Google allows you to define 4 goals. This is a great restriction, because if you have more than 4 actions that you want your visitors to complete, well then your website is a big unfocused confusing mess. In my experience, I never really configured more than 2 or 3 goals anyway.
What you need to do is:
1. Activate the Goal.
2. Put in the match type (this will be different for a static site and a dynamic site). An EXACT match means that the Goal URL you enter is exactly as it will appear on the site. A HEAD match means that you have a dynamic site, so the goal URL will be different every time - except the beginning, or HEAD of the URL will be the same. Just the end part will be different.
www.yourwebsite.com/?Session_ID=9a0f0559368fb1a39dac93b3b50ace50& would be an example of when you put in HEAD match. There is another option called REGULAR EXPRESSION MATCH, which I discuss below.
3. Enter the Goal URL. This is the page that visitors reach AFTER clicking the submit/purchase/join button. For example, your Goal URL might be: www.yourwebsite.com/thanks.
4. Name your goal: Contact Form. Mailing List. Download. Inquiry. Lead.
5. Set a goal value. If you are not selling something that has a fixed value, you can leave this blank. But perhaps your lead is worth $500 to you. You can put that number in here.
Now you are done setting up goals.
One thing I want to mention is the importance of having separate Goal URL pages. Say a visitor submits a contact form on your site. After he clicks the submit button, is he taken to a brand new page that says “thank you for your inquiry/comment/request”? Or, do the words “thank you” simply appear on the screen, on the same page you were on before?
If you do not have a separate THANK YOU page, create one or have your developer create one immediately. Otherwise, the goal configuration is not going to work.
Say you have more than one action to complete on your site. Take a look at the screenshot below.
In this example, we have a simple contact form, and then we also have an appointment request form. You want to make sure that the “thank you” URLs are different from each other, because otherwise, Google Analytics will not be able to tell which goal is being completed. So just make sure you have two (or three or four) separate Goal URL pages. They can look like this:
- www.yourwebsite.com/thanks1
- www.yourwebsite.com/thanks2
- www.yourwebsite.com/thanks3
or
- www.yourwebsite.com/contact-thanks
- www.yourwebsite.com/appt-thanks
- www.yourwebsite.com/signup-thanks
As long as you distinguish one from the other.
Now on to Goal Funnels. This is where you establish each step your visitor must take to ultimately achieve his goal.
Let’s determine the possible steps of purchasing a pair of shoes online.
1. After you find the shoes you like, you Add to Cart. (www.yourwebsite.com/add-to-cart)
2. You are done shopping, so you want to Checkout. (www.yourwebsite.com/checkout)
3. You will be asked for your Customer Information. (www.yourwebsite.com/customer)
4. Then, you will be asked for your Credit Card Information. (www.yourwebsite.com/credit-card)
5. You will choose a Shipping method. (www.yourwebsite.com/shipping)
6. Review Your Order. (www.yourwebsite.com/review)
7. Complete Purchase. (www.yourwebsite.com/THANK-YOU), where this last URL is your GOAL URL.
The above are just examples and of course vary based on the type of website you have. Below is an example of a funnel, where all of the checkout information is on one page of the site, so of course you see only two steps.
That’s it as far as the set up process goes. It’s very important to establish a funnel if you are selling something on your site. It is not uncommon for visitors to abandon shopping carts in the middle of the checkout process. Don’t you want to know when this is happening, so you can figure out why? Maybe many visitors leave at the Shipping method page. Guess what - that sounds like your shipping rates are too high or you don’t offer enough shipping options.
A few months ago, I was contracted to implement SEO on an e-commerce site run on Miva Merchant. When it came to configuring the Analytics, we had quite the challenge. Whoever had set up the site had incorrectly installed and configured Analytics the old fashioned way - cut and paste the snippet of code, and sloppily defined some goals. However, the actual sales reports were clearly not matching the data recorded in Analytics - the numbers were way off. So we did some detective work, went through the entire buying process on the site to determine the various steps and URLs in the funnel.
As it turned out, each URL during each step of Miva Merchant’s checkout process was the same. We learned that goal configuration for a Miva Merchant Site is clearly a different process than it is for a regular site, and we had to contract a Miva specialist to help us out. In fact, even a different Analytics tracking code was necessary to install in the site-wide footer.
Take a look at the screen shot below to see how we had to set this up. We could not use HEAD match in this instant, because of the nature of the URLs generated through the Miva CMS. So we had to use REGULAR EXPRESSION match.
After this was properly set up, the data recorded began to accurately reflect the products sold.
There are several metrics to measure an SEO campaign. It’s important to identify your KPI’s (key performance indicators) before you start working on a client site. Sometimes, the only metric that’s important to the client is keyword rankings. But clients are becoming more and more sophisticated. They want to see multiple metrics measured to determine the value of SEO. 
