Google Analytics Goal Tracking

So, I’ve been playing around with Google Analytics for awhile now, getting a sense of what’s what. Something that I haven’t really checked out, though, was it’s goal tracking abilities. Basically goals are urls on your site that you designate as special - for example a magazine site may designate the confirmation page of a subscription form as the goal. Then GA tracks when people hit that page and give you some interesting data on that - like where they came in from, what page they were one, how they got to the goal page, etc… It gives you really interesting way to look at the value of your audience beyond simple pageviews.

I was casting about for ideas on what I could use to check out this feature when I realized that there are more or less only two actions people take on this site, commenting and subscribing to my RSS feed. Commenting’s pretty easy for me to see all by myself (although, it might be interesting to see how people who comment arrive on the site) so I decided to go with tracking RSS. A quick search of the analytics helps brings you to the page where they tell you how to track clicks on outbound links (in this case, clicks to my feedburner feed).

That’s the first step - it’s very easy all you need to do is add an onclick attribute to the feedburner links. For example I am using:

<a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/deasil/QfYJ” onClick=”urchinTracker(’/goal/socnet/rnav_mini’)”>

So, I’ve basically invented a url that this will go against - /goal/socnet/rnav_mini. Anytime someone clicks on that link, Google Analytics will record it as a view of that virtual url. I decided that since there were a few places one could subscribe to my rss feeds, I’d create a few different url’s to see how effective each one was. After all the goal of goals is to measure what’s working so you can drop stuff that isn’t and focus on what is. So I made all the little bugs (including digg, delicious, etc..) in the right nav trigger the rnav_mini url. Then at the bottom of each post, all the little social networking links trigger post_mini and the big rss icon triggers post_big.

Once you’ve got that set up and your links triggering GA all you have to do is set up your goals. Couldn’t be easier, log into your GA account and at the main page (the one that has the table called “Website Profiles” - if you don’t see that table and are in an actual profile with graphs click on the “analytics settings” link at the top left of the page in the orange bar). Then click the “edit” link under the “Settings” column.

There you’ll see your four goal spots, G1 - G4. Click the “Edit” link at the right column type in the url you made up above (in my case, I added /goal/socnet/rnav_mini as one goal) and a name you want to see in your reports (for that URL I wrote “rnav mini”). And that’s it. There’s more on that page to work with Defined Funnels but for now, let’s just deal with the goal itself.

So, now you’ve got your goals configured. Now everything just starts working. Go to the GA page where you can start seeing the charts and click on the “Goals” element in the left nav (under content). Immediately you’ll see a topline number on how many people hit each of the goals you set up and a nice graph of goals per day. One of the most interesting reports there is the “Reverse Goal Path” here you can see the pages that people went to in hitting your goal. For example one of mine says:

(entrance) >>/2007/09/23/evil-bee-animation/ >>/goal/socnet/post_big

So, that user came directly to my Evil Bee page and then clicked on the big RSS link. I assume they got their from a search engine - although it could have been a bookmark.

And that’s it for now. I’m psyched to be able to see how people use those little buttons and maybe after awhile, I’ll play around with the sizing and positioning as I learn what works and what doesn’t. Your needs are probably different but the idea remains the same - assign certain actions/pages as goals and watch what works and what doesn’t. After you have enough data, trim off what’s been doing nothing for you and focus on what has been effective. The web is an iterative process so keep trying out new things.

http://www.mapelli.info/blog/how-to-use-google-analytics-to-track-feed-subscriptions-and-everything-else

in addition to his reasons - check out how valuable each source is

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