Set goals in Google Analytics to measure website conversions

Google analytics (GA) is a free to use online service that allows you to measure website traffic, referring pages, geographic location of visitors, real time visitors and more. It allows us to set up goals to measure specific things on our website that gives us great insight into what users are doing on our site.

You must install the GA tracking code before you can use it and you won't have any data until you have added the code and given it at least a day or two to collection meaningful data.

What are Goals?

Goals need to be added manually to tell GA what to measure. Imagine the following series of events that a website visitor may do on your website:

1. Land on your homepage
2. Navigate to your contact page
3. Complete your contact form to send you a message

This would be a great thing to track right? So we would set up a goal for this.

Adding Our Goal to Google Analytics

We will track the thank you page that appears after a visitor has submitted the contact form.

In Google Analytics:

1. Go to the property for your website:

2. Click the Admin tab:

3. Click "Goals" in the right column:

4. Click New Goal and select "Custom":

5. Click "Continue" and select "Destination" and name the goal "Contact":

6. Click "Continue" and set the Destination as "equal to" and specify your contact thank you page. This goal will track users who have submitted the contact form and been redirected to the thank you page:

Now when website visitors visit your contact page and email you, this will be recorded as a goal.

Other great uses for goals could be to complete a survey, visit a product page or view an offer etc.

I'll add more information to this article soon.