This week I spent several more hours
learning about some of the advanced Google Analytic reporting tools that I have
never been exposed to in the past. I have heard of goals and funnels before,
but I’ve never investigated how to apply them or why I should even be
considering them in the first place. Last week I discussed basic analytics
reports and how they can be used. These reports are great for judging basic
interest and user behavior on a website, but they don’t really give you a
perfect picture of how your site is accomplishing your actual business
objectives. This week, I’ll take a look at GA goals, funnels, filters, and
profiles – a few more advanced tools that, as some experts say, are what you
really SHOULD be tracking (Lofgren, n.d.). The tricky part, as I found through
my research, is the actual implementation of these metrics. It turns out that
more complicated analytical reporting means more complicated behind-the-scenes
set up.
To be completely honest, before this
week, I felt confident that I could take on a lot of web analytics functions on
my own. But after watching a series of Google-produced videos about setting up
profiles, filters, goals, and funnels, I have a new appreciation for the
necessity and function of a true analytics professional. Although I couldn’t
find any analytics experts being quoted online about how much time a person
must invest in analytics for their education to be useful, I would assert that
an amateur in the web analytics arena must make this subject more than a
secondary focus in the workplace to provide truly meaningful results to his/her
company. That is, at my day job I NEVER
would have been able to spare the hours I spent learning some more in-depth
(and helpful!) GA tools.
Since I’m sure many readers are
marketers on a small team, with a small budget, or for their own small
business, I’ll save you some time by breaking down my newly-acquired wisdom
about some of Google’s more advanced analytics tools and why they really are
worth the time it takes to learn about them. If you like what you see here, I
highly recommend finding a way to commit the time necessary to learning more
about how to implement these tools for your specific business needs. Just keep
in mind that a significant time commitment is required to fully understand
these tools and to implement them effectively!
Goals
Goals are the best way to see if your
site is meeting its business objectives. GA goals reports allow you to monitor
certain activities or interaction levels that might be important to the success
of your business based on one of four key metrics – URL, time on site, pages
per visit, or event. I really like goals as a way to get an easy gauge of
success on your site. Some of the objectives I might have for this blog could
include some of the following:
1.
Having readers spend a certain amount
of time on my page that would indicate they are interested and actually reading
at least one article. I’d say a minimum of three minutes.
2.
Having readers click onto more than one
story on my page, indicating that they’re interested in reading beyond the
original article they find.
3.
Having readers sign up for e-mail
updates when I publish new content.
All of these objectives can be clearly
measured and monitored over time by setting up GA goals as follows:
1.
Set up a goal that will be achieved
through visitors spending more than three minutes on my site.
2.
Set up a goal that will be achieved
through visitors reading more than two pages per visit.
3.
Set up a goal that will be achieved
when visitors arrive at the confirmation page after signing up for e-mail
updates. (Note: To be completely honest, this e-mail update page is actually
fictional, but it’s at least a good example of how this kind of goal could be
easily tracked.)
Funnels
A function of GA’s goal reporting,
funnels allow you to see whether your visitors are progressing toward a
destination URL through a specific path. For example, if your goal is to get
your site visitors to sign up for your mailing list, you’d want them to first
click on the registration form, then persist through to submit their
registration and arrive at a sign up confirmation screen. Your goal would be
the final destination URL, the confirmation screen. But you could also set up a
funnel that starts by tracking visitors on the registration form page, then
ends at the goal URL, the confirmation screen. By seeing whether there is a
larger than expected drop off between the two pages, you can determine if you
need to make any adjustments to the registration form. You can also test
improvements over time in an effort to increase the conversion rate, thereby
increasing the total number of visitors achieving your goal of actually
registering and arriving at the confirmation page.
Filters
GA filters allow you to look at your
entire set of analytics reports for certain subsets of visitors. Depending on
your specific business objectives, you may want to know monitor many dimensions
of the behavior of a segment of your audience. For example, on this blog, there
are a few different groups I’d like to know more about:
·
Visitors who aren’t me – I click on my
blog from time to time to make sure things are posting appropriately. Since my
site traffic is still pretty low, just a handful of my own visits could be
skewing my overall analytics reports because I’m not using my blog in the same
way a normal visitor would.
·
Visitors coming from referrals or
organic traffic – I’m planning to do some better blog promotion in the future,
specifically through social media sharing and improved SEO. I’d like to know
how my visitors from these efforts are behaving, so I can filter out other
audiences to see how this specific group is using my site.
The great thing about filters is that
the possibilities are virtually limitless. You can slice up your audience
however you want or need to. The bad thing about filters is that unless you are
using the over-simplified, pre-packaged filters, you’ll need to get very
technical, very fast! Filters are where GA starts getting quite a bit trickier,
but the ability to get a full set of analytical data on a specific segment of
your audience could be well worth it.
Profiles
Another GA element that goes hand-in-hand
with filters is profiles. As you develop different filters for your site, you
will apply them to profiles, and you’ll likely want to set up multiple profiles
to do this. Because you can’t retrieve data that has been filtered out once a
filter is applied, it is recommended to keep a version of your analytics data,
a “profile,” that doesn’t have any filters applied to it. You’ll also want to
keep each filtered audience in its own separate profile. Additionally, Google
allows for multiple filters to be applied to each profile, so you could develop
different ways of overlapping filters on multiple profiles to create very
complex profiles. Again, here’s where GA gets quite complicated for the
typical, non-technical user.
If I had a budget that would allow me to
hire an analytics professional, I would do it in a heartbeat. Google goals and
filters have shown me the edge of my confidence in my own comfort level. By
doing my due diligence in learning about the capabilities of GA tools, however,
at the very least I’ve enabled myself to speak intelligently when asking my IT
department for help in setting up these tools.
References:
Lofgren, L. (n.d.) 4 Google Analytics
goal types that are critical to your business. KISSmetrics. Retrieved from http://blog.kissmetrics.com/critical-goal-types/
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