Blogger Jamie Least describes URL destination
goals as the way Google Analytics monitors the URLs you are tracking—more
specifically, specific URL’s that are directly tied to your website’s KPI’s or conversion
rates. Through the use of URL destination
goals, I wanted to compare the number of times that a visitor to my blog site
reached the blog posted from February 4th versus how many times that
the post from February 18th was viewed. I wanted to determine if people who visited
the blog would go back to read previous posts versus only reading the most
recent blog post. At present the contest
is “too close to call”, with only one visit going to the February 18th
post, while no one clicked on the February 4th post. I have a theory on why so few page views were
tracked – filters. There will be more discussion
on that topic later.
From a business perspective, it is important to determine whether a visitor
has completed some type of high-value task tracked through Google Analytics. This
task could be filling out a “contact us” form, visiting a customer service page
providing consumers with information on “how to pay your bill”, or downloading
a file. The data from tracking these tasks
can be presented to help improve the performance of the website. We might learn that the “contact us” form is
getting several people to submit but an error occurs preventing a conversion. The link instructing customers on how to pay
their bill may not be located in a position on the site to be noticed,
resulting in low page views. Also, after
tracking the data, we might learn that the file customers are trying to
download “times out” after five minutes.
These are all actionable improvements that can be uncovered by properly
setting URL destination goals.
Often the task can be purchasing a product which usually concludes with
some type of thank-you page. As long as the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier)
is accurately set up in Google Analytics, the company can keep track of these
tasks. Also, if the website is an e-commerce
site, the business can apply a goal value to the tracked action. This is an important metric to remember when
you need to present website performance reports to executive leadership.
Visitor duration goals can be used to measure your engaged
visitors by determining how many visitors stay on your website longer than
the average time on site. In the case of
my blog, I set up three versions of this type of goal tracking: “5 minutes or
less”, “3 minutes or less” and “60 seconds or less” to determine the level of
engagement that the blog readers have with my posts. At present, again the results are “too close
to call” with only a few visits logged.
There is a story as to why the site traffic is low – More on filters a
little later.
For businesses, visitor duration goals can help determine if products or
services offered on a site are more or less favorable and encourage consumers to
spend more time shopping on the webpage.
For instance, if a website is generating a large amount of traffic but
appears to be failing on meeting a visitor duration goal, then the site is
likely not providing the type of content, products or services that your target
audience is interested in consuming.
Adjustments to the product or service offerings are likely in
order.
The Pages/Visit
goal can also be used to measure the engagement of your visitors. With this metric each individual is tracked
for the amount of pages they view per visit and will only complete your goal if
they are above or below the number you set in the tracking. In the case of my
blog, I set this goal measurement tool to determine whether people were
clicking to other pages and past posts on the blog or if they were abandoning
after only one page view. Again, thanks
to a limited amount of traffic to my blog site (and filters); there was not
enough data to determine a true sense of engagement.
Businesses that properly set up pages/visit goals can determine whether
their website viewers are engaging with the site and more likely to trigger
some sort of action. Again, in this
case, a goal value can also be applied to the metric to appease executives
looking for deep insight on web site activity.
You may have noticed that I might have mentioned filters a few times in
this post. You may even have picked up
the subtle hints that I accidently set up filters that disrupted my ability to
track traffic to the blog site. In my
excitement after reading about goals, funnels and filters this week in my Web
Metrics and SEO assigned reading, I set up a filter with the thought in mind to
specifically track the traffic coming from LinkedIn and Facebook. But that is not what a filter does. Just as it sounds, filters throw out traffic
that matches certain logic. I should
have added a new profile for traffic coming from each social media site. Profiles
enable us to segment the data in different ways including traffic sources and help
us gain a much better understanding of the traffic coming to a site.
Final thoughts... “How could understanding
the difference between profiles and filters have helped?”
In the case of this week’s blog post, simply understanding the difference
between profiles and filters would have saved a great deal of traffic that
would have been reported to this blog.
Blogger Daniel Waisberg provides some really good insight into the way
that you use the two, "A profile is the gateway to the website reports. It determines which data from your website appears in the reports. Filters can be applied to profiles in order to segment the data; for example, it is possible to create a profile only with visitors from USA, only from new visitors, etc. Since profiles use the same account and Web property IDs, data for multiple profiles can also be seen in aggregate."
Give me your feedback and let me know, "how
using goals, profiles or filters may have helped" you in the past.
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