How to set up goals and funnels in Google Analytics to track conversions.

June 28, 2011

Goals in web analytics allow you to measure conversions on your website.  So before you can start setting up goals, you need to know what actions (KPIs) are important for your business.

The most commonly used goals for ecommerce stores are:

  • Sale completed
  • Email sign up
  • Help page visited
  • About us page visited
  • Return & delivery page visited
  • Visitors who placed their order over the phone

NOTE: to be able to track revenue, average order value and what products you sold in Google Analytics, you will need a developer. See our Google analytics set up and audit prices.

Non-ecommerce websites goals could be:

  • Contact us form completed
  • About us page visited
  • Contact us page visited
  • Support page visited
  • White paper download
  • Pages/visit (useful for non-profit or news sites)
  • Phone call tracking

Setting up goals for ecommerce stores – checkout:

Let’s say, your goal url is www.mysite.com /pages/checkout_thankyou.aspx. Below are screenshots illustrating how exactly to set up the goal in Google Analytics so you can track your sales.

, How to set up goals and funnels in Google Analytics to track conversions

URL – don’t use the full url. Instead of www.mysite.com /pages/checkout_thankyou.aspx, use /pages/checkout_thankyou.aspx

Goal value – leave it as 0.0 (for goals directly tracking ecommerce transactions), as additional ecommerce tracking codes installed on an order confirmation page will give us the exact value of each order.

Any other goals should have a value assigned to them. If you can’t calculate an exact value of each goal, then you can use value of 10.

, How to set up goals and funnels in Google Analytics to track conversions

Always set up a funnel, as this feature allows you to visualize each step and where your visitors are bailing out. Name it so you can easily associate with actual pages.

After we saved the goal, we need to install ecommerce tracking code on your order confirmation page (job for a developer). See our Google analytics set up and audit prices.

, How to set up goals and funnels in Google Analytics to track conversions

For more instruction regarding the code above go to http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingEcommerce.html.

If any sales were made, then usually after 4-12 hours you should be able to see your transactions being tracked. If you made some sales within 24 hour period, but still can’t see any conversions being tracked in your analytics, then your goal isn’t set up properly.

, How to set up goals and funnels in Google Analytics to track conversions

With the goal and the funnel being tracked, you can see at which step your visitors are leaving and then with A/B testing you can try to fix it.

The process to set up goals for non-ecommerce sites is very similar, but with the following differences:

– No ecommerce tracking code required on your confirmation page

– Goal value – Very important. Either calculate your actual value per lead if you are able to monetize it, or try to use a goal value of 10, 50 or 100 (never leave at zero on non-ecommerce sites). This way you will be able to see in the analytics how valuable each page is in terms of contributing towards a goal. This will also help during conversion optimisation to find the lowest & highest performing pages.