Understanding Google Analytics Goal Setup & Advancement

The Google Analytics Goals does a great job in telling that from where customers are driving in but it doesn’t immediately tell about how much money actually made from them.

But Google Analytics give an option to calculate this. We can easily break down revenue and sort them into campaigns, referrals, or keywords.

All the traffic sources will have the per visit value, which sounds like some delicious data.

That option is called as Goal Values. The Google Analytics will allow us to define the desired goal values and settle our reports with data to find out from where the revenue is coming from.

HOW TO SETUP GOAL VALUES

Steps to setup goal values :

• Go to Google Analytics standard reports page.
• Click on the “Admin” button at the top right side of the page.
• Then Click on the “Goals”.
• Now from one of the existing goal sets, click “+ Goal” (goal sets are a way for to easily group the goals) if setting up a new goal.

Have the option of entering the goal value if want for each goal type. For example, if the goal value is of $10, then simply enter 10 in the box and the Google Analytics will take care of the rest.

THE MOST POPULAR USE FOR GOAL VALUES : LEADS

The goal values metrics are perfect for the leads. If there is no purchase then there will be no option of e-commerce tarcking. Since leads are usually easy to quantify, let us talk more about those goal values.

 

If we want to figure out the goal value for a lead? Let’s work like this!

Suppose we have a travel agency in the Southeast of Asia. We have received 10 leads in a month where the revenue was $12,500. Now divide the total revenue ($12,500) by the number of leads generated (10) that means our each lead is worth of $1,250, and that is the goal value we need to set.

The above example assumed that all our leads were generated from our website. Our sales funnel can be probably a bit more difficult. While calculating the total revenue and the leads which we received, don’t include the leads which we generated from other sources like social media, affiliates, word-of-mouth, referrals etc. to keep our data clean which will help us in taking better business decisions later.

While calculating the revenue and leads, refer the data from the past quarter or month.

OTHER EXAMPLES OF USING GOAL VALUES FOR LEADS

1.Newsletters: Similarly, take the total revenue which we received from the newsletter subscribers divide it with the total number of subscriber we have, and that is goal value for a new subscriber.

2.Document Downloads: Let’s say we gave away a free e-book to get the leads. Now calculate how much revenue we made from the leads that generated from a document and divide it by the total number of download.

3.Webinar Signups: Firstly, find out the number of people who click through to our webinar signup page and now how much we made from that particular webinar. Divide the revenue by the clicks.

4.Affiliate Links: Go to affiliate program (Click Bank, Amazon etc) to find the total revenue and then divide the total revenue by the number of clicks that affiliate links received.

5.Trial/Free Accounts: Find out how much money we make if one user upgrades to paid account. Now divide the total number of trial accounts.

WHAT IF WE DON’T HAVE THIS DATA ?

If we don’t have all these data that means we don’t have enough customers. If we’re just starting up our business or small enough that we don’t regularly generate leads or purchases on our website, then we can stop worrying about the Google Analytics goal values and focus on getting more customers and subscribers to our website.

When we really know what we’re doing with our business, then we can stop assigning the goal values to the following metrics:

• Visit Duration
• Pages/Visit
• Social Media actions
• Comments
• Any action on our site which doesn’t directly produce a purchase or lead.

To start tracking ROI of website, we need to get our goal values set up. This should be a high priority task to calculate the Return On Investment.