More Google Analytics Fundamental Metrics: Goal, Funnels, Filters and Profiles

After my eye-opening experience working with the basics of Google Analytics last week, this week we are exploring the features of goals, funnels, filters, and profiles.  What are these things you ask?  Those are my thoughts exactly, but they mean dollar signs for your business.  One of the nice things about using Google Analytics, other than it being free, is they provide video tutorials on their IQ page.  If you check out the Fundamentals section you will find these topics covered (rather quickly, but you can watch multiple times.  It is almost like Web analytics for dummies).  A Web site goal is a “Web site page that helps generate conversions for your site” (P.I. Reed, 2013, Successful Approaches in Google Analytics).  According to Kaushik, conversions are “outcomes divided by unique visitors during a particular time period”. 

For example, if I were selling cars on my blog then I would want people to look at my inventory and submit a lead for more information.  The goal would be to get people to the inventory page, and the conversion would be how many people submitted leads of all the unique visitors during the time frame I designated. 

There can be several types of goals to help you get to the desired conversions: including file downloads, page views or URL destination, visit duration, pages per visit, or an event.  For my very simple blog I do not have any file downloads, purchases, or leads to submit so those types of goals are out for me.  They would be very important to measure if I were an e-commerce Web site or if downloads and leads would eventually mean a sale of some kind, even an off-site sale.    As we explored in last week’s blog post, “Learning to use Google Analytics BasicMetrics to Increase Blog Traffic,” it is important to know the popularity of your posts, and how long visitors are staying on your site, so I thought those should be one of my first goals.  Since I am also trying to increase my awareness online I thought I should make how many views my “About Me” page was receiving Goal one.          

I followed the Google IQ instructions on how to set up a goal for the “About Me” page views as Goal one.  I set Goal two for visit duration greater than 2:10 minutes, which was my average visit duration from previous weeks.  I set up Goal three as page per visit greater than one and Goal four as visit duration greater than three minutes, as recommended by Easley (also in last week’s post).  I was so happy, that was not terribly difficult!  Later, I realized that I may not have set up Goal one, the “About Me”, correctly and that it quite possibly might not work with the way my blogger site is set up.  On my blog template the “About Me” link goes directly to my Google+ profile page and has the URL   https://plus.google.com/109522440475978999458/about.  In the directions for setting up URL’s it said to use the Unique Resource Identifier, the string of characters that follows the domain name.  So in my case this would normally be the characters that follow http://digitalmarketingmarcie.blogspot.com/.  However, since I could not figure out how to change my template to create a page that corresponded to the domain name, this goal is still not working.  It also looks like I set up Goals two and three as “set two” instead of separate goals but I’m getting reporting on them, and right now that is all I care about.

After checking in on my goals I can see no completions for Goal one “About Me” as expected, two visits that were longer than two minutes and ten seconds, twenty-one visits with more than one page view, and one visit longer than three minutes.  Success! Ok, relative success.  I still have to figure out what to do about the “About Me” page, but being able to segment the other areas and see that I am getting people to look at more than one page is great.  These goals also tell me that I am still not receiving the visit duration that I am aiming for and it still needs work.  Depending on what kind of goals your company has you can learn a great deal about whether or not your clients are getting the information they are looking for, and whether or not you are going to get the conversions your company wants.  Tracking goals also tells us whether or not you may need to make changes to your site to get the desired outcome, very valuable indeed.  According to KISSmetrics, “You have to tell Google Analytics to keep track of what’s critical to your business – and you do this with goals”.

 

 I have a simple blog with no ecommerce, downloads, or subscriptions, but if I had a more advanced Web site I would also use the Google Analytics features funnels, filters, and profiles.  Goal funnels tell you how visitors move through your Web site on their way to conversion and the path they take.  “Funnels allow you to monitor how frequentlyyour site visitors start the conversion process, complete it, abandon it and atwhat point they abandon so you can work on ways to improve your return oninvestment” .  In a future website I plan on using a funnel to measure conversions for reader subscriptions, class sign-ups, and purchases of my books and consulting services.

If you were strictly tracking page views or shared Google Analytics data with many people you would want to use the filter and profile features.  Filters “can be set up to exclude visits from particular IP addresses, to report only on a subdomain or directory, or to take dynamic page URLs and convert them into readable test strings” (P.I. Reed, 2013, para. 8).  If I was really concerned about my page views I might create a separate filter that removed my IP address from the data I reviewed.  This would be very important if I had a large company where many internal staff frequently accessed the Web site.  However, it is important to always maintain the original data so that you have access to it all if needed.  In a similar manner, if you have many people accessing your Google Analytics data, you will want to create more than one profile so that the data can be customized for each person’s specific goals.  These are two features I have not yet found specific use for in my class blog but that I can see being very beneficial in future endeavors.

Overall, I am impressed with the things you can do with relative ease in Google Analytics being a complete novice. By using your company objectives to set up your goals, you should be able to create funnels, filters, and event tracking since they are laid out reasonably well.  Most businesses should be able to take a few simple steps to get more actionable data from their Web site to see if it is truly providing the value expected.  By tweaking your goals, funnels, filters and Web analytic data regularly in Google Analytics companies can yield more profits from their online efforts. 

References

Easley, K.  (2012, August 6).  How to increase average time spent on site [Web log].  We blog better:  blogging tips for a better blog.  Retrieved from http://weblogbetter.com/2012/08/06/how-to-increase-average-time-spent-on-site/ 

Kaushik, A.  (2006, July 31).  Excellent analytics tip #5:  Conversion rate basics & best practices [Web log].  Occam’s Razor.  Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/excellent-analytics-tip5-conversion-rate-basics-best-practices/   

Lawhorne, P.  (2011, August 24).  How to set up goals and funnels with Google Analytics [Web log].  Retrieved from http://pamlawhorne.com/set-goals-funnels-google-analytics/  

Lofgren, L.  (2012, May 1).  4 Google Analytics goal types that are critical to your business [Web log].  KISSmetrics.  Retrieved from http://blog.kissmetrics.com/critical-goal-types/   

Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism.  (2013).  Lesson 6:  Successful approaches in Google Analytics. West Virginia University.  Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu