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Google Analytics 101: Setting up Goals

June 14, 2013
by Gradiva Couzin

This is the first part in our Google Analytics 101 series. This introductory series will help novice Google Analytics users learn how to set up and view goals, funnels and flows.

Google Analytics: Intro to Goals

Goals help you measure actions or objectives on your site. When setting up a goal in Google Analytics, you have four measurement types to choose from:

Destination – example: thanks.html
Duration – example: 5 minutes or more
Pages Per Visit – example: 3 pages
Event – example: played a video

The most basic type of goal you may wish to create are visits to a success page, typically the “thank you” or “confirmation” page on which a user arrives after submitting a form or purchasing an item in your store.

To begin setting up your Goals, log into Google Analytics, access the Admin section of the profile you wish to create a goal in, and under the Goals tab, select “Create a Goal.”

Here is the Create a Goal process step-by-step:

Name your Goal
Select the Type of Goal. We’ll use “Destination” in this example
You now have three destination URL types — “Equals to”, “Begins with” and “Regular Expression.” If you just want to measure visits to a page called “/thankyou.html,” select “Equals to”. If you want to measure “thankyou.html” in addition to “thankyou.html?id-1xyz” select “Begins with.” The regular expression feature offers you more advanced options, for example, measuring multiple pages.
There is no need to assign a Value or Funnel, so leave those two features off.
Click “Verify this Goal” which will help you identify if the goal is set up correctly. If there is no data, then you may have a typo in your URL.
Click “Create Goal”

Goals are not applied retroactively, so you will need to wait until Google Analytics compiles some new data to see Goal data in Google Analytics.

With your Goal set up and data flowing, you now have access to basic Goal reporting:

Navigate to the Goals dashboard in Google Analytics to see the number of goal completions and the conversion rates based on site traffic.
Goal conversion data also appears in other reports in Google Analytics, including Visitor Report, Traffic Reports, Site Search Reports, and the Events Reports. For example, looking Organic keyword data you can see a goal conversion rate for each referring keyword.

We hope this has provided a helpful introduction to setting up Google Analytics Goals! Next in this series, we will go over the basics of Google Analytics Funnels report.

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Ask the Experts: Should I Consolidate Sites for SEO?

October 1, 2012
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: We have two different businesses: catering and personal chef. Over time, we’ve ended up with two sites for these services. Additionally, we’ve purchased other domains and have them redirecting to the main sites. The personal chef site is not ranking well, but there is a personal chef page on the catering site that is ranking well. We are thinking about building a new site and condensing them into one, but are worried we may lose the traffic that the old personal chef page had. What can we do to retain this traffic?

A: First, a quick note regarding your parked domains: These are probably neither helping nor hurting the SEO presence of your main sites. But one good reason to keep control of these domains is so they won’t be be snagged up by competitors and used to compete against you. Be sure to re-point any redirects if you do decide to move your sites.

There is no single, definitive answer about whether or not to consolidate your two sites to a single site. Here are a few pros and cons of consolidation that may help guide you:

PRO: consolidation of authority & trust signals such as social sharing and inbound links will tend to make a single, unified website have more power in search engines than two separate sites.
PRO: a unified site makes online word of mouth more straightforward. Good reviews of one arm of your business will reflect well on the other arm.
CON: a unified site will need to compete with focused sites that can specifically optimize for each of the specific services (personal chef vs. catering).
CON: A unified site is probably less likely to have the opportunity to get links from lists or directories of one or the other service.
CON: You have an existing rank that you are legitimately concerned about losing. A 301 redirect from the old page to the new page is highly recommended, but even with that, it’s possible that the rank will suffer.

If these two sites truly are two separate businesses, with a different customer base, different service offerings, and having different conversations online, then it probably makes more sense to retain the separate sites (while linking between them, naturally).

If you do choose to unify, re-using one of your existing domains would be best. Is the catering domain name general enough to house both businesses? In that case we would recommend keeping the page that is ranking well (personal chef) at the same URL that it is currently on, and redesigning around it.

If it is not possible to re-tool the catering site so that it encompasses the personal chef site, and you feel a strong need to move both sites to a new domain, be sure to follow the page redirect recommendations we discuss in “Oops, I Redesigned my Website. An SEO Checklist.” A key point: you’ll need a 301 redirect from the existing personal chef page to the new URL. So,

www.example1.com/personal-chef/ should 301 redirect to www.example2.com

However, even if you do everything right in a move such as this, you should be prepared for a drop in search rankings. Like ripping off a band-aid, the pain will probably pass quickly, but it is not impossible that your site would suffer long-term ranking drops from moving domains, so we only recommend moving sites if absolutely necessary.

Google Analytics 101: Setting up Goals

This is the first part in our Google Analytics 101 series. This introductory series will help novice Google Analytics users learn how to set up and view goals, funnels and flows.

Google Analytics: Intro to Goals

Ask the Experts: Should I Consolidate Sites for SEO?

Get An Effective SEO Strategy