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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.

ask the experts

Direct Traffic vs. The Dark Social

May 20, 2013
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: I’ve started to notice that a large chunk of my direct traffic is landing on deeper pages. Some of these page URLs are very long. It seems odd these would be direct. Do I have a tracking issue?

A: This is a great question that we’ve been seeing more and more often lately. Your first step is to check whether or not your tracking is working correctly. Follow Google’s instructions in the two links below to make sure there are no problems:

1. Ensure Google Analytics in on all pages, and configured to be practices

2. Check Google Analytics referral information with the Debugger Tool

The Dark Social

Assuming you found no errors in your Google Analytics review, let’s dig into why you’re seeing direct traffic landing on deep pages within your site.

Many people in the SEO industry currently believe that a large chunk of the direct traffic you see in Google Analytics is actually coming from the “Dark Social”, a term coined by The Atlantic editor Alexis Madriga. Boiled down, the Dark Social are places across the internet from which analytics programs cannot track referral data. This includes: email, chat programs, and some mobile applications.

On our own site, yourseoplan.com, Google Analytics shows we had 1,476 Direct visitors for the month of March. But were those visitors really all people who either typed our URL in the browser window or bookmarked our pages with their browsers? Not likely. Thinking in terms of the Dark Social, direct traffic visits actually number only 672, with a little more than half actually coming from referrals that cannot be tracked. Here’s a screenshot showing actual direct traffic vs. dark social traffic:

One way to segment out the Dark Social is to create a segment in your Analytics solution that filters for Direct traffic and excludes the home page. You can click this link to see this segment if you are using Google Analytics. To be more conservative, you can use this advanced segment which will also count any subfolder with 4 characters in it. Neither of these techniques is perfect: they’ll probably overcount your Dark Social visits. If you publish printed marketing materials that display subfolders (such as www.example.com/2013sale) then be sure to exclude those from the Dark Social segment as well.

With your newfound information of the Dark Social traffic, you may have more “social” traffic than you previously thought! More importantly, you’ve gained a better understanding of the true sources of visits to your site.

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

Direct Traffic vs. The Dark Social

Q: I’ve started to notice that a large chunk of my direct traffic is landing on deeper pages. Some of these page URLs are very long. It seems odd these would be direct. Do I have a tracking issue?

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