Better understanding your visitors with a little help from Google Analytics’ New Goals

Google Analytics has millions of fans everywhere there is a website, whether business one or personal blog. It is an indispensable tool beloved by marketers and and not only all around the world. But to remain on top, it is necessary to permanently adapt to ever changing needs. Therefore, last week Google Analytics announced several new updates to Goals, including a brand new set-up process, new templates and new verification capabilities.

Google Goals feature is aimed to help businesses with an online presence understand how visitors are interacting with their site. Tools provided by Analytics help measure any type of engagement between user and website and track how the interactions help meeting larger business objectives.
Let’s see what’s new with Goals in Google Analytics.

New set-up process

You have the option to choose between using a Template - the best fit will be sugested – or to set up a Custom Goal – with this option, you can select the type that best fits the action you need to track. There are four goal types – each one specific to a different kind of action you can measure. Here they are:

• Destination: a specific location loads
• Duration: visits that last a specified amount of time or longer
• Pages/ screens per visit: A visitor views a specific number of pages or screens
• Event: an action defined as an Event is triggered

Templates

Choose a Template to see Goal set up flow suggestions. These are designed to help you set actionable Goals that meet standard business objectives. You can edit any template field before saving a Goal. If you choose Template, the goal categories are:

• Revenue
•  Acquisition
• Inquiry
• Engagement

Verify each Goal before you save

This very useful feature will help you decide whether you keep or not the goal you just set up. The verify option gives you the opportunity to see what the conversion rate would have been for the past week if the goal would have been set up.

How different Goals relate to each other?

Go to Goals Overview report - here you can see how your goal completions happen over time and you can also identify relationships between different Goals.

We do like the changes in Google Analytics – have you set up new goals? Did you have the time to test them? What is your opinion?