One of the most crucial elements of any Internet marketing campaign is the ability to measure its results. Unless you have accurate data on your campaign, you won’t be able to determine if your marketing budget is being well spent. It will also help you make better and more informed decisions as you move forward.  But there are so many metrics available in tracking platforms like Google Analytics that it’s impossible to use all of them. A lot of your time and effort can be wasted if you spend time on tracking platforms that don’t really add much to your site. To overcome such issues, it’s very important to set up goals in Google Analytics. Determining your site’s objectives and turning them into quantifiable actions makes it easy to track your performance and get a quick understanding of how your site is doing. But even within Google Analytics, there are a lot of different goals that you can set. In this post, we will talk about the most important Google Analytics goals that you should try to set. Let’s get started.

Google Analytics Goals: All You Need to Know

What are Google Analytics goals?

Google Analytics goals track and report the specific actions taken by visitors (and how often they are taken) on your site.

The actions include visiting a page, spending a particular amount of their time on that section of the page, completing a form, and lots of others. But they’re all designed to represent all of the steps that a visitor takes towards becoming a customer.

This means that before you set effective goals, you should try to work out what sorts of actions you would like your visitors to take. Do you want them to request a quote? Watch a video? Make a purchase?

All of these goals, along with many more are trackable in Google Analytics.

You can access your site’s goal settings in Analytics by clicking the “Admin” tab, then clicking “Goals” within the View column.

If there are any existing goals active on your site, you’ll see them here. You’ll even have the option to establish and configure any new goals you’d wish to add.

There are four basic sorts of goals you’ll create within Google Analytics: destination, event, duration, and pages per session. If you employ AdWords, you’ll also have the option to use Smart Goals to trace qualified visitors to your site from a pay-per-click campaign.

In order to settle on the most crucial Google Analytics goals for your business, you initially must determine which of those goal types works best for what you would like to measure (and set up your Google Analytics account). In most cases, you’ll end up with a combination of at least two or three.

Here are the four basic types of Google Analytics goals?

Destination

Destination goals allow you to establish a selected page as a goal. They display in Analytics as conversions. You can have as many destination goals on your site as you would like, and each time a user visits any of those pages, it’s counted as a conversion for your goal.

These goals are generally used to track form submissions and other actions that redirects users to a thank you page. Although you can’t track form data itself in Google Analytics, counting the amount of visits to a thank you page gives you a great way to trace those conversions.

Duration

A duration goal tracks the amount of time spent by a visitor on your page.

If you’re looking towards live engagement, these goals are a great method to track visitors who browse your pages, read your content, and study your company.

Unlike traffic, which measures all visits (even people who only stay on the website for a couple of seconds), duration goal completions represent people that are actively engaged with your website’s content.

Pages/Screens per session

Pages/Screens per session goals are another great way to trace engaged site visitors. Instead of counting conversions that are decided based on how much time a visitor spends on your site, they’re based on the number of pages viewed by the user.

Event

Event goals are based upon specific user interactions that you’ve already established as Events on your site.

These interactions include watching a video, downloading a piece of content, engaging with interactive elements, and more. For more information on fixing and tracking these goals, it’s highly recommended that you go through Google’s guide on the topic.

How to decide which goals to set in your Google Analytics account?

Google Analytics makes it possible to make goals for virtually every action a visitor takes on your site.

But you don’t need to track every single one of them. Instead of establishing every goal imaginable, analyze and decide which kind of conversions are the most ideal for your business. Do you want to generate contact form submissions? Phone calls? Sales? Something else? There are specific Google Analytics goals for all of them. Your Google Analytics goals should reflect your business’s overall goals, so determining what’s most vital is important before you create those goals. Then, you’ll either use relevant templates to line them up, or create custom goals tailored to your needs.

After you’ve created these higher-level goals, you can start tracing your steps and work backward to find out about the steps that cause those conversions. This is where you’ll want to use Google Analytics’ templates for goals that track Engagement. Even if you don’t consider user browsing and interaction with your site as conversions, you are better off getting a more accurate understanding of the behaviour of all the visitors on your site.