- [Narrator] I had dinner once with the person who
wrote the original source code for Google Analytics,
and someone at the table asked them
with all the enterprise tools that have been added in lately
what is the one power feature of Google Analytics
that people should be using, but they're not?
I expected to hear about attribution modeling,
or intelligence reports, or some other advanced feature
but he just replied 'set up a goal'
and that's because it's an unfortunate reality
that the majority of accounts don't have
the most important thing configured: goals.
It's tragic really, because it's so easy to do
but statistically speaking most of you
probably don't have your goals configured either
so we're going to go ahead and fix that
so you can actually analyze those campaigns
and pages with the metrics you need.
Now some sites have extremely complex analysis needs
and their goal configurations are gonna match.
Our goal here in the essentials course
isn't to overwhelm you with every single possibility
and case that could possibly arise,
but rather to give you the essentials
you need to get some basic goals up and running.
So the example we're going to have here is relatively simple
we've got cardinalpath.com/contact-us
and that first part here, just the contact-us
is going to be the form itself
and then the goal is going to get you to the thank you page
that means that you successfully filled out the form.
So that's how we're going to set up our goal.
So the first thing we're going to do is head on over here
to the admin section, we're going to go over to the view
that we want to create the goal in.
Click on goals, and then you can either import
some of these, but for now we're going to focus
on setting up a new goal from scratch.
Now you can set this up from a template,
the templates are really just kinda some examples
of commonly done goals, they give you a little bit of
prefilled configurations and get your ideas going
of what kind of things you can track.
You've got engagements and inquiries,
or people creating an account, obviously commerce.
We're going to go ahead and do a custom one here
So click custom, give a goal description,
so we're going to say contact us completed
and then we want to do a goal slot or ID
remember you get 20 goals through here
and so we can set these up, they're bunched into four
This really helps in the interface
so we don't have too many goals at once.
So we have four sets of goals, since this is our first one,
we're going to have goal ID set one.
Now below we can designate the goals type,
the first here is destination, where the goal completion
is a destination or it's a specific webpage.
In our example of form completion
we are going to choose this goal type,
since the destination of the goal is that thank you page
after the user completes the form.
We also have two other types of goals here
known as threshold goals or engagement goals.
Let's say for example my goal as a publisher
was to get people to stay on the site for a long time,
read my content, view my videos, et cetera.
I'd come over here and I would select duration,
and I could say well I want the goal
to be five minutes or longer.
And in this case anyone who's here on the site
for more than five minutes regardless
of what they did would be considered a goal.
The next option down here is pages or screens per session,
if I wanted to load a certain amount of those.
The next one down here are event based goals
you can create a goal based on hit level interactions
like playing a video or downloading a file
If you have events that track these things,
then you can also set up goals based on those interactions.
There's also a smart goal, one that's not available to us.
That's only if you have the AdWords connected in.
But again we're gonna go back and select destination.
Okay, now we want to go in here and put the webpage down.
We can paste this in but remember,
Google Analytics doesn't care about the domain side,
it only cares about that page, so I'm gonna go ahead
and delete the domain and just leave us
with the contact-us/thankyou.html
that's what our overall destination is here.
We have some options on here, we can do
equals with, begins with, or even
some fancy regular expression pattern matching.
In our case we're just gonna leave it
as the default equals to, and then
we can go and continue on down.
Now I've said that you should put this if you can,
so I'm gonna practice what I preach here
and I'm gonna say that every contact-us form
is worth on average 25 dollars.
Now if your goal has clear steps that lead up to it,
consider using a funnel here, we can turn this one on.
We went over the funnel visualizations of go reports,
so you should remember how easily and insightful
it was to go through that data.
To set this up we simply put the steps and the names in here
so, I want to call this the contact us form
and then I put the page name here.
So I'm gonna have two steps.
Simply come to the form, and then you fill it out.
Okay, lastly you want to verify the goal.
Now this is just a fake goal for us, so we won't,
and then we click save, and we have got our goal.
Your new goal now will show up in the goals list
along with it's ID, goal type, and any conversions
that are recorded within the past seven days.
If you want to turn off tracking for your goal,
you can flick the recording switch from on to off,
although for most cases we don't want to do that.
And that's really all there is to setting up goals.
Pretty easy, right? The value of these goals
makes them far and away worth this relatively small effort
to configure them.