- [Instructor] The Conversions reports are all about
understanding how your users are converting on your site.
But what exactly constitutes a conversion?
Is it when a user buys a t-shirt from our online store?
Maybe when they submit a Contact Us form
or something simple as starting a video
on your About Us page.
One thing's for sure is Google can't know
exactly how to present the Conversions report out of the box
for all the Analytics accounts.
That's because the concept of a conversion
is different for every business owner and every site owner.
And that's where these goals come in.
The Conversion section is split up between
Goals, E-Commerce, Multi-Channel Funnels, and Attribution.
All very useful tools.
However, we're gonna mostly be focusing on
the Goal reports here in this Essentials course.
Now remember that the simplest answer
to what you should track as a goal
is the answer to, "Why do we have a website?".
If the purpose is to get lead forms submitted, track that.
If the purpose is to get video game downloads, track that.
Sign up volunteers for a race, track those sign-ups.
We can find the dedicated Goal reports here
in their own section, Conversions, here.
And we're gonna start with the Overview.
And we'll be going over exactly how to set up
a goal in Analytics a few videos from now
in the configurations chapter,
but it's first good to know the importance of
why we do these and how they work
before we think about starting to create them.
We can configure up to 20 Goals per View,
and if you still need more, you can just use more Views.
And what you see here in these reports
is gonna depend on your site
and how you configure your Goals.
Remember, Google Analytics is just a tool.
Like any other tool, it has to be configured
for you to get the most out of it.
So we need to configure Goals in Analytics
to tell it what we need to be measured
and what we consider to be a successful visit.
One important configuration, we can actually
assign a monetary value to a Goal.
And not necessary E-Commerce, but the Goals themselves.
This allows us to get revenue
and we don't have to have that full blown E-Commerce shop.
The idea here is that if you know a particular Goal
is estimated to be worth a certain amount to you,
then each time a user reaches that Goal,
Google Analytics will then attribute that revenue
to the user in all the segments
that are associated with that user.
So if you know that your average web lead is worth $100,
then go ahead and put that Goal Value as $100.
Now remember, the bottom line here
is we're just trying to understand
which segments and which sessions
are outperforming or underperforming,
so don't stress about having a very precise Goal Value.
What if I don't know if it's exactly $100?
Even if you don't have a very accurate value,
it's better to have something than
just have zero for everything
and you can't distinguish between good and bad.
After all, really, what we're trying to do here
is provide a basis to compare
one session versus the others, one user versus the other,
one segment versus the other.
Okay, we have a few more reports
to help us understand the conversions on our site.
Let's go ahead down here to the Goal URLs report.
This report gives us information
about the number of Goal completions
and the total value of those completions
broken down by the page that the visitor's on
when they completed the Goal.
Now, for this report and for all these Goals reports,
we can come up here and we can either select All Goals
or we can actually individually
break down an individual goal.
If we want to know just purchases completed,
we select that and everything that we will see here
is going to be about purchase completions.
So, of course, then, what we see in the Page URL
are just the only two URLs where
we can actually complete a purchase
are the ones that are gonna show up.
And this is again, all the different Goal reports
will have this dropdown available.
The next one down here is the Reverse Goal Path.
This is an interesting report,
it's the unique navigation path
that was used to complete the goal.
So it starts with the Goal at, essentially, the end
and it works backward from there
in the most common paths that lead to that Goal
from a page point of view.
So it's like a funnel, but in reverse.
This is actually interesting report
because it compares that path or funnel
that we might predict a user might take
and what this shows us, is what the user actually does take.
Now, for the rest of the reports
down here in the Goals section,
we're gonna take a closer look at those
because each have their own uses.
But, to be honest, as important as I said Goals are,
it's pretty rare that I actually look
at the majority of these reports here in my daily analysis
because if I'm looking at Goals and Conversion Rates,
it's usually to evaluate the performance
of other data and the other reports.
What I really want to find are
those pockets of profitability.
For example, let's say I want to come to the Acquisition
and I want to look at my traffic
and I want to come down here to the Channels reports.
If I select Goals Set One here,
I want to be able to evaluate the sources of traffic
that are going to bring me traffic
that converts on my Goals.
The Goals is just the measuring stick
by which I'm judging this traffic.
The reports down in the Goal section
don't give me quite as much actionable info
because they aren't the metrics
by which we're judging these dimensions.
So I tend to use the Goals over here as
the success criteria on the right
rather than the actual dimensions of the report
as they are down here in the Conversions.
You see the ability to evaluate these
in nearly every report in here
and although I talk a lot about E-Commerce Goals,
like how much revenue did it bring,
that's just because it's easy to understand revenue.
'Cause everyone understands why
more revenue is better than less.
The truth is, you can just as easily use
Goal Conversion Rate, you don't have to run
an e-commerce shop to do what we're doing.
And defining these goals for you
and your business is the first step
between moving past that counting hits
and into customizing Google Analytics
to tell us what we need to know
about the quality of visits on our site.