In this video, I want to talk about goals in Google Analytics. Now there's a lot to say about goals. So I'm just going to try and scratch the surface here with goals in this introduction video. But if you do end up working with goals a lot, or if you need to set up a lot of custom goals on your website doing really complex things, definitely more to dig into. And look at here. So goals in Google Analytics allow you to measure how many people complete some kind of key activity.

And typically goals are called conversion. And you can typically think of goals as something that really is adding to the business value that's really meaningful to your business. So this is where you're measuring leads. This is where you're measuring sales. This is where you're measuring downloads of a key resource or donations, or you're measuring how many people clicked on advertisements or how many people clicked on affiliate links, right? Things that typically are really leading to key business objectives.

So there's a lot of ideas of what you can use goals to track in Google Analytics. You can track how many people engage with comments how many people filled out contact forms or order forms, how many people sign up for a newsletter. If you have quizzes or calculators on your website, use goals to track those, you have a search form that's really important for your website. And you can track that as a goal of registration forms or how long people spend on your website might be a goal to or how many people looked at a certain number of pages during their session. You can also track as goals other ways people can engage and engagement metrics can be really important to understand the value of your website's content. So let's talk about how you set up different goals on your website.

So for this, we need to go to the admin screen. So the admin screen, you get to by clicking on admin in the lower corner of the sidebar. And then we're going to go to the third column and the admin screen, and we're going to click on goals. So when you're on here, you want to click on new goal and then from here We have a few different choices of different kinds of goals that we want. Like goals, you can add custom goals, we can add SMART goals. So for this first example, I want to use a template goal.

And under templates, we're going to scroll down and we're going to select contact us. So we can set up a goal for a contact form. So select contact us, then click Continue. This will take us to step two. And the first thing we do under step two is give our goal a name. In this case, we're going to give it the name contact us.

We can then select the goal slot ID. The goal slot ID helps you organize goals. And this becomes really important if you're going to add a lot of different goals to your website. You then can select the type of goal. In this case, we're going to select a destination based tool. So this will then take us to step three.

And in Step three, we can say what that destination is. So if you're measuring a contact form, and what you want to put in here is the destination page or what page do people see after they submit That contact form on your website. So in this case, we're putting in confirm contact dot html. And so any visit to confirm contact dot html will be tracked as a goal. Now we want to make sure that the only way that people can get to this particular page is by filling out our contact form if there's some other way that people can get to this confirmation page. And our goal won't really work and won't really tell us anything.

So want to make sure that you're putting in the right URL that only can be accessed after people get through your contact form. Once you do that, we want to verify the goal. So the verification will help you understand how you have this goal set up before how many people would have counted as a conversion. So once you've verified it, once you know it's working, you can click on Save. And then you'll see your goal listed here. So in this case, we can now see our goal of contact is listed on the goal page, and it will start tracking from this point forward.

Now it's important to keep in mind that goals are not retroactive. So if I add a goal today, then it will track that goal every day going forward from here on out. But I won't be able to go back in the past and look at the goal. So it's important to set up the goals as early on as you can. As you're configuring analytics. That way, you can start capturing that information as soon as possible about how you set up another goal.

In this case, let's talk through a custom goal. So back to that goal setup step on step one, instead of clicking on template, let's click on custom. And so once we click on custom, the description on step two is going to look very much the same. So we're going to click on name and we're going to put in the name. In this case, we're going to do an engagement cool, so we're going to say the name is spent at least three minutes on the site. We can then select a goal slot ID again to help keep things organized.

And then we can select the type of goal. In this case, we're going to select the type of duration This will then take us to goal details. And this third step looks a lot different now, right for this duration based role. So here for the duration based goal, we can specify how much time we want people to have spent. So we're going to put in that we want as a goal that we want to know how many people spent more than two minutes and 59 seconds. On our website, people spend more than two minutes and 59 seconds on a website that will trigger this goal.

And we will count that as a conversion rate. And that's people spending three minutes on the site. So that's quite a bit of engagement. That's quite a bit of time that people are spending, really looking at our website and presumably reading the content contained on our website during that time. Here again, you can verify the goal, make sure it's working, and then you can click on Save. And now we have both of our goals listed.

Now that we have those goals set up, let's talk about how we report on those goals. So we've already seen in some of the other reports that we've looked at this Different ways you can report on goals right? As we looked at traffic sources, we looked at landing pages, we saw that column or conversions that was telling us how many people converted who right on that page or her right from the traffic source or who access to our website on particular device, right. And that's where that information is coming from. So that's one method we can use to report on goals. But there's a whole section in Google Analytics that gives you reports specifically about different goals.

So to access that, we're going to go in the sidebar, click on conversions, then click on goals, then click on overview. And then on here, you can see how goal completions are trending over time within the graph. And then below the graph. There's a few different metrics that tell us something about the different goals that are happening on our website. Above the graph, you can select the all goals drop down, and you can select a particular goal. So in this case, let's select the goal have spent at least three minutes on our website.

Now we're drilling in specifically on this particular segment or this particular goal, we can see how this goal is trending over time. You can also see how many people completed this goal, we can see the conversion rate for this goal in this case, right, the conversion rate is 7.6%. And so that helps us really drill in and look at just how that particular goal is performing. So what do we do here? Well, first thing that you should do is you should think through the different kinds of actions people can take on your website, and pay particular attention to the kind of actions that people can take on your website that are really valuable to your business. It really means something about how well your business is performing how well your website is helping your business.

And those are the things you really want to set up as goals in Google Analytics. And then you want to start reporting on those and measuring those and really paying attention to the different goal reports both the specific conversion reports here in this particular section of the analytics tool, but also the analytic Next reports that we've looked at in some of these other courses, how you can view conversions by source or by paid, really started noting how those different goals are working. Next up, let's talk about different way you can track actions on your website using events.