Quite simply, versatility is what causes Google Analytics to use the event goal in order to capture the non-pageview things that we might be interested in on a certain website. The biggest difference between events and goals is that events can happen multiple times per session whereas goals only happen on the first occurrence. Through event value, this allows us to pull full dynamic information off the page. In Project Digital, things like this would be helpful for us to track the events that people are interacting with on the page, like how long they engaged in a session or if they possibly shared a blog, based on the set goal we are looking to complete.
Reports of Event Goals
Using acquisition reports we are able to look at values such as what channels the audience is coming from, and how they have interacted with the page. Based on the set goals, it will funnel the information automatically for us to see exactly the values and conversion rates that have been created and completed by the audience members. Obviously with event data like this, we will use Google Tag Manager to create the most versatile solution to add the events to Project Digital. It all comes full circle.
There are four ways to track your analytic goals. These goals help you keep track of your business and shows you what you need to improve upon. The four goals are URL destination, visit duration, page/visit goals, and events.
Visit Duration Goals
This goal simply tracks how many people have been on your site and how much time they spent on your site. Google Analytics allows you to set specific time goals down to the minutes. Setting this type of goal can show you what areas of your website are getting more visits. This goal also shows what places your visitors are spending more time at on your site.
Tip: Make sure to update your goals regularly because your business metrics will be changing all the time.
To learn more about goal setting, head over to Neil Patel’s website.
Pages/Visit goals is a tool on google analytics that helps a business owner track the number of pages that each visitor sees before they leave the site. When setting this goal up, you can either select greater than or less than for an amount of pages visited. If you choose the greater than, that means you just want to see engagement on the site. You would use less than to see if they actually went through each page (effectiveness of site). Although this tool is simple, it can help businesses redesign their website if they get negative data.
How Can This Help ProjectDigital?
This tool can be a large help because if implemented with the greater than function, the owner could see if people are actually navigating the site instead of leaving after they hit the home page. If they use the less than function on specific posts, then the owner would be able to see if people are actually clicking through to read the posts. If they get information back that people aren’t visiting a certain number of pages or if they are not meeting their goal, then they could change the layout to convince people to click through.
For more information on goal types, take a look at this article.
This goal has a focus on tracking the amount of pages viewed by the user before they leave your page. This is a very help goal to track because it shows you how successful your page is at capturing user’s attention and then how well you are able to hold their attention. This is best for customer support in the sense that you can see if your customers or potential customers are satisfied with what they find on your site. This information can be helpful to gain or maintain satisfied users, and allow you to learn what to adjust in order to improve your page. Page views can be helpful for every business and can help us while using Project Digital. We would be able to set up a goal to track and see how well we are doing at getting people to view or site and blogs. The goal would tell use the data and allows us to understand how we might increase the page views to the blogs we write. If we want more views, we could add to our titles in order to encourage more involvement. Then to keep users on the page, we could try to add helpful information at the start to keep them on the pages. All the data given by a Page/Visit goal will help our class understand what else we can do to create more involvement with our blogs.
How to Set and Understand this Goal
First, set your goal as active and choose your goal type as “Pages/Visit”. This will let Google Analytics know what you are looking for and will give you the data based on what parameters you choose. The Goal details ask you to choose what you are looking for, which would be “Pages visited” on your site, the Condition and the Number of Pages Visited. Any of the options provided for each category provide different information for different tasks you are looking to achieve. For the Condition section, you can choose between greater than, equal to, or less than. ‘Greater than’ would be best if you were choosing to measure engagement, while ‘less than’ would allow you to measure the effectiveness of you site. The Number of Pages is really due to preference and what amount of pages you want to know are being viewed by users.
Visit duration has a lot of pros and cons to its use case with the main plus being it can track how long people are on your site with the con being that it only works on a loaded pages event. This means that while it can keep track of how long people are on your site it will only work if the viewers are loading new pages which means if they only see on page and leave you will see and time duration of zero seconds which can be misleading. This means that for sites where most of your content is on one page it is not a useful metric but with sites like blogs or shopping websites where there are plenty of clickable link this metric thrives in.
Applying Visit Duration
When using visit duration as a metric there is something important to keep in mind that time duration doesn’t mean success. For example if you run a shopping website and you see an avg. time duration much higher than maybe a week ago and you made changes, maybe you did find success or maybe the new site has become frustrating and confusing which can negatively impact your website traffic. For our site ProjectDigital visit duration can be very beneficial because it is very easy to navigate between blog to blog so it makes the metric much more accurate. In order to make it more accurate though we could filter out bounces meaning that all the people who visit one page and are done reading won’t be included into the data which accomplishes two things, one you get a much more accurate visit duration and two you also get to see how many people are visiting more than one page and who you are really connecting with.
Although it is pretty simple, visit duration goals can be very beneficial. Google Analytics shows a number of things about viewers such as demographics and amounts. Visual duration goals track how many people stay on a website for a certain amount of time. You can also set goals to track every visit that’s below a specific amount of time. One of the best benefits of this is that it helps websites answers customers questions as fast as possible. To set this up, it is necessary to set a goal on google analytics. After this you have to set the goal to be less or greater then a specific number of minutes. If you have a service based website then less minutes is a better choice because this means your website is helpful. For a content based site, longer is better, because that would mean people are enjoying youre content. After this just hit save, and you are good to go.
How these goals can benefit you’re company.
Setting these goals can be very beneficial to a company. These can greatly impact smaller companies. Say there service based, they would want a shorter visit duration. When they set their goals they are able to see exactly how long they are viewed for. If this companies website has long visual duration, it would help them realize the site needs some adjustment. This would tell them that their site isn’t necessarily easy to navigate and they had trouble finding what they were looking for. This could really help a company when determine what is the best options for their site.
If you are interested in learning about Google Analytic Goals, please read more below.
When you first start to use Google Analytics for your company, it can show you a great deal of information, such as the amount of viewers, the demographic of the viewers, and what those viewers like to do. It also can allow you to set goals for your website and its pages based on what the creator would like to track. One goal in particular that Google Analytics tracks is the visit duration goal. This goal allows the creator to see how many people are on the site for a certain amount of time. It can also be modified to only convert if the user stays on the webpage for a certain amount of time. To activate the goal you need to add a goal on Google Analytics. Then you must select whether you want the goal duration to be greater or less than a certain amount of minutes. If your website is content based then choosing greater than is more advantageous, meanwhile if your website is a service website then the less than option is a better choice. Then after you insert the amount of minutes/seconds, press save and the goal is now saved.
How Visit Duration Goals Can Impact your Company
Take for example a small content based website, like the one you are reading this blog on right now. They would be greatly impacted by being able to set a goal on the duration of the website views by each user. The longer the website view the more intrigued the visitor was with the content of the website. If the goal for this site, which would be “greater than” a certain amount of minutes was not met then we could conclude that the content wasn’t intriguing enough for the user. If the goal was met than we could conclude that it was interesting the the user in terms of screen time and we could continue to produce this type of content.
An interesting article on all four goal types is linked below!
What if I told you there’s a goal you’ll stick to better than your gym membership at New Years? It’s April, and most people have cancelled theirs already. But when it comes to your business, Google Analytics makes it easy to track your goals in 4 ways.
URL’s, time, page visits, and event tracking, with the help of a goal, can show you how your business is doing and give you visibility on areas of improvement.
Page visit tracking is arguably one of the more important goals in the bunch. This goal, depending on what you set for it, tracks the number of goals each visitor sees before they leave. These customizable goals allow you to set the number of pages it takes to trigger a track. Similar to the time and duration goal, this is telling of how long the sessions are on your site. If people are only seeing one page, this is a good indicator to evaluate your landing page and maybe make it a little more….. interesting.
For more information on how to curate your site to the best it can be, check out this article:
As you might have already discovered (or not) through poking around in Google Analytics when it comes to creating and setting goals, there are four main ways to track them:
Destination
Duration
Pages/Screens Per Session
Event
Do Your Goals Align With Your Objective(s)?
In this blog post, I will go into more depth on why using event goals can be very beneficial for your business, by using a real-life example. Of course, the other three goals that I listed are important as well, but choosing the right goal(s) really depends on what your business objective is. What do you want to know about your site?
Real-Life Implementation:
In my Digital Marketing Analytics course, we have been creating informational marketing blogs for the public to read, free of expense. So our goal is not to track what actions lead to the most revenue, but more of, how do we increase the number of users reading our blogs? Ideally, we would want to know about the actions being taken on our site, and what those actions can tell us about the content that we are posting. All of this can lead us to discover what blog topics are effective, so that we can write more of them, and which ones are not.
Using event goals to achieve your goal(s) is very beneficial because it allows you to see how users are interacting with your site by tracking actions like:
Button Clicks
Scroll Depth
Link Clicks
Video Clicks
Time Spent Viewing a Video, and so much more.
What Can The Collected Data Tell Me?
Now back to the blog site example. The site is called Project Digital, and yes, you are on that site right now. With event goals, we can set an event to measure scroll depth, very similar to creating tags in Google Tag Manager, if you have done so before. You would follow similar procedures regarding setting event conditions. You can set a category, action, label, and value, but remember you do not have to define all of them. Measuring scroll depth on the site blog’s is very beneficial as it can tell us how much content are users actually reading or looking at on a certain post. So we will be able to identify, which blogs contain information most valuable to the end-user, and which ones do not. As our overall goal is to get as many readers on our blog site, we would want to make sure that we post the content that our viewers want to see.
For more details and information on how to set-up each of the goals, and the importance of them, check out the links below!
Although they may seem like mortal enemies SEO and PPC can actually complement each other in many ways. For example those working on SEO can use AdWords to gain valuable keyword data, whilst those with PPC can use SEO traffic to build up credible remarketing lists. And that’s just for starters.
Compliments
Both SEO and PPC can learn a lot from each other when it comes to site speed. Page speed is not just an SEO-only metric, slow loading pages can cause serious problems for an AdWords account. An obvious benefit to both SEO and PPC is the dual use of keyword data. SEO’s can use PPC results to choose the best keywords to target naturally. PPC’s can use Google Analytics ‘site search’ data to target new keywords in their paid campaigns.
Working Together
Using both SEO and PPC is going to give you the best results. If you use both you eliminate another competitor from the SERP’s. If you run the two campaigns in conjunction with each other you will almost always see an increase in CTR.
