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!
Additional Resources:
https://www.monsterinsights.com/types-of-goals-in-google-analytics/