Google Analytics: Setting Goals and Funnel Verification

After a long time here we give an article related to Google Analytics and explaining about the setting google analytics goals and verifying vizualization funnels. This article is also something deals about the Google Analtics in depth and will explore Google Analytic’s beneficial features to help you get the most out of this powerful and free web tool.

Defining Your Goals:

The mani reason for setting a goal is to measure the success rate for any website. To analyse the success rate of a website and the goal measures here we are going to take an e-commerce website as an example. The main aim of ecommerce sites is to sell goods to their visitors. Therefore, a completed goal would be a successful sale on their website.

Here we explain you what is meant by a goal and what your site goals are.

• What do you want to measure?
• What are the factors that determine the success of a website?
• Are you after sales?
• Are you wanting to generate enquiries from prospective clients that want to hire you?
• Or do you simply want visitors to click around and spend more time on your site reading articles?

You need to know how to measure your goals, once you know your goal (or goals). For example, an ecommerce site might set up their “order confirmation” page as their goal success, because this page usually comes into act only after the finished sale.

Adding a Goal in Google Analytics:

If you are here for the first time and haven’t yet added goals, then loginto Google Analytics and navigate to the Goals section at the left hand side. Then click on the set up goals and funnels link to get started.

After click ing the link, then it takes to the Analytics settings page, where you can find goals settings options below the main website profile information section. You can group your goals together with goal sets, but we start here with setting up a goal with the basic one. Click on the Add goal link on the left, preferably on Goals (set1).

After doing that, you’ll be takesn to the Goal Settings page.

Here give your goal a name, make it as active to track the goals, and then choose a position; Set 1, Goal 1, for example, refers to your first set of goals, with “Goal 1″ indicating that this is your primary goal.

You will then see three types of goals to choose from the options given under the goal type.

First Option URL Destination:

URL Destination is the most common option used by everyone to set their goal to get a specific page to visit. For example, a completed checkout page in an ecommerce site.

Time on Site:

The Time on Site goal type will track users who spend either more or less than a specified amount of time on the site.

Pages/Visit:

Pages/Visit keeps track of people who visit more than, less than or an exact number of pages on the site.

Time on Site and Pages/Visit will give you a single option aside from setting the goal value.

Goal Details:

For each goal type, there are certain goal details that you can set to customize your goal to get the required result.

Goal Value:

As an example we take an website enquiry, on average it gives a return of $10 for each enquiry from the website and then we set set the goal value to $10. In most cases, this is just an estimate also you can set to a value “0″ for unknown value. If this is the case of an e-commerce website then for an variable amount for the completed checkout, you can set the goal value to your average value in the box. If you have set up with Time on Site or Pages/Visit as your goal type then you are done and you can now save your settings.

If you have chosen URL Destination as a goal type, read on to complete few more steps to complete the goal settings.

Match Type:

With the URL destination we have still 3 more match type options: Head Match, Exact Match, Regular Expression Match.

Head Match: If your goal page requires some dynamic variables in the URL that can change for each and every product, such as /checkout/?page=1&basket=50036, then using Head Match will match the starting string of the URL (/checkout/).

Exact Match: If your goal page is a static URL that doesn’t change, such as /contact/success.php, for example, then you’ll want to go for Exact Match.

Regular Expression Match: If the start of the URL could change for some reason, then you should use Regular Expression Match this is useful with URL cases such as /product1/checkout.php and /product2/checkout.php.

Which one to use on which websites depend on how much variety there is in the URL or your goal page.

Now we have completed with the goals and now let’s move forward with setting funnels.

Setting up funnel:

What are funnels? For certain goal pages, there is route (pages) that users must go through to get to your goal page.

Let’s take a previous e-commerce website with checkout process as an example: You add something to the basket (basket.php), enter your shipping details (shipping_details.php), add your payment details (payment.php), and when you submit your order to go to your confirmation page (confirmation.php) (which is your goal page).

This path is known as a funnel process, and by tracking people progress through a funnel, you can find the problems and where people are leaving the process. This is most often used way for checkout processes to see where people are dropping their shopping cart baskets. Initially, you need to map out the pages of your process and to set your funnel settings. For example, your checkout process might have these pages:

• basket.php
• shipping_details.php
• payment.php
• confirmation.php

After setting your funnels, then it’s time to review your goals.

Reviewing Goals:

So your goals are all set up, now how do you actually get information from them?

You can see your goal data from the sites overview page. Under the headings you’ll see a completed goals column which gives you a basicinformation which is enough for a quick glance. But let’s have a deeper look. The basic goal page, which is obtained by clicking on Goals on the main left-hand menu, provides the immediate information you need at your fingertips.

You are able to see the standard Google trend timeline and the breakdown of how many visitors completed goals and this is more useful when you have multiple conversions set up. You’ll then get the conversion rate and the goal value if you’ve entered a value for a conversion while setting up goal. So moving down the left hand side, you now have a number of extra menu options that we’ll look at in turn.

Total Conversions:

This shows you the total number of conversions and for a particular time period for the date which you have selected. This gives an easy visual comparison of better performing days for goal conversions.

Conversion Rate:

This looks somthing similar to the total conversions, right? Well, it is similar, and on sites that don’t have massive differences in traffic from day to day, they’ll look almost identical. However, the total conversions on a page was based on the number of conversions took place per day. Let’s see an example, when seeing the total convertation i.e. 40 conversions being larger than 10, for instance, conversion rate is based on the number of conversions to the total visits for that day. So 40 conversions out of 120 is a rate of 25% and 10 out of 20 is 50%, so the weighting now changes.

Goal Verification Path:

This will list all the pages where the completed goal was carried on. If you’ve used an absolute path for setting goal conversion (e.g. /contact/thanks.php) then the data should be same for all. But if you’ve used a head match and the end of the URL varies, then this will show different URL for each goal conversion comes from. For example: if you have a shopping cart and the end of the URL is just the cart id, it won’t be much use as they’ll all be different, but if you have something more meaningful in the URL—lets say the source of the site visit or conversions on different sub domains—then it can become useful. If you have golf.shop.com/finished and football.shop.com/finished, you can quickly compare where your conversions are happening.

Reverse Goal Path:

This data shows the pages where people landed on and thus leading to a completed goal page. This is useful for seeing which pages are funneling more conversions, and for those results showing (entrance), which landing pages are funneling those conversions.

So as an example, we have thanks.php set as our conversion:

• (entrance) > index.php > contact.php > thanks.php

This shows that the visitor landing on the homepage went next to the contact page and then completed a conversion; you can quickly see which pages funnel in more conversions and easily start to work out which pages are more successful to understand how you can improve other pages.

Goal Value:

If you have various goals set up with different values, you can use this page to quickly see which days are more profitable and then use other tools to dig down into why.

Goal Abandoned Funnels:

This page gives you an overview of the number of people who enter the goal conversion funnel, but exit without completing a goal. You can quickly see how many potential conversions your site is losing and again compare over the time period you have selected.

Funnel Visualization:

Once you open up this page, it is self-explanatory: the usual timeline chart at the top of the page and then a flow diagram through the funnel you set up. At each stage, you can see how many people enter at that stage, how many people are continuing in the funnel from the previous stage, how many people leave at that stage without completing, and perhaps most importantly, where they are going. This is hugely useful for analyzing things such as checkout processes and seeing where users abandon their shopping carts and where they go. For instance, if you have the first stage as the shopping basket, it wouldn’t be too alarming to see people exiting from there to continue browsing the site. But if they’re exiting all together, maybe something on the shopping cart page is making them drop from the process?. You can then look and see where people are dropping out and this can easily highlight problematic or broken forms and links or long-winded pages that people simply give up on.

Tools to Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

Arount the world mobile has become the most important part in everyone’s day today life. With the growing adoption of smart phones, more and more people are browsing the internet on their mobile device. This technology helped to reduce the time spent and waiting for a browsing center, till we reach home/office to use internet. Even though some phones, like the iPhone, have browsers that make viewing regular webpages suitable, a mobile version of your website can mean several benefits, like faster load times, and ensuring your content can be viewed on a wider range of phones.

Creating a mobile version of WDL has been on my to-do list for a while now, but yet there is still no mobile version of this site. Sensing that I’ve been putting it off for far too long, I’ve started to do research on the best mobile solution which can be used for all websites. I’ve found that there are a number of solutions out there that make it easy to go mobile with your website, but here are eleven of the best.

WPtouch

WPtouch is a mobile theme for your WordPress website. Modeled after Apple’s app store design specs, it loads lightning fast and shows your content beautifully, without interfering with your regular site theme. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, or BlackBerry Storm touch mobile device.

MoFuse

MoFuse is currently being used by over 23,000 blogs for their mobile versions. Some notable “big-name” sites are Mashable and Read Write Web. MoFuse gives you tools to promote your content, build and measure your audience, and even make money. Read the rest of this entry »

Collection of Website Analytics Tool Resources

For every webmaster and website owner the important thing about their websites how they act in search engines as well from other resources. So to know about the various factors we need to have analytics. In having mind all those tracking tools here we have listed some great tools which help you to track your websites. See below and start using and see the differences in the data as well you website status.

JAWStats

If you like Awstats, you will certainly appreciate JAWStats as well. JAWStats runs in conjunction with Awstats and produces more graphics than Awstats.

goingup!

Goingup! is one more tool website stats freaks will love because it offers many kinds of statistical data, which is represented in visually attractive ways. A substantial part of the functionality of goingup! is SEO-related, so if you don’t use any other SEO-tools, this tool will do this job as well.

Clicky

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