There is arguably no free resource that’s more valuable to today’s online business than the Google Analytics platform. It’s a tool that would normally cost thousands of dollars per year, but is Google’s gift to you. Having said that, are you making the most out of the platform by tapping into the “goals” feature?
Tracking pageviews is certainly interesting, but really isn’t that helpful to understanding your business. If you want to know how your website is performing and how customers are responding, you need to set goals.
In Google Analytics, there are four primary ways to track goals: destination, duration, pages per session, and events. Event goals are especially valuable, as they give you specific insights into how individual events are performing. Depending on the events you have set up in the Google Analytics platform, here are 10 creative uses worth trying.
1. Video Engagement And Duration
It’s one thing to know someone clicked on a video. It’s another thing entirely to understand how they interacted with the video. Not only can you set goals to track the video duration, but you can also set different controls to understand when viewers are playing, pausing, and stopping.
2. Specific Link Engagement
Let’s say you have a landing page and on that page there are multiple links pointing to the same sales page. One is hyperlinked within a paragraph of text, another is embedded into a banner at the top of a page, and another is included in a CTA button at the bottom. Normally, you can only tell when people have clicked over to the sales page. With the right goal, you can know exactly which of the three links is being clicked the most.
3. Form Field Abandonment
There’s a fine line between requiring too many fields on a form and not collecting enough information. Ordinarily you only know if a visitor does or doesn’t fill out the form. However, did you know that you can trigger an event when a user interacts with the form and then track how far they’ve progressed through the form?
4. Add-to-basket Conversion
Shopping cart abandonment is a crucial metric that ecommerce businesses have to track in order to better understand conversion rates. This can be analyzed as an event goal by tracking the add-to-basket conversion rate.
5. Tabbed Navigation
Does your landing page have a tabbed widget with multiple options for visitors? Understanding which tabs users are clicking on can help you refine your approach and deliver the right content. Set up a tabbed navigation goal to get the exact breakdown
6. Comments
Blog post comments are a major engagement signal. Setting up a goal to track which users are leaving comments can give you some insight into what makes visitors more likely to engage in this fashion.
7. Scroll Tracking
When you have a long blog post with an important CTA at the end, pageviews are usually a pretty useless metric. The goal you really need to be tracking is how far users are scrolling down before bouncing or converting.
8. Product Page Interactions
If you sell products with lots of different variations, then it’s helpful to know what your customers are searching for. With the right goal, you can track product page interactions and gain valuable insights into which sizes, colors, and materials customers are selecting in drop down menus.
9. Successful Logins
One of the trickiest parts about tracking engagement is trying to manage multiple domains that are tracked separately. With the right goal, you can see when a user clicks on a login button – even when it takes them to another domain. Under normal circumstances, this would count as a bounce.
10. Review And Rating Clicks
Everyone knows that social proof plays a valuable role in conversions, but how do you know which elements matter most to your users? Set up a goal to understand when different reviews and ratings are clicked for specific products.
Become A Master Goal Setter
It doesn’t matter what aspect of business you’re dealing with, setting goals and tracking your progress towards them plays a critically important role in being successful both in the short-term and long-term. Thankfully, Google Analytics makes it easy to set and track website goals. It’s a free resource that can add tons of value to your bottom line when properly leveraged. Make sure you’re taking full advantage of it!
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* Adapted lead image: 
Public Domain, pixabay.com via getstencil.com
