Actionable Information From Goals, Funnels, and Filters

The fundamental challenge with Google Analytics (GA) is that in order to successfully utilize information produced from its advanced tracking, a website needs to define the wins it wants produced. These wins are going to significantly vary based on industry, but could include media plays, social connections, newsletter sign-ups, a minimum purchase value, or the amount of time spent on a specific screen or entire website. Digital marketers must determine what they want visitors to do and why that action item is a win for their company/organization.

Goals

GA’s Goals feature allows one to determine whether a visitor performed an action that ultimately affects your bottom line. Websites like personal blogs may not have the ability to generate significant profit, but they can certainly gain considerable social capital. Whether your content is shared through social networks and e-mail, or someone chooses to sign-up for a newsletter or subscribe to an RSS feed, your influence grows and the potential for fiscal profit in the future increases. It is important to not discount the importance of tracking goals even if your website is not currently focused on building profits.

In May 2013, GA released goal templates in an effort to help websites measure customer behavior and evaluate performance. This updated feature is a big help for those of you who are newer to the world of web metrics and need some help setting up goals on GA. Based on the industry you selected in your property settings, goal options are broadly categorized by four business objectives: revenue, acquisition, inquiry, and engagement.

GA Goal templates make setting up website goals easier than ever!

GA Goals provide considerable insight over both short and long-term timelines. For example, an online magazine may release content daily or weekly. Part of their revenue could come from advertisements, whether Google AdWords (though not the most attractive way to display ads on a website) or through any banner ad distributor. Additionally, they may offer content exclusively to paid subscribers. GA Goals allows the website to easily track the conversion rate for new paid subscribers. Additionally, the success of AdWords can also be easily tracked through the software.

Moving to a long-term timeline, however, and we get even better insight. GA allows you to track goal performance over time, whether it be week to week, month to month, quarter to quarter, or year to year. Perhaps new paid subscriptions are down this month after a good number last month. Has the frequency of posts declined? Are people engaged by what you are posting? Another important metric to track might be the number of social shares or even the number of comments on an average post from month to month.

As I have shared previously, my marketing experience is rooted within a church ministry context. A strong church website has multiple goals. Like all non-profit organizations, income is generated through the generosity of donors. Many church websites include the ability to give online. At my church, we are focused on educating donors about automatic recurring giving options. For our website, a major goal is to move individuals through the setup process and activate this feature on their account. Additionally, we want the website to resource prospective guests who are considering a visit to one of our campuses. Spending significant amounts of time on screens that specifically talk about campus culture, service times, and current events demonstrates that a person has significant interest in our church because of the time spent researching us.

 

Funnels

An example of a GA Funnel in the context of lead generation.

All processes have steps that individuals must take to ultimately complete them. When it comes to e-commerce websites, there is a standardized process for money to switch hands and goods to be delivered. In the case of a church website, many have a particular pathway for new guests to learn about the church and sign-up for additional information. GA’s Funnels allow digital marketers to track the path taken by visitors as they move along in the process previously set by you. This visual process allows you to “determine what steps are causing customer confusion or trouble, figure out what language or copy might be altering our customer’s emotional behavior during checkout or sign up, and to be aware of bugs, browser issues and other technical nuisances.”

GA will tell you the exact percentage of visitors who move along your funnel from start to finish. Keep in mind that you tell GA exactly which pages belong in the funnel. This means you need to clearly think through which pages are key to a user accomplishing a predefined goal. Why are you selecting a particular starting page, and are the successive pages in the funnel absolutely relevant to the process? For an e-commerce goal, this is fairly straightforward as a visitor moves from inquiring about a product to paying for it. For goals related to lead generation, more thought will be needed to define each important step.

 

Filters

Filters aid in the accuracy of all data pulled from GA reports. A variety of data can throw off a report. If your business is focused on a particular geographic area, then international hits are not going to provide relevant data that is actionable. You may have a social media strategy that is looking to generate leads from specific networks. In an effort to focus on that data, you might want to exclude referrals from social networks that you are less interested in. As you attempt to determine the reasons behind success or failure of your GA Goals and conversion rates, filters allow digital marketers the opportunity to look at visitors as particular people groups with similar characteristics rather than just one large mix of people.

 

Conclusion

Goals, funnels, and filters can be combined to determine where websites need to refocus the clarity of their communication, the accessibility of certain information, and the organization of their overall sitemap. It is important to define realistic website goals that build financial and social capital for its owner(s). Additionally, understanding the path your visitors are taking to reach those goals will allow digital marketers to determine whether or not the predetermined is on target or convoluted. Finally, filters allow for better segmentation of information to provide a more detailed and clear picture of what is really happening on a website.