I’ve found many casual analytics users don’t actually use Goals, when they really should, and could get a lot of great insight from them. Goals not only give you focus and can help your business/pursuits in general, but they also help you to keep track of what works and what doesn’t, based on what people actually choose to do. If you knew how many more people signed up for your newsletter or gave you a lead based on the keyword they typed to find you, that would help you  to focus your efforts on those keywords. If you knew what pages made more of your visitors sign up, buy something, or download something, you could work on other pages that don’t perform as well and follow the successful pages’ lead.

Setting up goals is super easy, especially in my super tutorial:

Super Goals Tutorial

1) Decide what your “Goal” will be. Here are some ideas:

    * Fill out form

    * Buy something

    * Download something

    * Add something to shopping cart

    * Click on a link

    * Do a search

2) On the main page of your sites, click on “edit” for the site you want to set up a goal on, and then find Goal 1 and click “Edit”.

3) Set Active Goal to ON. Always be sure to check this, I’ve gone days trying to figure out why no goal conversions came in, later to find out this was set to OFF.

4) Decide what type of match it will be. Essentially I just use “exact match” for most everything, so that’s where you should start.

5) For your goal URL you can do one of two things: (a) Put in an actual URL like “/somedir/thankspage.html” where thankspage.html is the page that only gets viewed if there was a conversion, or (b) for links, downloads, or other goals that don’t go to an actual content page, make up a name (make sure it doesn’t match an actual directory or page) like “/goal/download/”. If you make up a name (b) you’ll need to make sure to do step 5.

(Only do step 6 if you opted for option (b) in step 5 above)

6) Edit the page that has the link that you need to track being clicked and add the following code to the “a” tag:

onClick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/goal/download/');"

7) If there is a value to your goal (like $0.10 every click or sign up) then you can fill in “Goal Value”. Leave the rest for now, and click Save.

That’s it! There are some other options with funneling, but we’ll touch on that another time.

Now the fun begins where you get to watch your conversions come in. Just click on the “Goals” link on the left and you can view all sorts of stats revolving around your goals.