In this training for Google Analytics we will go through Google Analytics Goals and Conversions setup for more advanced tracking. Tracking your goals is critical to monitoring performance from your PPC ads, SEO, email marketing, and any other marketing channels you need to evaluate. 

Learn more about setting up goals tracking to make sure you are getting a better ROI from your PPC ads and other marketing channels. 

Video Transcript:

okay in this video we’re going to go through google analytics training this is actually part of our course linked down in the description below this is google analytics goals and conversions so we’ll walk you through setting up goals inside of google analytics all the different goals there are you can do the custom events you can do destination url uh subtract tracking form submissions or people signing up for your email newsletter or sales for e-commerce we’ll go through all the most common ways to set up goals in analytics that way you have everything set up ready to go if you’re running ads or doing seo you’ll have all the tracking in there so this again this is from our actual training course so we’re going to walk you through a sample of that for getting started with setting up basic goals in google analytics in this part one video

okay in this next training we’re going to go through setting up tracking goals inside google analytics so first go over best practices for google analytics goals and then we’ll do a walk through on setting up tracking goals inside google analytics so let’s start off with best practices for goals inside google analytics things you want to remember while you’re setting these up or just learn more about them if you’re not familiar with setting up goals in google analytics so you’ll typically set up custom goals when you go in and set up the different options uh this is so you can decide exactly what type of goal you want to track there are some presets in there but most commonly you’re going to do a custom goal and this is most commonly used to track if a website visitor submits a form there’s i mean there’s lots of other things you can track but most the time for lead generation that’s when you do a custom forum setup you want to know if someone booked a demo they booked a call with your sales team uh or if you’re connecting it to third-party software you want to know did they make a phone call or just something that indicates uh they they became a new lead so that’s very common to track lead generation by submitting a form as a goal inside google analytics so you know if you’re actually getting any leads if you’re getting any new business new clients things like that from your website

e-commerce tracking is actually enabled inside the e-commerce settings tab this typically links directly to your platform such as shopify magento whatever you’re using so e-commerce tracking has its own setting the uh goal setup that’s more so if you’re doing something besides e-commerce and you need to track unique action uh typically if they submitted a form so with goals you’re just setting up div tracking on did a person do a specific action so they came to your website did they fill out the form or did they call you or did they book a demo or something like that you want to know that so you know how many leads you’ve got and it are your advertising dollars turning into more business you can also import all the goals into google ads that way the data is shared so you know inside the google ads platform how everything’s working but if you have the goals set up you can also see how many goals are being completed from other sources if you’re also doing seo email facebook youtube different things like that you can see how many goals or forms or sales came from other sources as well

also something that’s best practice that for some reason has gone away when you’re setting up a web form always have the form redirect to a new thank you page url rather than having just display a pop-up indicating the form was successfully submitted for some reason a lot of forms especially with wordpress and other website builders they just pop up your form was submitted and then it disappears um when you when you redirect to a confirmation url a different page it’s significantly easier to track actually if it doesn’t have that redirect it it’s actually very very complicated to set that up and you’ll need a programmer to do that and even then they’ll have a difficult time doing the custom code if you redirect it to a new url it’s extremely easy to track whether or not someone submitted a form or made a purchase so this is great for setting up remarketing audiences meaning if they reach that thank you page you can put them in a different audience to block them or re-target them later with something else and honestly it’s just a better user experience the pop-up’s kind of confusing or it could get blocked

when you go to a thank you page there’s an option to upsell or just explain what happens next you can put a video thank you for scheduling a demo uh thank you for reaching out our sales team will contact you shortly to tell you more about our products or services i mean having a thank you page really any legitimate company will have one the pop-up is kind of a lazy way to just uh just say the form was submitted it’s a very bad user experience it’s hard to track so if your form does not redirect definitely switch the plug-in buy a new one change the setting or redo it or tell your web developer it has to redirect to a new url when the form is submitted it’s a much better user experience there’s opportunities for upselling for multi-part forms if you want to get more information you can have a small form on the front and more information on the back end of it the tracking is much easier it’s just all around a better experience so make sure you redirect to a confirmation url like a thank you page do not leave it on the default or it just pops up and says the form submitted successfully

so this training video is actually going to be a sample from our actual training program so you can get a better idea of what’s in here what we offer some of these are more uh beginner lessons and they’ll go into more advanced so if you need more advanced training we do have a link below in the description that will give you access to discounts and different things like that from our advanced training and all of our different programs that’s going to be a link down in the description below so different type of custom custom goals include a destination meaning they reached a certain part of your website most commonly yourwebsite.com thank you or confirmation or success or something like that if they reach that specific url you know they made a purchase or they submitted a form or they scheduled the demo or they signed up whatever it is if they reach that destination you count that as a goal that’s why it’s critical to redirect to this destination otherwise you’re going to have a very hard time setting up tracking duration

that’s kind of a secondary goal i wouldn’t really optimize that it’s just something you you might want to set up to be aware of if the duration is at least 30 seconds or one minute i might want to keep an eye on that so people are on the site a longer time but not really a primary objective same thing with pages screens per session you know it’s good to have people go to three four five different pages something like that especially with e-commerce but again not really a goal to optimize for make sure people go to lots of pages you want to make sure you’re usually going to do destination or event making sure they got to thank you page or order confirmation page uh an event that’s something else uh you could track as kind of a smaller goal you know did they watch the video um did they click a certain button did they uh reach a certain part of your page different things like that you just it’s a secondary goal to wonder kind of what they’re doing on the page but most of the time you’re going to set up the destination and it’s going to be for the thank you page or the order confirmation page whatever the url is they go to after completing the action so their their order finished or they filled out the form that’s the most common one you’re going to set up and optimize all of your advertising for these other ones are just good secondary ones to add to have some more info

so with the destination custom goal it does have a couple of different options it’s equals to this uses the exact url so if it doesn’t change uh like it’s just uh thank you or something like that you can use that begins with meaning the first part of it is com yourwebsite.com thank you that’s if um you have a crm or you have different tracking where it adds a bunch of code at the end of the url maybe the person’s name where they’re from all this other stuff is added per user that’s when you would do begins with or maybe the product they purchased is towards the end begins with might be a better option or you might even use a regular expression this is really similar to the url contains uh like facebook ads and other ones duke uh contains so regular expression you would just put in uh thank you or think dash u or confirmation just one word and if the url contains that one word then it’s going to count it so just uh be careful with that if for some reason thank you is in some other random url like maybe a blog or maybe a thank you sale to current customers or something like that you don’t want to trigger that but a regular expression can be used if the url just contains thank you or confirmation or thank you order completed something like that you don’t have to type in the whole url just the part of it that contains whatever it is you’re trying to track so it just kind of depends on how your website’s uh set up i mean you’ll usually do begins with or regular expression because a lot of different tracking will add a bunch of stuff to the end of the url so exact or sorry equals two won’t work in that case

another option would be an event custom goal if you are setting this up it’s a lot more complicated and you’ll need some custom code so you need a developer that can write code or you’ll know how to use google tag manager which is a lot more advanced or maybe even third-party software will will give you the instructions for how to set this up but once you have it set up somewhere else this is where you put everything into google analytics so you have the category kind of what it is for example it’s a button the category is it’s a button the action is they clicked it so category button action clicked and you could put a label on a value if you want but maybe there’s there’s a button at the bottom to get more info or maybe you have play a video or something like that to where you want to know did somebody take an action it’s not submitting a form it’s not making a purchase it’s not reached a certain url because there’s other setups that will do that it’s something unique often times it’s like when they click on a button for or this is what you have to do if you don’t do the url redirect on your form this is significantly more complicated and it doesn’t always work to track if the button was clicked for submitting a form just do the url instead but uh if you are familiar with this or you have third-party software that will track this call tracking software uses this the category is call uh the action is you know they called you uh or sorry call tracking and the action is a phone call so if you have call tracking it uses this uh you’ll create a custom event and depending on the software it tells you exactly what to put in here and connect at all but uh events are just kind of if it doesn’t fall into a destination url then it would track as a event so it’s much more complicated if you’re just doing form submissions or something you don’t need to do this if you’re doing call tracking software they’ll walk you through exactly what to put in here and then save it so it’ll track all the calls on your website

also as i mentioned before uh different crms call tracking software and other third party tools can be imported to google analytics as goals we won’t get into that because the third party software it’ll either link directly to it and just you’ll do a basic setup or it’ll walk you through with screenshots and videos or their support walk you through how to connect it to your google analytics account so i i mean this this tracking includes uh phone calls on your actual website maybe a completed sale from your leads uh not e-commerce meaning they were a lead and they made a purchase and became a custer a month later or something like that or just other offline goal completions can be imported into google analytics through third-party tools just in case you have some goals you want to track that don’t necessarily happen directly on your website or it needs more software to be able to track that like a phone call

so when you’re looking at your website traffic this is just a source medium report this is the most common one to look at just a sample here your conversions you could select all goals or a specific goal maybe did they book an appointment or did they download a white paper or did they make it to the directions page you can separate that and it’ll show you how many goal completions there were per source so maybe organic a lot of people are just downloading a white paper getting directions with google ads a lot of people you can shift it to a different goal to see how many people are buying or how many people are booking an appointment or you could just look at all the goals at the same time but google analytics will separate all the different data per source so you can see which goals and how many goals are coming from each source

so next we’ll look at setting up tracking goals inside your google analytics account so do a quick walk through on adding some of the different goals the more common ones for tracking your your website traffic

so we’re inside our google analytics test account normally you’d have traffic data but this is just a sample website so it doesn’t doesn’t have anything on here you go to the left and click on admin and this has a we have other videos going through all these different setups but uh it’d be over here on the right under goals so you’d create a new goal i’ll walk you through some of the basics maybe this one’s just submitted form uh or book demo or something like that here’s all the different options we talked about uh let’s let’s do destination in this case even the example right here it says thanks that’s the most common one by far so submit it a form that’s just the internal title whatever you want to call it that makes sense make sure you give it uh you know book demo free trial something you can tell what this is don’t just say goal 1 and the goal 2 and goal 3 you won’t know what they are and this is internal nobody else sees it then click continue so this is uh the destination url you can put in equals to begins with or regular expression uh we’ll just do begins with to make it simpler and if you look here the um the example it knows the first part of your website www dot thank you it tells you you don’t have to put in that entire url just put what’s after that so uh for example the example.com forward slash that’s what it’s saying it already knows your website name it just wants to know the rest of the address so you don’t need the entire thing uh like it says here you would just need the thank you part so uh begins with thank you and the reason we’re doing begins with is sometimes you see uh you know all this other product id and then maybe um you know source and then all this other stuff at the end of the url for tracking

so it’s going to change per person that’s why we’re just doing begins with so it already knows the full name of our website we don’t need the ws and everything it just wants to know what specific page was it it’s the thank you page or it might be the confirmation page all this is is the the url the address whatever it goes to for example after the form is submitted so maybe it just goes to confirmation or it goes to thank you or it goes to form submitted successfully whatever it is on your website that’s what you’re going to put into here uh the the value in the funnel that’s a little bit more complicated if you want to analyze all the different steps you don’t have to do that you can verify it to see if someone actually submitted the form you should have the setup before you run advertising in the first place but you can double check just to see if it actually tracked it and then click save so now you have submitted form which what it’s doing you can click on it again click on the details if someone gets to the page uh the url that has confirmation in it it begins with that all the rest of it at the end uh doesn’t really matter just it begins with confirmation if they reach that page then you’re tracking it as a goal and the only way to reach that page is if you submitted a form that’s why it’s critical to redirect your forms to a confirmation page otherwise this is a nightmare to set up tracking and it doesn’t always work so always redirect it to a confirmation page redo your form hire a programmer to do it buy a different plugin make sure you can redirect it to a different url

so that’s the most common one by far if they submitted a form you can do different forms if they uh booked a sales call if they requested more info if they scheduled a demo if they signed up for a free trial you would want to separate those into different uh goals especially if they’re different levels you know there’s the free trial and there’s book the sales call or book to demo uh or signed up for the webinar you’d want to make sure that all these different ones have different urls so maybe um signed up for a webinar or something like that or or whatever the url is for that or booked a demo um maybe book demo or success or something like that make sure they have different thank you pages so you know did they book a demo did they book a sales call did they sign up for the webinar what exactly did they do and that’s that’s why you want to have all these different forms that go to different thank you pages makes the tracking much much easier so most commonly you put in one or two of these uh destination url goals so you know did someone reach the confirmation page or the thank you page uh for third-party software like call tracking that’s going to be an event um you’ll just go right here to event or sorry let’s just do uh it’s a phone call event click continue and your call tracking software or your crm or your email software if they’re saying set up an event

they’ll tell you what to put in the category action label value uh or if you want to track a different value maybe it’s a different sale or something like total or number like that the third party software will walk you through what to put in here and then just click save and it will track your custom goal inside of google analytics so if it’s a phone call or whatever it is they’ll tell you what to put so these will track inside of google analytics but uh you definitely want to import them into google ads and connect google analytics to google ads so you have uh data in both platforms so you have a different video on how to do that there’s a lot of different steps and things you can import so that’s in the connecting google analytics and google ads video but this is the basics of setting up goals so you can start tracking your goals from your website traffic and your different marketing efforts to know it is it actually paying off and getting more customers or more sales alright everyone thanks so much for watching our ppc ads training video uh if you want more videos go ahead and hit the subscribe button like this video if you found it useful and any questions post them in the comments down below we also have additional training uh promos links things like that in the description as well as any other tools for ppc tools or software that we referenced in our videos so thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you in the next video