GA Checklist: Setting up goals & funnels

Like everybody else, you’ve created your website with a purpose. Measuring how much your website meets your desired purpose is what goal & funnels setup is all about. Google Analytics allows you to define up to 20 goals of the following types:

• URL destination: how many visitors get to a page that confirms you they have finished a desired action (e.g. Thank You for Buying page);
• Time on site: How many visitors spend on your website more than the time you desire them to;
• Pages/Visit: How many visitors get to visit more than the number of pages / visit that you desire them to.

From the 3 types, the first one might give you some head ache, especially if you website is not static HTML, which is very likely. For this you will need to get some RegEX skills. If the thought of this scares you, just ask an analytics consultant to give you a hand (you can always give it a try on an analytics discussion group).

If you do have some RegEX skills, before setting up the goal and funnel just validate it using the method from the ROI Revolution Blog.

eCommerce Tracking: If your website has or is an online store, than this feature offered by Google Analytics is a must. It’s one of the few things that might need some implementations in your website Thank You for buying page, but it is 100% worth it.

You’ll get reports about your sales, revenue, products, sales referrers, you name it. Here is the official video on how to set it up. Most probably you are using a third party gateway for your transactions so make sure you have cross domain tracking activated in order not to lose referrer data. Here is the documentation.

Bonus: RegEx help. To be honest, a couple of years when I saw RegEX rules, having very little programming background than, I thought that they were from another planet. They just made no sense for me. The best resources for me were the LunaMetrics blog with their RegEX series (old but good stuff) and a RegEX tool (or this one) for trying things out on the fly.

This article is part of the Google Analytics Implementation Checklist series. Here are the articles from the rest of the series:

• Implement the right tracking code and make sure you track your whole website
• Accuracy in tracking traffic sources
• Bonus tracking tips and hacks (filters, segments and others)