How to Track Goals in Analytics For Lead Generation Marketing

Lead Generation Marketing Goal

Houston SEO services know that once your website is up and running, one of the most important things to know is how it is functioning over time to achieve its intended purpose. There are many ways to determine the effectiveness of your site. Google Analytics is a very powerful tool for reporting site metrics, and that’s one of the web analysis tools we use here at Directory One. Every web site that exists for every type of business has its own specific structure and purpose; so custom metrics that are relevant to one type of business may be irrelevant to another. Make sure to tailor your custom metrics to the purpose of your site and business.

The first thing you need to do once you set up a Google Analytics Account and have the code up on your site reporting metrics, is set up Goals. This is a great way to track the effectiveness of your site’s lead generation marketing. A Goal registers a Conversion every time it is completed. This Conversion can be a URL Destination Page Goal such as a submitted form or shopping cart, a Time on Site Goal to track user interest. Goals can be further examined through Funnel Visualization, which shows where visitors abandoned the Goal in a series of pages such as a shopping cart checkout. Our Houston SEO web design prefers Goals for a destination url.

If your site has a URL destination page for a form that has multiple entrance URLs, custom reports may be more relevant than funnel visualization. It is possible to create multiple goals with a funnel designating each individual entrance URL. However, the metrics will be skewed and show conversions each time the URL destination is reached – whether or not the visitor actually reached it through the designated funnel URL.

A custom report can be created that tracks the landing pages for this conversion.  To do this, once you have logged into your account, navigate to “Custom Reports” on the left side of the Analytics navigation bar. Here you can further segment the data collected for your site beyond the basics of the dashboard, to the specifics of your site’s needs. Click to create a new advanced segment, and set up the metrics as “Total Goal Completions,” “Goal1 Conversions,” “Goal2 Conversions,” (etc. to the number of goals your site has) and the dimensions as “landing page.” If you like, you can set a secondary dimension to something meaningful to you, such as “source” or “visitor type.” Don’t forget to title the report – a specific name that you won’t forget such as “Goal Tracking from Website Landing Page.”

Some sites may have a pdf download as the goal. In this case, you would set up an Event Goal, and add an onClick event to the link using _trackEvent. To do this, you have to modify the site link with a snippet of code. This Event Goal tracks the number of downloads.

In order to find insights into the data reported on the Analytics site, you may need to set up additional custom reports and advanced segmentation. Remember that once Goals are set up, additional advanced segments and custom reports can always be created to analyze the data collected. Contact Houston SEO Directory One at (713) 465-0051 to learn more about advanced reporting and website analysis using Google Analytics. If you don’t have a website yet, or if you have problems with your site, our Houston website designer can build one for you quickly.