“Every
successful web metrics story starts with a very simple question: “Why do you
exist? ... This question is asking why your business (or non-profit
organization) exists. In a world where we are blessed with more data than God
herself wanted us to have, it is often easy to skip past that question and just
jump into reporting metrics. After all, metrics are so easy to find.” (Kaushik,
2010).
Kaushik,
with his years of experience, has learned that for a business to be successful in
its data collection and interpretation efforts it is important to “focus on a
critical few metrics” in order to shape data interpretation and subsequently
the conversation of the metrics with bosses and team members. Kaushik warns
that “you shouldn’t have more than three of four critical metrics” (2012). If
you have more, he says, then you are not doing your job well.
It
is important to keep the above information in mind when beginning to look at
goals towards conversion on a given site. This post will focus on creating
Goals in Google Analytics. It will also look briefly at Funnels and Filters.
Goals
I
explored the Goal functionality of Google Analytics this past week and
discovered some of the key functionality. When setting up Goals on Google
Analytics, there are 4 different of types of Goals a user can create:
Destination, Duration, Pages/Screens per visit, and Events. In this post I will
discuss the two I tested on my site: Destination Goals & Duration Goals.
This
function allows you to set goals around a specific page with a unique URI that
you want your visitors to visit. For example, on my page, I wanted to test how
many people I could direct to my latest post—a post I made about the use of “filter
bubbles” by companies like Google and Facebook. To do this, I set up a Destination type Goal
and set “/2013/07/what-google-and-facebook-are-hiding.html,” as the URI of my
post as the destination.
By
setting this up as a goal, I can now see how many people who visit the site go
to that specific page. Here is the result after driving some traffic to the
site through social media posts:
As
you can see, the total number of completions for this goal was 9. That created
a conversion rate of 18.75%.
Since
the benefit of this for my blog is not that obvious, let us look at an example
of where a Destination Goal would be considered a key metric:
Let
me pretend that my site sold cat toys and related products. For the month of
May, I have an overstock of 5 items that I want to increase sales of. To do
this, I create a special page called “May Specials—35% off!” As a website
owner, I can create a goal to drive at least 30% of the website visitors to at
least visit this page. Each week, I test a different visual strategy to draw
attention to the tab: In the first week, I use arrows to point to the tab. In
the second week, I use highlighted colors. In the third week, I use a colorful
banner. In the fourth week, I use a pop up.
By
analyzing the goal completion rate, I can see which approach worked best to
drive traffic to the May Specials URI. I can also look at the Traffic Flow to
see the path visitors took to reach the May Specials tab in order to better
understand Drop Off. By constantly comparing different approaches to the goal
rates, I can refine optimization strategies and better understand visitor
behavior.
2. Duration
A
Duration Goal allows you to set a certain time limit that you want visitors to
spend on your site or a page on your site. For example, on my site this week, I
set a goal to have viewers spend 30 seconds or more on my site. One of the
problems I noticed in the beginning of my installation of GA is that the
engagement on my site was extremely low. Since the site is informational in
nature, I wanted to understand what percentage of visitors were actually logging
on and reading the content. Here are my results after some promotional efforts
on social media sites:
As
you can see, I had a total of 5 visitors stay on for 30 seconds of more. That
results is a conversion rate of 10.42%. I can also see what specific posts were
generating the goals. In this instance, the “What Google and Facebook are
Hiding” post drove the highest number of goal completions.
The
benefits of this metric are a little more obvious, even for an informational
site like mine. In general, we want visitors to stay longer and engage with the
site at a deeper level. By setting specific duration goals, we can see what
percentage of visitors are sticking around for a desirable amount of time.
Funnels
“A funnel
represents the path you expect visitors to take on their way to converting to
the goal.” (P.I. Reed School of Journalism, 2013).
Funnels help data managers understand how often
visitors abandon goals and the paths they take to arrive at the goal or the path
they took after they left the goal. Specifically for e-commerce websites,
understanding funnels can be of great importance. For example, they inform
continued optimization to check-out processes to increase final purchase and
conversion rates.
Filters
“…filters can be set up to exclude visits from
particular IP addresses, to report only on a subdomain or directory, or to take
dynamic page URLs and convert them into readable text strings. “(P.I. Reed School of Journalism, 2013).
A filter allows for inclusion or exclusion of
certain sources of traffic. For example, a filter can improve the accuracy of a
reporting by excluding certain IP address. To give an example, a filter can be
set up to exclude information about a website tester, as he or she would be
creating lots of traffic to a site that would affect conversion rates and
statistics if counted as a regular visitor.
Conclusion:
Goals,
funnels, and filters help create data that can be understood on a mico-level.
By isolating certain metrics that have been defined as key metrics for your
website, analyzing them can inform effective and efficient optimization. In
short, goals, filters, and funnels allow for targeted analysis, which can be
used to understand conversion successes or failures.
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