Google Goal Conversions – What Makes A Great Goal To Track?

We published an article back in July which was ‘How Setting Up Goal Conversions In Google Analytics Can Benefit Your Online Business’, since then we’ve been asked what makes a great Google Goal Conversion to track. Depending what your business is and how your website is set up will depend on what you should track. In this article, I will be discussing the different goals you can track and how they can benefit your business.

All websites can be spilt into two groups, E-Commerce websites and non-E-Commerce websites. Now depending on which group your business website fits into, will depend on which goals you can potentially track in Google Goal Conversions.

Let’s start with common E-Commerce goals…

Common E-Commerce Goals

Obviously the main goal for any E-Commerce business and website is to sell as many products as possible to the most amount of people. And of course you can track overall orders by looking into your order data on your website. But by setting up Google goal conversions it means you can view much more data and information for your website.

Here is a list of common E-commerce goals:

Orders – As stated above, tracking orders is the overall goal you want to have. From tracking this goal, you’re able to see how many orders have been placed on your website. You’re also able to monitor and review date information, so you can see when your best sales come in and when your sales are at their lowest. Again, like any data you get, you need to spend regular time monitoring and reviewing the data to see if you can spot any patterns.

Shopping Cart Views – A great goal to track as it means you can see how many people are getting to your shopping cart. You can review this data next to the total number of orders and you’ll be able to see how many people have dropped off from completing the order. This will indicate to you if there are any issues with the cart page and if you need to make any amendments to the page.

Product Page Views – Tracking certain product page views will show you if a particular product is popular or not. If you have a main product on your website that you want to promote and sell more of, you can review this data to see if it’s getting enough views. If views are down, you can push the product more on your Social Media for example.

Product Category Views – This follows the same rules as tracking a product page. If you can see that a product category isn’t getting enough views then you can spend more time promoting the category to help increase sales.

These are the main goals that you would want to track on your E-Commerce website. There are other pages across your website which you can track, it’s just the case of deciding what is important for your business and how best to track it.

Common Non E-Commerce Goals

For a business that does not have an E-Commerce website and offers a service instead to their customers, it can be a little less obvious when deciding on a goal to track. If you take time looking through your website, you will see openings as to what you can track to help you monitor and review your website.

Here is a list of common non E-commerce goals:

Enquiry Form Submissions – One of the easier and most popular elements to track on a website. This will allow you to quickly see how many people have completed and submitted your enquiry form on your website. Showing you whether or not you need to make updates to your form. If you have a long form and not many submissions then test a shorter form and see what the results are.

Business Service Submissions – Similar to the above point, but if you have specific service forms on your website, these can be great to track. Showing you how many people are wanting to learn more about your service. If submissions are low you can try moving the form to see if this improves submissions.

Contact Page Views – Tracking contact page views can be very beneficial as it shows you how many people are potentially looking for your contact details. You can match the views up to other data to focus on whether they contacted you or not. After this, you can run tests on making your contact number larger to see if more people call you.

Newsletter Signups – If you have a newsletter feature on your website it can be great to track as it will give you a quick insight as to whether people are signing up for it or not. If signups are low then you can update the graphic element and see what impact it has on signups.

Blog Subscription Signups – Similar to the above point, if you have a blog subscription signup you need to track this. Again, you can see how many people are signing up and whether or not you need to make updates to this element.

No matter what it is that you’re tracking on your website you need to make sure it’s an achievable thing that you can actually track. Creating separate ‘Thank You’ pages and linking forms to specific ones, can help you achieve this.