Google Analytics - Creating Goals

Goals are a fantastic way of helping measure success of your efforts and when used in conjunction with “Javascript Events” (I talked about this yesterday) can be very informational for affiliate marketers.

Goals are a very quick and easy way to get a good picture of your conversion rates and understanding your conversion rates is critical for being successful.

The following is how to set up a basic goal for a double opt in mailing list.

Step 1: Click on “Analytics Settings” to ensure you are on the settings page.

Step 2: Click on “Edit” under the settings for the site you want to create the goal for.

Step 3: Scroll down to “Conversion Goals and Funnel” and click on “edit” for G1 (goal 1)


Step 4: Select the “On” radio button of “Active Goal”, keep the “Match Type” and “Head Match” (click the question mark if you want an explanation of the different types of matchtypes).

In the “Goal URL” just put the file name of the page. So if your url to your opt in page that the reader goes to once they have verified their subscription is…

www.yourdomain.com/thanksforconfirming/

…then simply enter /thanksforconfirming/ as the Goal URL. Then name the “Goal URL” and just leave the rest as default.



Step 5: Scroll down and in the “Define Funnel”, in step 1 enter the URL of the initial page that the user goes to when they initially opt in. Click on the “required step” check box and then click “Save Changes”.

Step 6: Once your goal is set up, you will want to let it run for at least 48 hours before you start looking at the info but I would recommend at least 2 weeks of allowing the goal to run, to get a real sample of your opt in conversion rate.

To check your “goals” (conversions), click on “Goals” and then “Overview”

Purpose: By settings goals you are able to effectively understand the conversion rate of your opt in and this allows you to test different things, such as headlines, and track improvements. Understanding your conversions helps you to understand if your efforts are providing an effective ROI.

But COW what about Tracking Affiliates!!!

Hmmmm…. have not I given you enough… do I need to give more????

OK then.. Here goes

Goals for tracking how well an affiliate page is doing is very powerful and it is super easy to set up. Lets say for example you have a review on your site and you want to know what the conversion rate is of people landing on your page and visiting the actual affiliate product page. To do this you would first of all make sure you add the JavaScript event to the links on your pre sales page. You will want to make sure that all the links in the content that are using the affiliate link, use the same event code.

So you link might look like this…

<a href=”http://www.abc.com/yourid#” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/aff_event/abc_com’);”>

What I would then do is create my goal with your goal URL being:

/aff_event/abc_com

…and then your step 1 required step would be the URL of the actual presales page.

This will now track for you the percentage of people that visit your page and actually go to the affiliate product page.

SO what do you think.. you like this tip or what?

This is the last one in this Analytics series and I am thinking I am next going to get into creating effective presales material.

Part 1: Google Analytics - Installing
Part 2: Google Analytics - Keywords
Part 3: Google Analytics - Incoming Links
Part 4: Google Analytics - Outgoing Traffic
Part 5: Google Analytics - Content
Part 6: Google Analytics - Tracking with JavaScript Events
Part 7: Google Analytics - Creating Goals

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