You want goals setup in Google Analytics …….because, well, you like money right? You want to have some kind of measurable purpose or outcome, that line in the sand, those conversion rates to give you some context on how well your website is doing to meet your objectives. Not forgetting, how your marketing is working to drive said conversions and to be honest, without goals, you are left reporting on site visits, page views, what marketing channels got them there, and that will only get you so far. You need to know if your work is having an impact.
So, this brings us to the question, “What are the best website goals to have for your website?”
Before you jump off into admin land and create them, you need to spend some time thinking strategically about the goals you want to have on your site, and from there you can work out what investment is needed in order to get them working. You may need some configuration to your analytics in order to build the goal, such as Event Tracking (check out our Event Tracking Explainer, if anything to see our faces on buckets of chicken).
Macro and Micro Goals
You can have a whopping 20 goals on your site, yet more often than not, we have found that goals aren’t set up in Google Analytics, or if they are, there are only a small few, and they have been focused on the big hitter goals. You should be thinking about your goals from a Micro and Macro point of view.
Macro The main key performance indicators for your business, AKA if this doesn’t happen your business will go bust!
Micro These are small interactions from people actually moving towards what you want them to do. There is value here; don’t throw this data away! Here is a basic example for an Ecommerce site. End game, macro goal, you want the money, smaller conversions could be people looking at your social media accounts, or signing up to your newsletter, of clicking through your product images/ reading reviews/ watching a video about the product, then adding to basket (they are soooo close to giving you the cash now).
Mapping to your funnel
Ideally, you should map your business goals (micro and macro) to a funnel. To help, we have created a model to think about goals, say hello to TIMER©
Teaser Represents the people who are flirting with you, they arrive on your site and scroll down a page, maybe look through some pictures, then they hard bounce out of your site! Bye!
Investment They are “investing” their time with you, not quite converting but slowly giving more of a damn about you. Maybe watching some of your video, downloading a pdf, or adding to basket. It’s the little things.
Meaningful They are doing what you really need them to do, you are big hitting, if they don’t do them, we will go out of business goals.
Engaged Your users are happy (and unhappy) people who are really engaging with your brand after a big goal, think referring a friend or leaving a review.
Retention The circle of life and all that, you have to consider some retention goals, do they come back, repeat the process? Think signing back in, or cross/ up-selling. Also known as post acquisition in some circles.
What does it look like in action? Here is one I made earlier, well actually we made 6.
Want to see 20 ‘atypical’ micro and macro goals to use in your Analytics? There are 20 goals available per business (to mirror the allowance of goal numbers in your analytics views), well you are in luck!
As part of our Google Analytics Online Course, we have created 6 fully editable templates based on 6 business models (Ecom, SaaS, Lead Gen, UGC, Content, 2 Sided Market Place)