Implementing goals in Google Analytics

Hello again, and thanks for joining me as I continue to document my foray into the world of Google Analytics.

In this week’s post we will be moving beyond traditional metrics and taking a look at some more advanced manipulations including goals, and filters.  I will be applying some of these concepts to my personal blog in an effort to understand their value and applicability in a business setting.

First, I selected some goals that I deemed appropriate for a personal blog site. The goals you set will depend largely on the nature of your site.

Goal 1

Visit Duration & Page Views

As the author of a blog, I’m very concerned about the effectiveness of my content. However, gaining insights into your content is a difficult task. I ran into problems last week when trying to get a grasp on engagement within my site. I determined that page views could be a misleading metric as all my content could be viewed on one single page. In addition, visit duration is determined by timestamps, which are recorded every time a visitor clicks through to another page. With my lack of pages, this again becomes a problem. Still, due to the low number of pages on my blog, I came to the conclusion that visit duration would give me a better chance at some meaningful conversion data. So, I made the decision to set up a goal pertaining to visit duration.

Successful conversion of this goal is achieved when a visitor stays on my blog for a period of 4 minutes or more. I figured that this amount of time is equal to the time it would take for a visitor to read two posts. And if I can get a reader to read one post, then move on to an additional post, then I feel comfortable saying that my content was effective with that particular visitor. For a blog site, any visit duration under 4 minutes would indicate a passive interest in the content.

Hypothetically, if I were to monetize my blog with advertising content, this conversion rate could be a great selling point for potential advertisers. If 90% of visitors spend over 4 minutes on my blog, this shows superior engagement and the opportunity for quality impressions for advertisers.

If this discussion pertained to an ecommerce or business website, goals associated with visit duration and page views become more complicated.

First, let’s you set a goal of recording five or more page views per visit. You find that your conversion rate is around 75%. This is a good sign right? People are showing a high level of engagement while on your site. Not so fast. A high amount of page views could be a signal of poor site design. Visitors could be clicking through to a high number of pages because they are confused and cannot find what it is they’re looking for (KISSmetrics, 2013). The same goes for visit duration. For this reason, these goals might not be ideal for ecommerce and business sites. In fact, with ecommerce and business sites the goal more commonly would be to reduce page views and visit duration, to ensure that users were easily navigating the site and finding what they needed. In which case, you would want to switch the setting in Google Analytics from “greater than” to “less than.”

Goal 2

About & Contact Pages

Again, I wanted to utilize Google Analytics goals to get a better idea of how the content on my blog was being received by visitors. This goal revolves around the creation of additional pages on the top bar of my blog. In this case, I created an “about” page and a “contact” page. The “about” page is a short autobiography, while the “contact” page lists all the ways visitors can reach me. The main purpose of these pages is to measure site engagement through the creation of corresponding goals.

When visitors click through to the “about” page they are showing additional interest in the blog. If they are buying into the articles, then they most likely want to buy into the author of those articles as well. For many bloggers, the “about page” is one of their most visited pages. For visitors, the “about” page can be a valuable source to get a sense of the author’s voice, credentials, background, and mission for the blog. If a good percentage of visitors are clicking on the “about” page there is good chance they are developing a positive identification with the blog.

Filter

Exclude Internal IP Address

One of my first thoughts when I started taking a closer look at filters was to ensure that my data was not being skewed in anyway.  More specifically, I wanted to make sure that all the traffic that was being reported was not a result of all the time I had spent on the blog over the course of this term. Often times, in the early stages of a website, failure to account for internal IP addresses can lead to misleading spikes in unique visitors (Knutson, 2013). Since my unique visitors remain in double digits every week, 10-15 visits from an internal IP address represents a substantial, false spike in data. In larger businesses, internal IP addresses can pose an even bigger threat to the validity of data. A variety of factors can cause heavy internal traffic that should not be reported as actual visits.

Luckily, Google Analytics provides a method to filter unwanted traffic. After retrieving my internal IP address (which can be achieved by looking on your network settings, or utilizing an online service) and selecting “exclude” I have seen my number of visits remain pretty much consistent. This makes sense because in the initial stages of my blog I was not generating nearly as much traffic, as I am presently. So in the early stages of the blog, my own visits must have been generating a substantial amount of the traffic. Moving forward I can be sure that all visitors are coming from IP addresses other than my own.

KISSmetrics. (2013). Why You Shouldn’t Set Pageviews and Time on Site as Goals in Google Analytics. Retrieved 2 December 2013 from http://blog.kissmetrics.com/pageviews-time-on-site/

Knutson, B. (2013). Exclude ip from google analytics reports. Retrieved 2 December 2013 from http://bradsknutson.com/blog/exclude-ip-google-analytics-reports/