Google Analytics Goals, Funnels, and Filters

            My experience with Google Analytics for my blog this week was like night and day compared to the drama of last week! Lucky for me, no additional coding efforts were needed! Phew! I have learned that understanding HTML, and even just copying and pasting it into the right place, is not my strong point. I became a bit fanatical with my Google Analytics account this week, wanting to check the data every day. After watching what seems to be all the videos offered on the Google Analytics website (if you have not had a chance to do so, click here. Great resources!), I felt very confident about toggling around the tool and experimenting with different analyses. I was excited to log in each day and see the fresh new data cumulated giving me insights into the visits and visitors to my blog. Watching the Google Analytics videos made me excited to drive more traffic to my site so that I could experiment with all the different aspects available through Google Analytics. This week, my primary focus for the blog was exploring the benefits and capabilities through Google Analytics relating to goals, funnels, and filters.

Entering into this week, my perception of setting a Goal in Google Analytics was simply saying something along the lines of “See a 10% increase in traffic to my blog this week”. This week opened my eyes to the variety of different types of goals that can be set up in the Google Analytics tool. Google Analytics defines goals as measuring the level of interactivity on a website, and our lesson this week defined it further by stating “a goal is a web site page that helps generate conversions for your site”. (P.I. Reed School of Journalism, 2012) Any company with a web presence should have goals for their websites, if only to answer the question of “What is the purpose of my website?” Google Analytics can help companies monitor the success of these goals, report on them, and help you improve on them.

According to our lesson this week, there are four types of Goals – URL destination, visit duration, pages/visit, and event. (P.I. Reed School of Journalism, 2012) URL destination goals let you specify a specific page as the goal page, and as a user reaches that page the goal is achieved. An example of this would be the order confirmation or receipt page and ordering online or completing a form on a website. Visit duration goals allow you to set a specific time allowance that you want a user to engage with your site, and the goal is achieved once a user meets or exceeds this specified time. For this blog, I would set a goal of at least 120 seconds per visit. Since my blog is very basic, keeping the time minimal but not too short would allow me to capture a snapshot of which visitors are at least scanning through my most recent blog post, if not completely reading through the whole blog. Obviously, more developed sites could extend this time based on their research on engagement levels. I can see this being extremely beneficial for ecommerce sites to develop statements such as “users that exceed 5 minutes on the website have a 35% higher propensity to complete a transaction”. The pages per visit goal is achieved once a user visits a defined number of pages on the website in one visit. This helps give insight on how engaged a user was with the content on your site, and if any content optimizations are working. Since my blog is essentially one large feed (page), this was not a goal that I explored in depth, but this could be very useful to companies with much more robust websites than a single page like mine. The final goal is the event goal, which is achieved when a user completed the necessary steps on an event on your website. These events need to be predefined in a special section in Google Analytics before being able to set this up as a goal for your website.

Each goal set up in Google Analytics also has a funnel, which is the path of pages you expect visitors to take on their way to reaching the predefined goal. (P.I. Reed School of Journalism, 2012) Defining these pages allows a company to see how frequently their visitors abandon their path to reaching that goal, and where they go once they stray from that path. (P.I. Reed School of Journalism, 2012) The example provided in our lesson this week related to ecommerce sites, which I think is the most applicable application of funnels. For example, the funnel on an ecommerce site could include the shopping cart page, the shipping information page, and the credit card information page. Using the Funnel Visualization report, a company could see at which point visitors are abandoning the check out process and where they are going once they abandon.  In relation to my blog for this class, this seemed a little too complex for such a one-dimensional layout, but would be very beneficial for ecommerce sites or sites that have more pages and opportunities for more engagement.

The last part of the Google Analytics experiment this week was to use filters with the data produced about my blog within the GA tool. Filters are a way for you to control what data is included in a Google Analytics report you pull, and how you want that data to be presented. There are predefined filters and custom filters available within Google Analytics, and the most helpful I found this week included the ‘Traffic from an IP address’ filter, which allows you to include or exclude specific IP addresses on the reporting. Once identifying my IP address, I could go into my Google Analytics account and exclude myself from data tracking since I visit my blog often and do not want my own visits to skew any data I am receiving on other visitors to my site. One thing I did learn was that applying this kind of filter only applies on data moving forward, and cannot be used on data already recoded. (James, 2008) It will be interesting to watch my data in the coming weeks now that this has been implemented to see how much my personal visits to my blog was contributing to my statistics. Stay tuned for those updates! This particular filter can be extremely helpful in instances like an agency environment that I work in. Whenever we launch a microsite program for a client, we always receive workplace emails asking us to test out the site, fill out forms, click on everything possible, etc. to make sure things are working. Obviously, we would not want to include these thousands of visits in our reporting to the client, so by blocking our work IP addresses, we can test the site without skewing the actual reporting data.

                  The more I dig in to Google Analytics, I am continuously surprised at the amount of capabilities it has – for free! There are so many beneficial features to help companies get the most out of this tool and really help with online practices and optimizations, but it is important that businesses experiment with the tool and spend the time to educate employees (or hire knowledgeable employees) so that the tool can be used for the maximum benefit to the company.

References:

James, K. (2008, September 15). 7 Google Analytics filters to help understand your visitors. Retrieved July 1, 2012, from http://doteduguru.com/id629-google-analytics-filters.html

P.I. Reed School of Journalism, WVU. (2012). Lesson 6: Successful approaches in Google Analytics. Retrieved June 24, 2012, from WVU eCampus website https://ecampus.wvu.edu

RAN. (2009, March 4). 10 must track Google Analytics goals. Web Analytics World. Retrieved June 29, 2012, from http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2009/03/10-must-track-google-analytics-goals.html

Sparks, D. (2010, March 14). Google Analytics in depth: Goals and funnels. Retrieved July 1, 2012, from http://sixrevisions.com/tools/google-analytics-in-depth-goals-and-funnels/