Did you ever know there are four types of goals in GA designed to help you create improvements to your construction website and grow your business? And just like you set goals for your business alone, you should also set them for your website.
Knowing how your website is getting by and the visitors clicking and taking action is essential to improving your lead acquisition strategy and growing your traffic.
In this blog post, learn about different GA goals and their importance. We will also share some pro tips on how to track these goals successfully.
What are GA Goals, and Why They Matter?
GA goals track and report how often your website visitors take particular actions on your site. These goals are sometimes referred to as OKRs or Objectives and Key Results.
If you are wondering what actions your visitors often take, they include visiting your page, spending a specific amount of time on it, filling up and completing a form, and many others. All of these actions are designed to represent your visitor’s steps toward becoming your customer.
So, this only means that before you even set effective goals, it is important that you determine first what type of actions you want your visitors to carry out. Do you want them to watch a video? Request a quote? Make a purchase? Get a consultation? Such goals and so many others – are all trackable with the use of Analytics.
When you have your GA goals set, it helps you get data with in-depth analyses like:
- Evaluation of the overall success of your website over time.
- ROI calculation of your marketing investment
- Performance comparison of different activities
Four Types of GA Goals
Here are four types of GA goals you can set up and track as follows:
1. Destination goals
Destination goals are the most commonly used type of goal, and GA will count it as a conversion whenever a visitor hits a page you specify. You can have as many destination goals as you want for your website. This type of goal will give you important information like:
- Newsletter sign-ups
- Downloads of gated content
- New user accounts created
- Demo/pricing requests
If your construction website offers any of these, you must have goals set up for each of them.
2. Duration goals
This type of GA goal tracks how long a user has been on your website. Duration goals are best in helping you track users’ engagement to your site.
The duration of time you want to track and measure will depend on your website. So, make sure to pick a duration that you are targeting. Does your audience usually have a duration of over five minutes, and then they will convert right after? That can be a great duration, to begin with.
3. Pages/Screens per session goals
Looking at the number of pages/screens a user tends to visit during a session is another way to measure engagement. This goal allows you to set a minimum number of pages or screens a visitor needs to visit. It varies from site to site and may differ completely on your construction website.
There are sites where a visitor visits three or more pages and is considered an “engaged” visitor. For other sites, the number can be higher.
4. Event goals
Event goals are considered the most complicated goals to setup, and however, they are some of the most valuable goals in Google Analytics.
Event goals are generally based on specific user interactions you have already set up as Events on your website. Such interactions typically include downloading content, watching a video, engaging with interactive elements, etc.
To be able to pick the most vital GA goals for your construction business, you have to determine first which of these goals works best for anything you want to measure. You may often end up with a mix of at least two or three of these GA goals, depending on the criticality.
GA Goal-Tracking Tips to Get Ahead
Once you create and set these goals in Google Analytics, you can start tracking them. Here are some tracking tips you can follow:
1. Use Real-Time Analytics
Do you lack confidence in goal-tracking setup, even if your goals are already verified initially? Sometimes, completing a goal action on your website and viewing real-time reports in GA can show you whether your goals are firing.
Assess all goals you set up in GA. And avoid filtering your company site traffic channel because your goal conversion may not appear in real-time reports. In addition, ensure you are working with an unfiltered analytics property.
2. Use reverse goal path for funnel testing
This particular section of GA is very helpful for understanding whether the visitors follow the funnel flow you have designed for a specific goal. Having a funnel assigned to your existing GA goals can help you better understand the basic pathways to a goal.
3. Use Custom Modeling Attribution
For many sites, a conversion is rarely won during the first visit. And often, visitors do not re-enter the website via the same channel. When you notice a visitor entering your website via Facebook the other day, you may see them returning to Google today before they transition to conversion.
Make use of Custom Modeling Attribution. This allows you to assign specific values to various channel touchpoints in a multi-visit conversion funnel than simply crediting the end touchpoint by default.
4. Set up Goal Alerts
GA provides the ability to set up not just your goals but also goal alerts. GA alters the notifications you will receive when some predetermined events are behaving abnormally in your account. It is vital to know that these alerts are not sent to you automatically, and instead, you have to create Custom Alerts to have notifications sent directly to your email.
These alerts are valuable as they can help you determine and troubleshoot problems that can significantly negatively affect your SEO performance, traffic, or sales.
5. Play with your data
When you have your GA goals all set up and configured, it allows you to break down data in many ways that will help you deeply understand what your visitors are doing on your website. In addition, it can also help you strategize your conversion rate optimization needs and usability issues that might exist on your site.
6. Verify your data geographically
It is worth knowing that you should review your goal engagement by state and country. Taking a closer look at where your GA goals are coming from by state or country can help you better understand if there might be goal engagement not worth tracking.
7. Connect your data
Another advantage of using Google Analytics is you will be given the ability to incorporate multiple efforts together. Given the capacity to understand the visibility of your pages and the potential crawling issues, it is a great tool for marketers and website owners just like you.
Also, integrating Google Search Console to your GA account does not provide you with new data but the ability to merge data to have insights from a single display.
8. Report on your Data
Congrats! As you reach this final step, you have already set up your GA goals, verified accuracy, tracked, dissected, and even taken advantage of pairing other GA properties (Google Search Console, etc.)
And now is the right time to make reports concerning this so you and others (your team) can enjoy and take advantage of all the insightful data.
GA offers Dashboards and Custom Reports:
- Dashboards: This part of the platform is a great way to see insightful visuals that can help you better understand KPIs and goal conversion from a more in-depth view. In dashboards, you can choose data layouts and integrate high-level data that are all exportable.
- Custom Reports: You can see custom reports in the dashboards. They are often created by an analyst for review purposes by those that are more analytically inclined. While considered less visually appealing, custom reports allow you to combine all data.
NOTE: All Standard Universal Analytics properties will be going to stop processing new hits by the 1st of July, 2023. That is why it is strongly encouraged to transition to Google Analytics 4 as early as possible.
Better Data Means Better Decisions with ConstructionMarketing.io
Having properly set up and configured GA goals will allow you to fully understand your web audience– who they are, what they are exactly doing, and whether they are converting to your specified site objectives. Hopefully, you understand and learn so much about the many GA goal-tracking tips we shared with you above and confidently apply them in the process.
We firsthand know GA goal setup and management can be a daunting process and full of technicalities. If you have other things to prioritize, like running and growing your construction business – let us be your agency partner!
ConstructionMarketing.io offers professional, in-depth assistance with any Google Analytics account. We create custom marketing solutions to your business needs, providing ongoing GA consulting and maintenance, consistent monthly reporting, and training. We believe accurate and clean data is the center of every digital marketing strategy, hence, our approach is data-centered.
Get in touch with us today. Let’s start setting up your goals, track them, and get lots of insights!