More "Goals" for Google Analytics | Search Engine Optimization Blog

More “Goals” for Google Analytics

Posted by: Date: October 30, 2009

by Paul Jahn

A few days ago in the Twittersphere, it’s been mentioned that Google
Analytics is now starting to add the number of “goals” to 20 (four groups of five), up from four only.
For some, this may not be a big deal. For others, it’s just fantastic
and the possibilities are almost endless.

For many companies, a couple goals fit just fine. If you’re generating leads, you may have goals set up for both a long and short form for people to fill out, giving you information about their needs. That’s it.

What if you want to get more
granular? Maybe you have a new service or product and want to set goals on how many users get to these pages. You can test these goals for the number of pages you want people to visit or even how long you want users on your site.

Or, if
you’re an e-commerce site 20 goals still may not be enough. That’s probably a different discussion.

Let’s take a look. Here’s how part of your goals page may look now.

As noted above, the 20 goals are for four groups of five. This still allows you to get creative. Here’s a small addition. It’s not just about a URL destination.

Time on Site and Pages/Visit are just a couple tools you may want to play around with for measuring different site engagement goals.

If you want to measure engagement by “time on site”, you can easily do so down to the second.

Same goes for the number of pages per visit.

As always, Google provides an easy-to-understand YouTube video.

Any of you test these new possibilities yet? More robust tools out there that already have this and more, but the popularity of Google Analytics along with its price (free) makes this new for many.

Check out our small business news site.