About Goals and Funnels

Google Analytics uses the concept of goals and goal funnels to help you evaluate how well your site serves the ends you have in mind. For example, if you have an ecommerce site, you might set a goal to see what percentage of monthly visitors complete transactions, and then set up an accompanying goal funnel for the expected series of pages leading up to the transaction. If you have a publishing site, you might set a Visit Duration goal to see which percentage of visitors spend more than 3 minutes on the site. Or you might set up a Pages/Visit goal to see which percentage of visitors view a minimum number of pages in a single visit.

When a user completes a goal targeted toward a specific objective, that is called a conversion. You can specify a sequence of pages you expect the visitor to see en route to the goal and designate that sequence as a goal funnel.

The rest of this article describes:

• Goals
• Goal Funnels
• Next Steps

Goals

Analytics offers four kinds of goals for different types of conversions:

• URL Destination
  The conversion occurs because a specific page (or virtual page) is viewed by the visitor. For example, if you have a lead-generation website that presents a page that thanks the user for sending contact requests, you could set the URL to/sales/thankyouforcontactingus.html.
• Visit Duration
  The conversion occurs after a specific period of time has elapsed for the visit. For example, you could use this type of goal to determine how many visitors stay longer than two minutes on your newly redesigned shopping page.
• Pages/Visit
  The conversion occurs after a defined number of pages have been viewed for the visit. You could use this type of goal when you anticipate visitors to view a set of 3 pages minimum, for example.
• Event
  The conversion occurs because an action has been triggered on an event. In order to set this kind of goal, you must first set up event tracking on your site with at least one named Event category. For information on event tracking, see Event Tracking on Google Code.

In addition to the Goals Reports, you can also view goal information in the following Analytics reports:

• Visitor Reports
• Traffiic Reports
• Site Search Reports
• Events Reports

Goal Sets—20 Goals Total

Goals are automatically grouped in sets, starting with Set 1. Use sets to categorize the different types of goals for your site. For example, you might track downloads, registrations, and receipt pages in separate goal sets. For each set of active goals, the Explorer tab above the score card shows the set number.

You can create up to four sets of goals per profile, each with a maximum of 5 goals for a total of 20 goals. To track more than 20 goals for a website, create an additional profile for that site.

Goal Values

The Goal Value metric is the total revenue realized from the goal conversions. The data for Goal Value is first obtained in the goal configuration itself: either by a manually assigned value that you enter, by ecommerce revenue, or by a combination of the two. The calculation of Goal Value in the reports is obtained by multiplying the number of conversions on the goal by the numeric data available for that goal. For example, if you have 3 visitors who each spent $20 on your site in the past month, and you configure a "Sales Goal" for transactions, the Goal Value metric is $60. Google Analytics also uses the Goal Value data to calculate other metrics like ROI and Average Score.

For non-ecommerce goals, a good way to manually configure goal value is to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers. For example, if your sales team can close 10% of people who request to be contacted, and your average transaction is $500, you might assign $50 (i.e. 10% of $500) to your "Contact Me" goal. In contrast, if only 1% of mailing list signups result in a sale, you might only assign $5 to your "email sign-up" goal.

Goal Funnels

A goal funnel allows you to track a goal along with a series of pages you expect the visitor to see en route to the goal. A goal funnel is used only in conjunction with a URL Destination goal. Because Google Analytics tracks where visitors enter and leave the goal funnel (and at which rate), you can get valuable insight about visitor drop-off rates in expected activity paths. You can view funnel activity in the Funnel Visualization report.

To illustrate how goal funnels work, suppose you want to define a URL goal for an ecommerce purchase. You can also create a funnel to track activity across the whole purchase process. Here, the goal funnel -- or series of pages -- might look like this:

• Page one of the checkout process
• Shipping-address page
• Credit-card information page
• Order confirmation page

The last page in the sequence is your goal page (entered as Goal URL), while the preceding pages make up the goal funnel.

For lead-generation goal funnels, you could assign the first page of the funnel as the URL of the contact request form and the goal page as the URL for the "Thanks for your request" page that appears after the user submits a contact request.

Next Steps

Now that you understand what goals and goal funnels are and how you might use them, read these articles for set up and configuration details:

• Setting Up Goals
• Goals for URLs and Ecommerce
• Special-case Goals and Funnels

Once you have set up goals with values and/or ecommerce tracking, you may wish to exploreMulti-Channel Funnels.