Creating Goals to See Who’ s Taking Action
After you’ ve created a UTM tag, as described in the preceding section, you can set up goals in Google Analytics. Goals provide a way to track the actions that groups of people take on your site by tallying specific behaviors. What makes goals really useful is not just the ability to track how many times an action was taken but also to see which groups of people took that action. Although Google Analytics does not allow you to track behavior back to personal identifiable information, such as the person’ s name or email address, it does allow you to track information such as the device they are using, where people are in the world, or the other pages they visited on your website. Thanks to the UTM parameters, you can actually see what individuals and groups of individuals do when they arrive on your site.
The most basic goal that you want to set in Google Analytics is an opt-in that generates a lead. When visitors fill out a form, they are often directed to a confirmation page. To measure the number of opt-ins you’ re receiving, you simply set up Google Analytics to measure how many people visit the confirmation page after visiting the opt-in page.
To set up a form fill in Google Analytics, follow these steps:
1. Click the Admin section of Google Analytics. The Admin menu appears.
2. Click Goals under All Website Data. The Goals dialog box appears.
3. Click the + New Goal button to create a new goal. The Goal Setup page appears.
4. Scroll down and select the Sign Up Goal type; then click the Continue button.
The Goal Description page appears. Google offers a variety of goal templates that should fit your specific needs( although you can create custom ones as well). Because you want to track opt-ins, Sign Up should be perfect in this case.
5. Name your goal and then, under the Type field, select Destination and press the Continue button.
The final setup page, called the Goal Details page, appears. 6. Set up the specifics for your goal.
For Destination field, change your rule to Begins With and add your Thank You page’ s URL string— that’ s where people who opt-in end up. Using Begins With helps to ensure that all opt-ins are properly credited. The other way to ensure that you’ re tracking actual opt-ins and not just accidental Thank You page visitors is to create a funnel. This involves adding the URL string of the opt-in page as well( see Figure 12- 3). To set up a funnel, you turn the Funnel option to ON and add a step with the page