For digital marketers, it is of paramount importance to be able to learn user behavior and engagement in order to best serve clients on the internet and convert visitors into long-term customers. Google Analytics is a free and effective web analytics tool that will give marketers and analysts the insight they need to gauge the success of their digital marketing. Google Analytics’s most important tool is goals, where users can track specific activities on their sites. This article will walk you through how to configure Google Analytics goals to track email signups, a conversion metric for most businesses.
Understanding Google Analytics Goals
Before we dive into setting up email sign-up goals, it’s a good idea to first know what goals are and why they matter in Google Analytics.
A Google Analytics goal is a set of actions or conversions you need users to perform on your site. These can be making a purchase, filling out a form or, in this case, joining an email list. Goals can be set so that you can accurately track your website and marketing performance, gain insight into user behaviour and behavior.
Configuring Goals in Google Analytics.
If you want to set up a goal in Google Analytics, read this:
To get started, sign into your Google Analytics account and find the Admin tab. It is accessible by clicking the gear icon, located in the bottom-left corner of the screen.
Under Admin, click on the View where you want to place the goal. View: This is the View that dictates what data you display in your reports, so pick the right View for your goal.
In the View column, select Goals. That will bring you to the Goal management screen.
Click on the New Goal button. It will display the Goal creation window.
Select one of the templates for goals or click Custom to set your own goal. When you create a goal on Google Analytics, you have a number of ready-made templates that can fit any business goal, whether it is revenue-oriented or engagement-based. Instead, you can use the Custom option if none of the default templates fits your goals.
Name your goal – “Email Sign-Up”. Your name should be clear and short because it will be seen in several reports throughout the Google Analytics dashboard.
Click on the type goal: “Destination”. This is usually employed for monitoring which pages users end up visiting when a desired task has been performed (for example, a sign-up confirmation page or a buy thank you page).
Under Destination, provide the URL of the page that users arrive on after registering for your email list. Make sure to specify the full path, including the domain name. For instance, if your email sign-up confirmation page is “www.example.com/thank-you” then select “/thank-you” as the Destination.
You can assign a price to your goal if you wish, so that you can estimate your marketing campaign’s ROI. This is optional, but can be helpful for companies who are primarily dependent on e-commerce or lead generation.
If you want to measure the user journey before the email sign-up, create any necessary funnel flows. It’s also a completely optional step, but can give you valuable feedback about where your conversions are declining. Funnel steps enable you to view the order in which people browse through pages before landing on the landing page and provide insight into any bottlenecks or obstacles during signup.
Save your goal. Once set, your goal will start logging data right away. Goal reports will let you know how your users convert on your site, which in turn will allow you to adjust your marketing and user experience for optimal conversions.
Reviewing and Tracking Your Google Analytics Target Setting.
After you’ve added your email sign-up goal to Google Analytics, it’s time to double-check and monitor it to make sure it’s converting.
Test Your Goals
Once you’ve created a new goal in Google Analytics, the first thing you want to do is to set it up properly. In that respect, here are a few quick tips:
Verify Your Goal: Head to your goals section and click on the “Verify this Goal” link next to your new goal. This will trigger the query that determines how many conversions could have been recorded in the last week.
Analyze Impact: Google Analytics will give you a rough estimate of what you’re going to convert based on your goals. if it’s 0, don’t give yourself a heart attack yet. It might take a while before your goal starts counting conversions accurately. Traffic on your site and the activity of your visitors are the factors behind these missed goals.
Through this check, not only will you make sure that your objective is actually set, but you’ll also get early insights into how effective it might be.
Monitoring Your Goals
Once you’ve formulated and double-checked your objectives, the last step is always monitoring to see how they are faring. How to do it in Google Analytics:
Conversions Section: Access Google Analytics. When you open the dashboard, click on “Conversions”.
Where to Look For Your Goals Overview: Click on “Goals” and then “Overview”. Here’s another area where your goal score will be very concisely displayed. You can monitor some very relevant metrics here, such as total conversions, conversion rate, and even the value of your goals.
Deep View: Click the Goal URL displayed in the summary table to see a fuller overview of your goal performance. It displays finer-grained data, such as data on where/how they’re driving to your goal, or what age groups are the users converting.
Consistently monitoring allows you to see patterns over time, rotating money across all the winning channels and adjusting tactics where it isn’t producing results.
Conclusion:
Implementing Google Analytics goals for email signups is an essential part of determining the way users move and engage with your site. Tracking email signups accurately allows you to evaluate your marketing campaigns, spot weak points, and use data to make informed decisions on how to optimize your website to convert. This guide gave you the skills and knowledge to configure and track your own email sign-up objectives in Google Analytics.
