1. The Art of Effective Goals and
Goal Funnels
Overview & Best Practices

2. Intro
Who We Are and What We Do

4. Justin
Spencer
Search and Analytics Strategist

5. Overview
Putting the “fun” in funnels

6. What We’ll Cover
• Goals
– Types of Goals
– Uses of Goals
– Best Practices
– Worst Practices
• Analysis
• Funnels
– Uses of Funnels
– Best Practices

7. Goals
Goooooooaaaaaaaalllllllllllllsssssss

8. Types of
Goals
Not All Goals Are Alike

9. URL Based Goals
• Can be either actual page or virtual
pageview
– Pulled directly from content reports
• Multiple match types
– Exact match: Don’t do it
– Head match: Sometimes do it
– Regular Expression match: Usually do it

10. Event Based Goals
• Match any singular or combination of
Category, Action or Label
– Events must be functional to be set as goals
• There are match type options here too
– Begins With
– Is Equal To
– That Matches

11. Engagement Based Goals
• Set thresholds to trigger goals
– Pages Per Visit
– Session Duration (Time on Site)

12. Uses of Goals
Extracting Insight

13. Success Points
• Goals should be any action that is a
success event
– Purchase
– Email subscription
– Creating an account
– Viewing a key content page

14. Key Engagement Metrics
• Set engagement thresholds
– A session that views more than 4 pages or
spends longer than 3 minutes and 10 seconds
on the site
– With a lot of data, you can set the average as
the threshold to gauge performance against
average

15. Best
Practices
Be A Rock Star

16. Have A Strategic Architecture
• Once a goal is set, it should never change
• If a goal is changed, the historic value
remains intact
• Calculations begin at the exact moment the
goal is set. They are not retroactive
• Future-proof your page settings
– If your conversion page changes, you can use
regular expressions match to keep tracking
consistent

17. Group Your Goals
• Google Analytics is separated into four sets
of five goals
• Group similar goals together
– This type of architecture provides great long-
term value and creates ordered structure within
the profile

18. Example Sets
Group 1: Transactional Group 2: Non-Transactional
Completed Purchase Account Creation
Cart Views Email Sign Up
Product Views
Group 3: Key Content Group 4: Engagement
Support Pages Above AvgPages Per Visit
Product Views Above Avg Visit Duration

19. Goal Score Framework
• A value can be assigned to each goal that is
set
• These values populate as a dollar value in
Google Analytics
– For example, for each 1,000 users that sign up for an email,
they purchase $150 worth of product. Therefore, the value
you assign to the Email Sign Up goal is $15.

20. Goal Score Framework
• For goals that do not have a directly attributed
monetary value, we can still assign a value
• A Goal Score Framework helps rate events on
a scale from 1 (low importance) to 10 (high
importance)
– Account Creation: 10
– View Shopping Cart Start Page: 7
– View Products: 4
– View Support Articles: 2
High value Low value conversion
conversion days day

21. Worst
Practices
Don’t Be That Guy

22. Avoid These Common Pitfalls
• Improper match settings
– Test your settings in content reports to know what
the reports will look like
• For example, a match type of “/success” could also
match “/?errorpage=/success”
• Duplicating goals
– If you set up goals that are duplicated, it makes
extracting insights difficult
– Possible Exception: Duplicating goals for specific
funnel analysis, such as abandonment rate from
different starting points

23. Avoid These Common Pitfalls
• Temporary goals
– If possible, make temporary URLs permanent
• “Conversion Rate” metric in Google
Analytics is AGGREGATE of all goals.
– Be aware your aggregate conversion rate
might be over 100%

24. Analysis
Goals In Their Natural Habitat

25. Standard Reporting
• Traffic Reports
– Judge conversion rate from last-click attribution

26. Standard Reporting
• Browser & OS
– Conversion rates can help pinpoint issues with
certain browsers or operating systems

27. Multi-channel Funnels
• Goals are required for MCF to function
properly
• Understand various touch points leading to
a conversion

28. Multi-channel Funnels
• Understand which channels are best at
assisting conversion, even though they
may not be directly attributed

29. Custom Dashboards
• Dashboards can provide a quick view into
metrics and dimensions not easily
accessible in standard reports

30. Custom Dashboards
• New dashboard widgets allow you to dive
deeper
– For example, you can view what language a
visitor is using sorted by the country they are in
and whether or not they completed a goal

31. Goal
Funnels
Going With the Flow

32. Goal Flow
• Introduced in October 2011
• HUGE improvement over previous funnel

33. Highlights
• Big improvement over previous view
• Retroactive
• Dynamically update nodes
• Segment views on different dimensions
• Apply default and custom segments
• Detailed information within each step

34. Best Practices
• Ensure the first step of the funnel is on a
logical page
– Abandonment Rate is calculated on this page.
Shopping Cart Home Page

35. Best Practices
• Don’t select “first step required”
– Outdated feature of deprecated funnel view

36. Best Practices
• Include all possible steps in the process
– Login error page
– Incorrect password page
• Any page not included in the flow will be
skipped over in the visualization

37. Best Practices
• Plan your goal architecture before saving
the goals
• Keep a record of your goal structure
– Make notes for future reference

38. Conclusion
For anyone still awake

39. Wrap Up
• Goals are a powerful tool to help extract
performance-based insights
• A strategic goal architecture is crucial
• Goal settings should be permanent to
avoid irregularities in data
• Strategic set up of funnel steps provide an
additional layer of insight into goal
abandonment and bottlenecks

40. Resources
• Visit AnalyticsPros.com/tools/goal-
planning-worksheet
– Download a template spreadsheet that allows
for effect goal framework creation
• Visit goo.gl/lGgAe for a secondary planning
worksheet to monitor current state and
preserve historic iterations

41. Questions?
Hit me with your best shot.
Fire away!
justin@analyticspros.com
@jutspen