The Goals Setup in Analytics

Overview

What is the goal of your website? Is it for visitors to purchase items? Sign up for a newsletter? Goals allows you to track how many people have completed your goal is and then reports it to you through Google Analytics.

Total Conversions

This tab will show you how many conversions or ‘goals’ have been completed within a certain amount of time. You can break it down by day or hour for more in depth information.

Conversion Rate

What percentage of your visitors complete on of your goals? This tab will show you all this data.

Goal Verification

When you set up a goal in Google Analytics you will have to determine a point in which your goal has been met. This example shows that when a user reaches the page /contactconfirm.asp that the goal has been achieved. From a user perspective, the only way they can access this URL is if they successfully fill out the contact us form on the DKS website.

Reverse Goal Path

Want to know what your visitors were doing before they met the goal you set up? This is the tab you can see reverse paths. For instance, DKS gets a lot of contact forms filled out once a user visits a service page or views the project pages.

Goal Value

Google Analytics allows you to set a value for each goal that is achieved. Have you done the calculation for the value for each quote request e-mail you receive? Place this value in Google Analytics when setting up your goals. Now when you click on the goal value tab you will be able to see a financial value for each goal achieved.

Goal Abandoned Funnels

How many people started the conversion process but left your site before completing the goal? This tab will give you this information.

Funnel Visualization

Assuming you set up a funnel for your goals (advance set up required) this tab will show you a visual for where your visitors are leaving your site. This information is extremely valuable for showing ‘issue’ pages in your checkout/conversion process.

What Are Search Engine Spiders?

A spider, also known as a robot or a crawler, is actually just a program that follows, or "crawls", links throughout the Internet, grabbing content from sites and adding it to search engine indexes.

Spiders only can follow links from one page to another and from one site to another. That is the primary reason why links to your site (inbound links) are so important. Links to your website from other websites will give the search engine spiders more "food" to chew on. 

The more times they find links to your site, the more times they will stop by and visit. Google especially relies on its spiders to create their vast index of listings. 

Spiders find Web pages by following links from other Web pages, but you can also submit your Web pages directly to a search engine and request a visit by their spider. In essence, that is search engine submission. Because so many millions of web masters have submitted their sites over and over, the search engines have responded by putting more emphasis on sites that their spiders find naturally and less and less emphasis on sites submitted directly. So, being found is better than submitting directly.