Three Major Types of Goals in Google Analytics

In Google Analytics, goals are one of the best features that allow us to go deeper into a website’s traffic performance and fix any possible issues. It helps you to track how users go through various pages or sections of your website. Goals help us to see how users travel once coming on your website or how users are reaching a particular section of your website.

Setting up goals with Google Analytics also helps you to make sure that the visitor has done what you would like them to do on your website. For example if you have a shopping cart then your ultimate aim is to make the users purchase your products. Mostly the last page that a user reaches after purchasing anything online would be a “Thank You” page and by setting a goal for this page, you would be able to understand the amount of successful user visits to your website which have converted into sales. Goals also help you to know more about the user behaviour on your website such as site engagement, user engagement etc.

There are three major types of goals in Google Analytics and you can use it as per your requirement. The three major types of Google Analytics goals are:

1) URL Destination
The URL destination goal type helps you to find out how often users have successfully visited a particular page through various sections on the website.  This is mostly a good option in ecommerce sites and other websites whose aim is to get sales or leads through the website. You can also set goal funnels to see how the users come to your goal page and you can set multiple goal funnels for your website.

2) Time on Site
The Time on Site goal helps you to understand how many times a user spends a particular amount of time on your website. This goal clearly gives an idea about the user behaviour once he visit your sites and you would know whether the user spend a particular amount of time on your website or not. This would help you to understand about the potentiality of your website in keeping the users for a longer period of time and you could make necessary changes on your website as per this data.

3) Pages per Visit
This option helps you to know about the depth of user visit on your website. You could know how many pages a user have visited your goal page and you could set a particular number of pages for this which seems good for you. This is also very much effective in calculating the overall user engagement on your website.

It is very much easy to set up a goal for your website using Google Analytics and you can do it from the settings area of your Analytics account. In the settings area of your Google Analytics account, you can see the option to add goals and you can create goals that are most suited to the nature of your website.