Google Goals, Funnels and Filters Help You Learn About Your Website

I have set up four goals on my class blog’s Google Analytics page. The basic aim behind these goals is to measure the engagement level of visitors to my blog site and use that insight to improve my blog content as well as layout. According to a MalleckDesign blog post, “Having 1-3 goals for your site is vital. Why only 3? Well, if you get any more than that then you will most likely overwhelm yourself, your designer and your users.”

Goals are hugely beneficial if you want to see your website succeed. If you don’t have any tangible and measurable goals for your site, you will simply be wasting time and money building a web strategy.

Like in life, goals help to focus the design and development of a website. Knowing what the site must achieve gives you and your designer the clarity that is needed to really create an effective site.

This blog entry discusses the three successfully created goals, as well as the one failed attempt.  I will also discuss the information that can be learned from each.

Goals set up for this blog site include:

•  Page visits greater than one

•  Site visit duration greater than two minutes

•  Click on “About Me” link

•  Register to “Follow by Email”

Page Visits Greater Than One

This goal measures the number of visits where a person opened more than one page.  When setting up this goal, the reasoning was that in order to see an entire blog post, the visitor must click on the “Read More” link, therefore visiting at least two pages during their visit.  This goal will estimate the number of visitors who read, at lease, one complete blog post.

Theoretically, your number of visits with more than one page view should be about the same as your number of visitors, especially in a situation when the visitor must click a link for a new page as soon as he/she determines they are ready to continue reading the post. If this number is relatively low, this likely means that the user was not intrigued enough by the content they landed on to bother reading more.

After reviewing the Google Analytics results from my blog, I’m finding that not everyone who has visited the blog site has visited more than one page during their visit. I’m pleased to see that some have visited numerous pages These results as I believe it means that the content I’ve provided is substantial enough that it is maintaining the attention of some visitors, but not all.

Site Visit Duration Greater Than Two Minutes

This goal records the number of site visits that lasted more than two minutes. In an attempt to determine how many visitors are reading at least one blog post, this goal was created. The average reader can read and understand about 200 – 250 words per minute, with blog posts averaging 500 words, most visitors will need anywhere from two to two-and-a-half minutes in order to read and process one complete blog post.

If visitors are not staying on your site long enough to read the content that you are providing, that says (rather clearly) that the content is not appealing or useful to them. On the flip side of that argument, returning visitors should not be on the site an excessive amount of time. If new visitors are staying on the site for extended periods of time that seem a bit unreasonable, it could mean that the blog archive section is too difficult to navigate. This could signify a layout issue if it is too high or a content concern if it is too low.

After reviewing the results from this particular goal, I started to feel pretty good about the content provided on my blog.  Most of those people who have visited my site have remained on the site for longer than two minutes.  This tells me that the visitors stayed long enough to finish reading the blog posts and were not turned off by some aspect of the full post, whereas the teaser entry has been successful in grabbing attention.  I also am confident that the content is what these visitors were seeking; after all, “people in general (and especially on the web) are short on attention and patience (Malleck Design, 2012).”

Click on “About Me” Link

This is a URL Destination type goal, with the target URL housed within the blog’s domain.  Visitors that click this link are likely a bit more engaged than the average visitor and are exhibiting some basic loyalty behavior.  These visitors probably want to know more about the author of the blogs because they are finding value in the content provided by the author.

I need more time to obtain adequate results from this metric in order to come to some sort of conclusion.

Register to “Follow by Email”

This goal is a URL Destination type, with a target URL being housed outside the domain of the blog.  This goal will measure the number of people interested enough in the blog content that they are willing to share their email address, opening themselves up to one more email on a regular basis.

While the setup of this particular goal was a failure, I felt it was important to share as a learning opportunity.  When I saw the data on this goal, I was very concerned that the goal had not been set up correctly.  This prompted me to test the settings by going to the blog site and signing up for the blog.  I never saw the results in the data. 

The lesson learned here is that not seeing the data that you’re hoping to see does not necessarily mean you have failed.  For me, it meant assessing the goal itself and trying different setups in an effort to correct the issue. I will continue to monitor and tweak this as needed.

Filter

I have set up a filter on the Google Analytics account for my personal website.  The filter is designed to segment the activity coming from, and occurring on the social network Facebook. Because much of my marketing for traffic comes from posting links to my blog articles to my personal Facebook page, as well as my company’s Facebook page for Virtual-Hideout.com. Referral links and traffic coming from outside sources is already monitored and reported, however I wanted to track my efforts on Facebook versus other social networks, which will be my next filtering metrics. As of now, I need more time to obtain adequate results from this metric in order to come to some sort of conclusion.