In my previous post, I mentioned why it was so important that you set up goals in Google Analytics. Once you’ve decided on the goals that will measure the success of your website, you then have to decide how you will set up those goals within Google Analytics.
What four types of goals are available in Google Analytics?
The four goal types in Google Analytics: pages per session goals, duration goals, destination goals and event based goals. While pages per session and duration goals can both be valid measurements of success, in this blog we’ll go into the difference between destination based goals and event based goals. These two goal types have their pros and cons, and if done incorrectly, both types of goals can either under report or over report the amount of goal completions that occur.
Destination Based Goals
A destination goal is a goal that is completed every time a user lands on a particular url, such as a thank you url. In this instance, destination doesn’t mean that the url you specified is the last one a user hit – rather it means that a user visited that url at some point during their time on your website.
Destination goals are the easiest kind of goals to set up. Additionally, many advertisers, such as those who use Facebook ads or display ads, use destination goals, so you can ensure you have the same Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across channels without any extra website development time.
There are still a couple of things to look out for when creating a destination based goal in Google Analytics. First, check to see if your urls always force a trailing slash or always remove the trailing slash. Failing to check this and then using the “exactly matches” criteria can mean you miss getting credit for some conversions. If you’re not sure about whether or not a trailing slash is always used, you can use regular expressions when determining your goal criteria like I do above.
Another thing to look out for when looking at your destination goals in Google Analytics is whether or not it can be accessed outside of your preferred page path. For example, if you have a thank you page that loads after someone fills out a contact form, make sure that the thank you url can’t be accessed without filling out the contact form first. If you can access the thank you url regardless of whether or not you filled out the form, it can lead to an inflation of goals, which is just as bad at missing out on goals that happened.
Although not an out of the box solution, some Google Analytics users may choose to send a virtual pageview instead of a real pageview to Google Analytics as a way to ensure users don’t hit a thank you url multiple times. From a development perspective, this may take as much work as the event based goals mentioned below.
Event Based Goals
Event based goals are goals based on event tracking. Google Analytics event tracking is additional tracking added in by a developer to record website actions such as button click or clicks to external urls. Each event sent to Google Analytics passes through a category, an action, and a label, allowing you to both aggregate and segment your events in Google Analytics. Event tracking can be easy to add if you have Google Tag Manager, however just like destination goals, there are a couple of things to look out for.
The first problem with your event-based goals is that if you don’t set up any form of validation for your event tracking, then there may be an inflation of goal completions. For example, if you fire an event each time someone clicks the “submit my email” button on your website, but don’t bother to check whether or not a user actually submitted a valid email, you may be reporting more events than actually occurred.
The next problem with event based goals has to do with how you type in your event category, event action, and event label whenever you set up your goal. In order for the goal to fire, your category, action, and label all have to match exactly what comes into Google Analytics. That means if you decide to get fancy and have a label that is generated programmatically based on certain event specifics, you need to account for it when you create your goal.
The best way to get around dynamically generated categories, actions, and labels is to either use regular expressions or leave your programmatically generated field (most likely your label) empty. An empty field when creating your goal won’t cause any problems, since only one dimension of your event tracking is needed (category, action, or label).
Another downside to creating event based goals in Google Analytics is that the event tracking code you use can’t be reused for advertisers without modification. The fancy footwork required is greatly decreased with Google Tag Manager, however, there’s still some footwork required if you’re not familiar with Google Tag Manager.
Summary
Tracking based on events versus destinations can be an easy decision for marketers, but it’s necessary to learn all the pros and cons of each before you start down a path. Both options can either inflate or deflate your number of conversions, so make sure you vet the functionality of your website thoroughly before committing.
