Goals are always a great thing to have, both in business and in life itself.  It gives you something to strive for, a challenge…and a sense of accomplishment when you finally achieve it.   But in the web analytics world, a Goal has a *slightly* different meaning.  In this context a “Goal” is any measurable action that occurs on your website, and unlike the traditional definition, an analytic Goal is not a final achievement marking the end of the journey.  In fact, it’s supposed to occur over and over (the more often the better!).

So we know that an analytic Goal is an action (so we can define it) and it’s measurable (so we can track and analyze it).  We’ll get into the techy nuts-and-bolts of implementing Goals in Google Analytics in a later post (assuming you have implemented GA already, right?).  First we have to define your goals, what is it that you want to happen on your website?

Correction, it’s not *your* goals…

I have a secret to tell you.  You know your website…the one that has all your products on it, and that snazzy About Us section, and basically all the stuff that you think is important for your company?  That website doesn’t *really* belong to you, it belongs to your customers.  Sure, you may try to guide or persuade them to purchase something or fill out a lead form… but at the end of the day it’s the visitor that has come to your site with specific goals in mind.  Your job is to understand what those visitor goals are, and do everything in your power to help them achieve those goals as quickly and easily as possible.

Got it? Okay, let’s roll up our sleeves and start defining our…err, I mean…our visitors’ goals!

Define a Primary Goal

Out of all the many actions a visitor can perform on your site, chances are there’s one main action that most folks want to accomplish.  And chances are, that action is also the action that *you* want them to perform!  (Let’s hope so anyway!)  For e-commerce sites, it’s pretty obvious that the primary goal is to purchase something.   Or if your site is focused on lead generation, then a completed lead form is the primary goal.   Most of the time, the primary goal is directly tied to revenue.

Goals have a Long Tail

While sales (or leads) are definitely great goals to track, if we stopped there we would be leaving a LOT of valuable information on the table.  In Search Engine Optimization there is a term used called the keyphrase “Long Tail“, which suggests that all of those secondary keyphrases add up to be equally (or more-so) important then your primary keyphrases.   The concept is similar with goals…there’s a lot of activity happening on your site, activity that can be very valuable to you…and worthy of defining and tracking!

As marketers we know that not every visitor is going to hit your site, head straight to the product they want, and purchase something (oh how we wish this were the case!).  But maybe they’ll sign up for your newsletter, or read product reviews on your site, or watch a demo video, or download a pdf that contains information about your services.  All of these smaller actions might result in a purchase…it just will take a little longer than that ideal impulse buyer.

So grab a pen & paper and write down all of the Primary and Secondary goals that you think are important to your customers.  Next, you need to…

Describe what triggers the Goal, in non-geek terms

Now that you have a good list of goals, it’s time to figure out how you’re going to measure them.  Don’t worry, you don’t need to know any Google Analytics lingo (yet!)…just think about what actions would trigger each of your goals in plain ol’ English.   Ask yourself “How would I know for sure that this goal was completed?”  For an e-commerce site, a visitor would probably have to reach a purchase confirmation page before you could declare it a completed goal.  Lead forms most likely have some kind of Thank You page.  Notice we didn’t say “It’s whenever someone hit the Submit button on the lead form” because it’s possible that they incorrectly filled out the form, hit the submit button, and got an error message.

Other goal trigger examples:  when someone clicks on a download link, hits “play” on a video (or watches more than X minutes of a video), clicks a Facebook or Twitter share button, stays on a product review page for more than X minutes…there’s literally no end to the types of goal triggers you can have.

We’ll cover how to actually implement these goals in Google Analytics in the next post in this series, but in the meantime…what goals have you come up with for your site?

Good Luck, and I hope you achieve your goals!