Goals. We all have them. I aim to run a half marathon this time next year, will it happen? Watch this space.  But what about setting goals on Google Analytics?

By Carla Mateus, senior account executive at Stone Junction,

The goals feature on Google Analytics allows you to look closely at how your website visitors are behaving, in relation to how you want them to behave. For example, you may want visitors to click through to the contact us page after viewing a certain product page. This feature allows you to put a percentage figure on how many people that visit a product page then go on to visit the contact us page.

Start by clicking on admin, then goals to view the goals you have set. If you’re new to all this, then this table will be blank — for now. Setting your first goal is remarkably straight forward. Select new goal to see a range of templates you can use. From your visitors adding the page as a favourite, to signing up to a newsletter, there’s lots to choose from. However, I recommend choosing custom.

From here, you can name your goal and choose the type of goal:

• Destination goals aim to see lots of visitors view a certain page
• Duration goals aim to see people spending a long time on a specific page, or across the domain
• Pages per session goals hope to see visitors viewing lots of different pages across the domain
• Event goals see what percentage of visitors carry out actions such as playing a video, downloading an asset or clicking an external link

Let’s stick to the initial example of tracking how many people visit contact us after looking at a specific product page. This is a destination goal.

Simply set the destination to the contact us page URL, turn the funnel on and add the product page URL to state that this must be visited first for this goal to be achieved. Set this as required and click save.

Hey presto, you’ve just set you’re first goal! Now to get training for that half marathon…