11 Goals Every Internet Marketer Should Know About!

 If you are a website owner or an Internet marketer, then you probably know that you can set up tracking various goals in Google Analytics and Yandex Metrica. But how do you know what exactly needs to be tracked and what are the capabilities of analytics systems in terms of goal tracking? An experienced internet marketer can easily handle this issue and create a list of goals to track. But here's how to be the owner of the site or a novice Internet marketer? 

Whatever your level of knowledge and expertise, the first thing to start with is to familiarize yourself with the business goals of the site. All owners of commercial sites want to get more customers, that is, the site must provide an influx of new sales or customers.

If you have an online store and on the site you can pay for the goods or at least leave a request, then everything is clear. The purchase decision itself takes place on the site. So the business goal is to sell as many products as possible on the site itself. It should be noted that not a small share of sales comes from phone calls, but this, unfortunately for Internet marketers, is a feature of the mentality of buyers in Ukraine and Russia, who still call more often than make purchases through the basket, but that's another story.

Most online stores with similar business goals set up only e-commerce and are extremely superficial about the detailed study and setting of Goals, which is a big omission and further you will understand why.

If you do not have an online store, like a corporate website, whose task is to sell the services of your company. In this case, the decision to order your services may not take place on the site, but in the office of your company or at the time of the consultation by phone, then the business goal of the site is to generate as many requests for consultation in the office or by phone as possible. Moreover, these applications should preferably be of high quality, that is, with a high conversion rate into a deal.

You can't set up ecommerce to track the business goals mentioned above, and that's where Goals come into their own. Moreover, in this case, the Goals are the only reliable tool for tracking conversions on the site.

It is to track the effectiveness of achieving the business goals of the site that the Goals in Google Analytics and Yandex Metrica are used. It should be noted here that the Google service has many times more functionality than the Yandex service. And this applies both to the total number of monitored parameters and indicators, as a general functionality that allows you to process and build the most complex reports with these parameters and indicators in a very diverse way, and also to the fact that the functionality for setting Goals in Analytics is also incomparably greater than the functionality in Metrica.

And this applies both to the total number of monitored parameters and the main functionality that allows you to process and build the most complex reports with these indicators in a variety of ways, and to the fact that the functionality for setting Goals in Analytics is also incomparably greater than in Metrica.

Let's sum up the intermediate result. We know what business goals websites have, we know which of the statistics collection services is better to use for marketing analysis, and also that various goals can be configured in these web analytics services. But the truth is we still don’t know which goals can be tracked.

Main types of goals

1.  Making a purchase/order

This is the most important goal for most sites. Tracks the goal of achieving a pageview, successful checkout, or successful payment if the site has online payment.

2.  Visiting the Basket

For most online stores, this goal is intermediate in the process of making a purchase on the site. But this goal is important for tracking the conversion between those who added the product to the cart, visited it, and moved to the next stage in the sales funnel (in some online stores, the next stage is “Make a purchase”).

3.  Viewing a specific page

Both Google Analytics and Yandex Metrica are able to track the statistics of visits to each page of the site.

So, you can set the goal to:

• visiting a specific page of the site;
• multiple visits to a particular page;
• visiting certain pages of the site in one visit;
• several visits to certain pages of the site in one visit;
• sequential visits to certain pages of the site in a strictly specified order.

For example, you can set the Goal to visit pages: “Contacts”, “Discounts”, “Special Offer”, “Delivery”, “Payment”, “Price”, etc.

In the process of making a decision, a site visitor can visit many different pages, but often visiting the pages listed in the example indicates a greater interest of a particular visitor, compared to others. It's certainly not a 100% guarantee of interest, but it can still help segment those who are more interested in buying from those who aren't.

4.  Click on target button

This goal is configured for any click on the target button on the site. These buttons can be:

• buttons "Buy" and "Add to cart";
• button "More" or "Next";
• button “Add to comparison”;
• any other button on the site.

5.  Submitting data via a form

This goal somewhat intersects with the previous one, since when setting up any form, a click on the target button occurs, but still this goal is so important that it should be discussed separately.
If you have forms for applications or feedback on your site, then they must be tracked in analytics. Moreover, we recommend setting up tracking how visitors interact with each of the fields:

• what fields they interact with;
• what fields are not filled;
• how much time is spent filling in each field;
• with which fields there are difficulties and errors in the filling process;
• which fields fail to submit the form;
• conversion between those who opened the form and those who started interacting with it;
• conversion between those who started interacting with the form and those who were able to successfully submit it.

All this data can be tracked by setting goals in Google Analytics, but for such a detailed setting, some knowledge and experience with analytics will already be required.

An example of forms that should be configured for such a goal:

• "Submit your application";
• "Call me back";
• “Feedback”, etc.

6.  Registration and Authorization

From my own experience, I can say that if you can’t buy a product on your site without registering, you have big problems with sales. Unfortunately, there are many sites where registration is made a mandatory element, and this obligation is not dictated by anything and arose only because of the inexperience of the site developer. This should be avoided. Any mandatory step in the sales funnel reduces the overall conversion and greatly reduces the percentage of visitors who were able to successfully complete a purchase on the site. And all those who failed to cope with this mandatory step, most likely, will not even call you, but will go to the competitor’s website and make a purchase from them.

That is why it is important to regularly improve the Registration and Authorization forms on the site, simplify them and make them as understandable and user-friendly as possible. And you can track the results of changes just by studying statistics on visitors who have reached the goals “Registration” or “Authorization” on the site.

7.  Video

Do you have a video on your site? And how many statistics do you collect about those visitors who interact with this video? Perhaps it will be news to you that you can set the target not only to launch, but also to events such as:

• percentage of video watched;
• following the links in the annotations to the video;
• following the prompts after the video;
• number of video stops.

All this detailed statistics will not only allow you to understand how interesting a particular video is to your visitors, but also to identify the most effective video, as well as track how watching a video influences a purchase decision.

8.  File download

Simple goal - tracks the number of downloads of the price list or any other file present on your site. If you have, for example, several product catalogs in the form of files, then by the number of downloads you can find out which catalog visitors are most interested in, and improve this catalog in the first place to achieve even more orders and deals.

9.  Click on the banner

Any banner on the site is a marketing tool that must perform a specific function. Many site owners forget about this and place banners according to the old Russian strategy “anyhow.” However, if you have multiple banners on your site, or if you update them frequently, then by tracking the number of goals achieved, you will be able to track the most effective banner that attracted the most visitors and generated the most sales.

10.  Click on Contact information, Email address, etc.

On some sites, it is justified to partially hide contact information, so clicking on a button that reveals contact information can be a signal that this visitor is interested in a call.

Also, an interested visitor can be someone who clicks on an email address on the site to immediately go to the email client and send you some kind of letter. Of course, this goal is not an absolute metric, and not only targeted visitors will certainly fall into such an audience. For example, sales managers of various campaigns who will visit your site, look at contacts and send you some kind of commercial offer with a boring and uninteresting service.

From experience, I can say that the percentage of such non-targeted visitors who have reached, it seems, the target goal, will not be critical. And this means that you can safely use this data for marketing analysis of your site.

11.  Duration

This goal is not as informative as all the previous ones, but you should also be aware of it. If you have an information resource and it is important for you how long the visitor spends on the site, then you can set up goal tracking for the duration of the visit. That is, the goal will be registered when the visitor stays on the site longer than the time you set. This will allow you to determine which of the materials was more effective and which was less effective.

Once again, we draw your attention to the fact that the goals must be configured for those site owners who do not have e-commerce. In such projects, Goals are the main data that an Internet marketing specialist can rely on in his work.

Returning to the question of why it is necessary to set goals for e-commerce projects, because in such projects e-commerce can provide much more practical information than achieving microconversions in the form of tracking set Goals (namely, microconversions, because macroconversion in e-commerce is like once there will be a transaction).

In practice, in any e-commerce project there are always sections or categories of products where the total number of sales is not enough to make unambiguous decisions on adjusting the marketing strategy. Such situations arise at the beginning of advertising a new site, at the start of advertising a new category of goods, or if the category of goods is not very popular and it is simply impossible to get more data in this category.

So, in order to make effective business decisions, you should rely on data with a sufficiently large sample. And if there is very little data on transactions, then with proper setting of goals, statistics on these goals will be an order of magnitude larger than statistics on transactions. It is this larger amount of data that should be relied upon to make the right decisions in limited conditions.

Goals are very different. We have considered only the most basic ones. And no matter how many there are, it is very important to keep track of most of them. This data will help you understand how effectively you manage your advertising budget, adjust your marketing strategy and increase profits through revenue growth and cost optimization with the same advertising budget.

Author: Sidnev Vlad,

Director of Strategic Internet Marketing Agency Star Marketing
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