Engagement Goals as part of Google Analytics help track success metrics focused around visit depth as well as time spent on site. To enhance the functionality, new version now incorporates one more feature in the form of Event Goals. It gives users even more encouragement to make use of event tracking.
An explanation on Engagement Goals
Just to provide some backgrounder, each Google Analytics profile can well be configured with up to four different ‘Goal Sets’, each one of them geared to house five individual goals. Each goal set in the Traffic Sources reports will appear as its own tab and the goals, which are associated with the set, get listed in plain text format, to indicate how your site visitors are accomplishing its pre-defined objectives.
For instance, your Goal Set 1 can be comprised of five separate goals like Newsletter Signup, Contact Us Page, New User Registration, Webinar Signup, and Catalog Request. Subsequently, your goal sets 2, 3 and 4 may contain other goals. Just a click on the tab reveals the requisite numbers for you.
An introduction to Event Tracking
You can employ the feature to track site visitor actions that may not correspond directly to the pageviews. It is no doubt, a great fit to track things, such as PDF or other file downloads, interaction with dynamic/AJAX sites, that with Adobe Flash objects and other media including embedded videos, error count your users get while trying to checkout and the length of time for which a video on your site was watched.
Generally, events are defined on basis of a set of specific Categories, Labels, Values and Actions. This is how you might opt to set up event tracking to track whitepapers and presentations’ downloads.
These interactions do have considerable business impact, but till this point users could not track them as goals. There are three distinct ways in which they might use Event Goals on the business site.
Tracking Downloads: If you run a business to business site and give whitepapers perhaps as a PDF download for attracting leads, and drive traffic to this webpage through sustained advertising, you can track the downloads count by using event tracking. For instance, it is possible to use the category for designating the click was of ‘download’ type and also use the action for designating the download was actually a ‘whitepaper’ and make use of the label for identifying the actual whitepaper downloaded.
Configuring this as a goal becomes easier with the new version of Google Analytics. It simply matches any event with the action of ‘whitepaper’ and the category of ‘download’. Finally it sets the goal value.
Tracking time
Event tracking can be very effective because it allows users to track not only values but also the category, action, as well as label. Going back to the functionality of a B2B site, imagine you’ve hosted an embedded product demo video on any of your webpages. It is possible to track the time spent by a user watching the video – with a small JavaScript – and send the same (number) back as an event value to Google Analytics. Event Goals enables users to set up a goal on basis of this value.
Traditionally, the only way to set goal values was when creating the goal in Google Analytics, or from the tracking code using ecommerce tracking. With Event Goals, you have another option: using the event value as the goal value.
