There are three different types of goals you can create from the Goal Settings page, including URL Destination, Time on Site, and Pages/Visit that allow you to specify a page with its very own URL as a goal; provides you with data about a peculiar type of behavior on site, and offer insight into how engaged a site user is, respectively. Let us know in a bit more depth about these parameters.
As we have followed in the previous post, site owners should ideally create at least one or more goals in order for Google Analytics to work out goal conversion metrics. Before setting up a goal, it is necessary to make sure that you’ve certain key requirements like the name of the goal, the defined funnel, and also the value of the goal. Now let us know about the different types of goals.
With URL Destination, you can get the Request URI after the domain name or just by copy-pasting the requisite goal page URI from Top Content report. In case of a registration, your goal page may perhaps be ‘Thank You’ page (for example, enter ‘/thankyou.html’ for goal page www.mysite.com/thankyou.html).
Time on Site, on the other hand, gives you handy data about a specific behavior on your website. For instance, you run a news site having different news/feature story categories and you wish to measure the engagement for the ‘Current Topic’ section. This Time on Site goal for it is a good way of measuring visitors’ interest in your ‘Current Topic’ content, and whether or not your content is drawing visitors’ attention.
Pages/Visit goal type can give insight into how engaged your users are with your website content. For instance, in case of a catalog site that allows users to click around before buying an item, this goal type is handy since you can well grasp the depth of the user visit.
With a specific goal in mind, you can strategically work towards achieving your objectives, tracking your performance, and making the necessary modifications to derive the desired results.
There can be many objectives or sample focus areas for a particular goal. In case you want to draw more clicks, you need to focus on keywords and proper placements. You might enhance your ad exposure by inserting keywords and site placements to your required ad groups. If you want to boost your clickthrough rate, it is vital to focus on ad quality. Increasing CTR or attracting more clicks can be achieved by refining ads, and eliminating those extra impressions by opting for highly targeted keywords plus placements. At times, you can also use negative keywords.
In another scenario, you might seek an improvement in your return on investment (ROI). For this, the precondition is to draw attention of the right target audience. This can be done by focusing on your ads, keywords and placements and then on your site.
