Google Analytics Tips For Small Businesses

A standout amongst the most critical strides when setting up Google Analytics is to characterize your Conversions, or Goals. Shared objectives are cite demands, demo demands, telephone calls, and online requests.

As it were, Goals enable you to track leads and deals created from your advertising efforts. Without Goals you’re flying visually impaired and you don’t know which advertising channels are driving leads and deals and which are simply squandering your promoting spending plan.

Presently, in the event that you’ve been utilizing Google Analytics for some time and you’re simply finding out about Goals, at that point I have some uplifting news and some awful news.

How about we begin with the awful news…

Stats Cannot Be Seen If Not Set In The Past

I’m sorry to say this, but if you go set up Goals in your Google Analytics account today, then you will not be able to run reports to see Goals generated before today. Goals are not retroactive. They’ll only start tracking and reporting from the day you set them up.

All I can say is it’s better late then never. You’ll be much happier in a few months if you set them up today.

So that’s the bad news.

And here’s some more not-so-good news…

Your Goals May Change Over Time

That’s right, even if you did set up Goals in the past it’s possible your goals have changed since then. For example, over the past year on our website we’ve introduced new free reports and added new forms. Each new report and form requires a new Goal.

Also, priorities in your business and marketing change over time that may require new Goals. Long story short, the Goals you set up today may not be relevant a year or two down the road.

And as noted above, Goals are not retroactive. So unless you can see into the future, you’re not likely to set up all the Goals today that you will eventually need tomorrow.

That finally brings us to the good news…

Introducing Sequence Segments

Unless you’re a heavy Google Analytics user you probably have not ventured too far into the world of Advanced Segments. In fact, you may be wondering what is a Segment?

When you’re looking at a Google Analytics report, then at the top you’ll see an option to “+ Add Segment”.

By adding a Segment, you’re able to slice and dice your data by different metrics. For example, you can add a Segment for Mobile Traffic so that all the reports are broken down by “All Users” as well as the Segment for “Mobile Traffic” .

OK, great, but how does this help us measure Goals that happened in the past?

Click on the “+ Add Segment” button again, and this time click on the red “+ New Segment” button to create a new custom segment. On the next page you’ll be presented with an almost endless array of options. Before your ADD kicks in, click on the “Sequences” button in the left navigation .

This page is where the magic happens 🙂

You can define any sequence of events that would define the Goal you want to track. For example, let’s say you have a blog article that is ranking high and driving traffic to your website and you’re wondering if any one of those visitors requested a quote or made an online purchase after reading your article. The sequence in this case would be:

1. Visited blog article
2. Visited the quote or purchase thank you page

So you could set up the Segment like this…

As you can see in the Summary section to the right of the image above, there are 18 users that fit the criteria I selected. That means, 18 people visited the blog post as the first page (or first interaction with the website) and then eventually requested a quote.

Isn’t that cool? Again, this does not rely on Goals so you can run this kind of analysis even if you never set up Goals in your Google Analytics account. Of course, I’m not recommending you skip Goals altogether. Goals will ultimately make your life a lot easier when reviewing your reports.

And with Sequence Segments you’ll now be able to run even more in-depth analysis to uncover more opportunities to improve your marketing. Happy hunting!