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In order to truly make data driven decisions in your marketing campaigns, you have to set up Google Analytics Goals. It's important to understand the concepts behind setting up these goals. Let's start with the basic level.

Google Analytics Goals will help you identify quality visits to your website or app vs. average visits to your website or app.

The simplest way to set this up is to go into the Admin View of Google Analytics and under "View" select "Goal" then "Add New Goal."

There will be an option to either set a Goal as a "Duration" or an "Average Screens/Pages per Session."

Each of these Goals are relevant to tracking a Quality Web Visit. For example, if a regular visit spends an average of 1.91 pages on your site, you should set a Pages/Session goal of 4+ pages per session, or double the average amount.

If your average web visitor spends 1:32 on your site, set a duration goal of 3:00 or more.
Tracking users that spend more time on your site is important, because it allows you to see which referral sources (i.e. Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, Email Marketing, Instagram Bio links) are not only driving the most web traffic, but it allows you to see those that are driving the most traffic likely to convert (i.e., spending more time on your site).

While most people are hung up on form conversions or eCommerce purchases (bottom of the funnel), I'd argue these metrics (mid-funnel) are even more important to be tracking in terms of making data driven decisions.

Setting these up on Google Analytics will also give you the ability to link them into Google Adwords as a conversion, meaning your Adwords campaigns can start running to people more likely to spend double the amount of time on your website, vs. simply clicking an ad. This is called optimizing your Adwords Campaigns for conversions - yet another reason why setting up Goals in Google Analytics is a must for any marketing team.

Previously, I've written about the importance of Google Analytics and how to get started setting it up on your website. I've also written about understanding who your audience is by using Google Analytics Audience Reports. And of course, in order to get more web traffic in the coming 12 months, you have to understand where it has come from in the past. This shows you where the opportunity lies to go get more. Drilling down into your Acquisition Reports to see each of your top level Traffic Channels will start to tell you the story and build your digital marketing roadmap.

Feel free to email me at paul@datadriven.design with any questions.

Thanks and have a great day!

Paul Hickey has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.

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