Setting up Google Analytics: goals, funnels and campaign tags

Most small-business Analytics accounts were installed once by a web designer and never touched. They report visits and bounce rate and nothing else, which means the owner cannot answer the only questions that matter: which sources send customers, which pages produce inquiries, and what an AdWords dollar returns. Google's 2011 redesign added multiple profiles with up to 20 goals, Multi-Channel Funnels, Real-Time reports and Site Speed, but none of it helps until the foundation below is in place.

1. Use the asynchronous snippet. In Analytics, go to Admin, select your property, and copy the code that starts with var _gaq = _gaq || [];. Place it just before the closing </head> tag on every page. If you run WordPress, a plugin such as Google Analytics for WordPress handles it; otherwise put it in the site template.
2. One property per website. Do not reuse the UA number across unrelated sites. Subdomains (shop.yoursite.com) can share a property with the _setDomainName option added.
3. Verify it is on every page. Use the free Google Analytics Debugger extension for Chrome, or open Real-Time reports and click through your site to watch the hits arrive. Missing code on the thank-you page is the most common reason goals show zero.
4. Check for double counting. Two copies of the code, usually one in the theme and one in a plugin, produce a near-zero bounce rate. If your bounce rate is under 10 percent, look for this.
5. Track off-site links and downloads. PDF downloads, mailto links and links to external booking or payment pages do not register as pageviews. Use event tracking (_trackEvent) or virtual pageviews (_trackPageview('/virtual/brochure-download')) so they can become goals.

Profiles are views of the same data with different filters. Create three before you add any filter:

• Raw. No filters. Your backup if a filter goes wrong; filters destroy data permanently.
• Test. Where new filters are tried first.
• Main. The one you report from, with the filters below.

Filters to apply to Main: exclude your office and home IP addresses; exclude your web developer's IP; force lowercase on request URIs so /Contact and /contact are not counted as different pages; and include only traffic to your hostname, which removes hits from staging copies and sites that pasted your code by mistake.

A goal is a completed action. Set one per conversion type, and give each a value.

For the value: if one in five contact-form leads becomes a customer worth $1,000 in gross profit, a lead is worth about $200. Enter $200. Now every report that shows goal value is showing an estimate of profit, and "which source is best" becomes a question you can answer with a sort.

Goal types in the current version are URL Destination, Time on Site, Pages per Visit, and, new this year, Event. Use URL Destination wherever a thank-you page exists; it is the most reliable. Match type should be "Head match" or "Exact match" on the thank-you URL, and make sure that page cannot be reached except by completing the form, or test it with a regular expression that excludes direct visits.

For an online store, turn on ecommerce tracking in the profile settings and have your platform send transaction data; Shopify, Magento, Volusion and BigCommerce all support this with a checkbox or short snippet. Then revenue, product and transaction reports populate automatically.

A funnel is the expected path to a goal: product page, cart, shipping, payment, confirmation. Define it on the goal, with each step's URL. The Funnel Visualization report then shows where people leave.

Rules of thumb: a checkout losing more than 60 percent of visitors between cart and confirmation has a problem worth fixing, usually a forced account creation, surprise shipping costs or a form that fails on mobile. A contact process with three pages should be one page. Funnels are the fastest way to find the $5,000 fix hiding in a $20,000 site.

Note that funnel steps require distinct URLs. If your checkout runs on one URL with changing content, use virtual pageviews for each step.

Analytics identifies traffic from search engines and referring sites on its own. It cannot identify email, banner ads, QR codes, Facebook ads or a link in a print ad unless you tell it. Use Google's URL Builder to add campaign parameters:

• utm_source: where the link lives (newsletter, facebook, yelp)
• utm_medium: the type (email, cpc, banner, print)
• utm_campaign: the specific campaign (october-promo)

A tagged link looks like yoursite.com/offer?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=october-promo. Keep a spreadsheet of every tag you create and use consistent lowercase names; "Email" and "email" become two rows in reports.

For AdWords, do not tag manually. Turn on auto-tagging in AdWords and link the accounts; you then get cost, click and conversion data side by side. Link Google Webmaster Tools as well to see search queries in the new Search Engine Optimization reports.

Never put utm tags on internal links within your own site. Doing so restarts the visit and wipes out the original source.

If your site has a search box, turn on Site Search tracking in the profile settings and enter the query parameter (usually s or q). The Site Search report is a list of what visitors could not find, which is a content plan written by your customers.

Use event tracking for video plays, tab clicks, outbound links and anything else that matters but is not a page load. Keep the category, action and label naming consistent, written down, and shared with whoever edits the site.

Add an annotation in the reports every time something changes: a site redesign, a new AdWords campaign, a press mention, a Google algorithm update. Six months later the spike or dip will have an explanation.

Then set a monthly review. The reports worth 30 minutes each month:

1. Traffic Sources, with goal value as the sort column.
2. Landing pages by goal conversion rate.
3. Funnel Visualization for each multi-step goal.
4. Multi-Channel Funnels, Assisted Conversions, to see which sources start journeys that other sources finish.
5. Site Speed, because slow pages convert worse and Google now uses speed as a ranking signal.
6. Mobile report, which for most businesses is now 5 to 15 percent of visits and climbing.

Use the new custom dashboards to put these on one screen, and email the dashboard as a PDF to the owner on the first of each month.

Tracking code only on the home page. Goals pointing at a thank-you URL that changed during a redesign. No IP filter, so the owner's daily visits inflate the numbers. Marketing emails sent without campaign tags. Analytics account owned by a former web designer's Gmail address, which you discover when you try to add a user. And no one reading the reports, which is the most common of all.

We discover what the business needs to know before touching the account: which actions are worth money, which channels are being paid for, and which decisions the numbers should support. We plan the goal, filter, profile and tagging structure in a one-page measurement document. We build it, test every goal with real submissions, and connect AdWords, Webmaster Tools and the ecommerce platform. Then we improve the site using what the reports show. Measurement is part of every web build and growth campaign we run, not an afterthought.

A representative engagement in our infrastructure work: a company whose Analytics account had been installed years earlier and reported nothing but visits. We rebuilt the setup with profiles, filtered views, valued goals, checkout funnels and tagged email campaigns, and linked the advertising accounts, so for the first time the owner could see which spending produced inquiries and which pages lost them.