Goals in Analytics That Nobody Set Up

Visits, and nothing else

Many small business sites have Google Analytics installed. It went in when the site was built, and it has counted every visit since.

The reports are all about traffic: users, sessions, pages viewed, time on site, where visitors came from.

What they cannot say is how many of those visits ended with somebody getting in touch. Analytics does not know what a result is for your business until somebody tells it.

That is what goals are for, and on a great many small business sites nobody has set any up.

What a goal is

A goal is an action you tell Analytics to count as a success. When a visit includes it, Analytics records a conversion against what it knows about that visit: the source, the first page, the device.

Goals live in the view settings, under Admin, and each view can hold twenty. A small business usually needs three or four.

Two kinds matter here: a destination goal, which counts a visit to a particular page, and an event goal, which counts an action such as a tap on a link.

The goals most small sites need

• The form's thank-you page, reached only by sending the form.
• Taps on the phone number, from phones in particular.
• Clicks on the email address, wherever it appears.
• A booking confirmation, if bookings happen on the site.
• A price list download, if the site offers one.

The second is the goal most sites lack. On phones, a great many enquiries are a tap on the number rather than a form, and without a goal those calls are invisible in every report.

The form and its thank-you page

The simplest goal is a destination: a page visitors only reach by sending the form, such as an address ending in thank-you.

Many sites have no such page. Their form shows a thank-you message in place, so there is nothing separate to count, and the form has to send an event instead.

A real thank-you page has a side benefit: it can say what happens next and when, which reassures the person who just wrote.

Keep it out of the menu and out of search results. Otherwise people who find it some other way are counted as enquiries.

Phone taps and email clicks

A phone number written as a link opens the dialler when tapped, and that tap can send Analytics an event, with a category such as contact and an action such as phone.

The usual way is Google Tag Manager: a trigger for clicks on links starting tel:, and another for links starting mailto:, the kind that opens an email program. Each event then gets an event goal.

A tap is not a completed call; somebody can tap and hang up. But it is a far better signal than nothing.

Callers who dial the number on your van or a business card never touched the site, and no goal will count them.

A worked example

A two-lawyer wills and estates practice in a suburban office had run Analytics since its site launched in 2016. The managing partner looked at the visitor total once a month, and little else.

Whoever maintained the site added three goals: a destination goal for a new thank-you page after the consultation form, and event goals for phone taps and email clicks, set up through Tag Manager.

Two months later the picture differed from what the practice had assumed. Most enquiries from phones were taps on the number, not forms.

The blog posts that brought the most visits produced almost no enquiries. The page explaining fees, with modest traffic, was where many enquiring visitors had first landed.

The practice put its phone number at the top of every page on phones, gave the fees page a clear route to booking, and stopped judging the site by the visitor total.

Goals count from the day you add them

Goals are not retroactive. Analytics applies them to visits from the moment they are saved, and nothing before.

A business that sets them up this week will have its first full month in July, and its first year-on-year comparison next June.

That is the strongest argument for doing it now rather than at the next redesign. Every month without goals is a month that can never be measured.

Keeping the numbers honest

Goals are easily inflated by the business itself.

Test submissions count, so filter your own office's internet address out of the main view. Keep one unfiltered view as a backup, since filters cannot be undone on past data.

Spam counts too: a form without spam protection reports robots as enquiries. And a goal counts once per visit, so someone who sends the form twice counts once, which is usually what you want.

What changes once you can see them

With goals in place, the reports gain columns for conversions and conversion rate, and the useful questions become answerable.

Which sources send people who get in touch, not just people who visit. Which pages people land on before enquiring. Whether a newsletter or a Facebook post produced enquiries, which is where campaign tags pay off.

Goals can also be imported into Google Ads as conversions, so ad spending is judged on enquiries rather than clicks.

And the monthly visitor total stops being the measure of the website. It never was a good one.

The counter-case

Goals count actions on the website, not customers. A form sent is not a job won, and a tap is not a booked appointment.

Calls from the Google My Business listing, a printed flyer or a returning customer's contacts never touch the site. A business whose work mostly arrives that way will see small numbers.

Small numbers also swing: three enquiries one month and seven the next is noise, not a trend.

So keep asking new customers how they found you. Then set up goals anyway, because they are the only record of what the website itself produces.

Setting them up

1. Check the view settings for existing goals.
2. Create a real thank-you page for each form.
3. Add a destination goal for that page.
4. Send events for phone and email links through Tag Manager.
5. Add event goals to match them.
6. Filter out your own office and test once.
7. Read the results by source and landing page monthly.

Step four is the one that finds the calls. On a site visited mostly from phones, the tap on the number is often the main way people get in touch, and it stays invisible until it is counted.

Knowing which newsletter or post sent those visitors is covered in campaign tags on the links you share.

Frequently asked questions

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