4 Steps for Setting Up Google Analytics Goals

Goals in Google Analytics are designed to let you measure business objectives for your site. They must correspond to a measurable action performed by visitors to that site.

Google has a useful post on setting up Goals. In that post, they detail the four steps of setting up a Goal and Funnel. They are:

1. Define your Goal Funnel
2. Configure Goal Settings for Each Profile
3. Define your Goal Funnel
4. Wait a Few Days and Analyze your Goal Performance

With regards to business objectives and measurable actions, think about them like this:

"Usually the visitor action that’s associated with a goal involves multiple steps," says Google’s Analytics Team. "Together these steps make up the Goal Funnel, or the sequence of steps that lead up to the successful completion of a Goal. Like the Goal itself, each of these steps must correspond to a measurable action, such as a pageview of a specific page."

Web analytics are all about measuring your site’s performance, and using the data from that to identify areas that need to be improved upon. Goals and Funnels in Google Analytics can help you achieve this. Read Google’s post to get details about each of the four steps and help yourself understand the process better.