Goal setting in google analytics (GA) is critical for an ecommerce site because it turns raw traffic data into measurable outcomes.
Without Goals you know who visit your site but not whether the site is successful.
Measurable business outcomes not just traffic
An e-commerce website measures success not via page view how many people visited your page rather that conversions how many people actually get converted
Goals allows you to track conversions or actions such as completed purchases, add to cart actions, checkout starts, newsletter signups, account creation and pdf downloads.
Setting goals helps answer are visitors doing what they wanted to do in the website
Setting goals helps track conversion rate
With Goals enabled, google analytics calculates
Conversion rate – how many conversions happened based on the visits
Goal completions – how many purchases or checkouts happened
Revenue contribution – how much revenue appeared on the ad spend.
Example
If 10,000 visitors visits and 300 completed purchases, your conversion rate is 3% conversion rate.
Without goals setting this insight is impossible
Goals allows you to create funnels, showing where users abandon the process
Photo by Andrew Patrick Photo from Pexels
Example
When the visitors visited the website, add the products on product page and then add to cart on the cart addition, made the checkout, appears on payment page go through the payment process and finally visit thank you page
You can see and visualize the funnels on
Where the users drop off
Which step needs improvements?
Either on pricing
UX page,
Shipping cart or
Payment option
And this directly improves sales performance.
Goals connect marketing efforts to results
You can analyze
Which traffic sources connects the best or which traffic channels connects the best
Google ads, seo, social media, referral or email campaign.
You can also analyze return on investment on the paid campaigns
You can also analyze high value customer acquisition channels
i.e instead of asking which channels brings traffic you can set goals and look for which channels brings revenue
Goal data helps you optimize product pages, improve checkout experience, allocate budget to high converting channels, test offers, pricing and layouts (a/b testing)
Business owners’ decisions become insight based data speaks rather than assumptions
Goals can also tracks micro conversions such as product video views, add to wishlist, email signups, pdf downloads, coupon downloads
After analyzing the goals completions path
You can detect usability issues on UI UX designs, improve site navigation how customers are navigating different pages on the website, reduce the cart abandonments that leads to purchase drops and increase customer satisfaction.
Goals ensures that analytics reflects real business objectives such as increase revenue high return on investment, growing customer base, repeated purchases
