Making Goals, Funnels & Filters Actionable

Google Analytics (GA) makes advancing your business easier by giving you the tools to quickly see where improvements can be made in your web site that will make a difference to your bottom line. Whether your bottom line is dollars or traffic, GA has solutions. Three of these tools are called goals, funnels and filters. I will briefly outline the uses for each of these and how they can provide actionable insights that will sharpen your business’ performance.

Goals

In setting up any analytics program your first priority should be to determine your goals. Beware, it is easier said than done because they cannot just be any goals. Goals have to tie the data you are collecting to your desired business outcomes. Without goals, the metrics you collect will not yield actionable insights. It is lovely to know that you got 1,000 visitors on your site today, but how do those visits impact your business, really? That is where setting up clearly defined goals comes in.

For example, let us say that you have a business goal of getting a publishing deal to write a book on how to de-clutter your home. One strategy you determine for yourself is to become a recognized expert in home organization. The tactic you employ to achieve your strategy is to write a blog where you share tips on home organization. You do some research and discover that publishers sit up and take notice of a blogger when in addition to getting an average of 50,000 visitors per day, the average time on the site is 12 minutes. You set a goal of achieving an average site visit time of 12 minutes. (See how we must first have clear business goals in order to know what our analysis goals should be?)

Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik (2008) says it well:

At the end of the day every analysis needs to solve for the business outcomes. So you have to have some understanding of the goals going in (this is much harder than you imagine).

 Many people just jump into the data, find interesting trends and patterns, convert those into "insights" and off it goes. The problem? You are sending things out you think matter, rather than what the business actually cares about (paras. 25 & 26).

Perhaps you decide that a goal of a 12 minute average visit is too overwhelming to start with. So you set up four smaller goals in GA. The first goal is a visit duration of greater than 3 minutes. It looks like this:

The second goal is for visits greater than 5 minutes. It looks like this on the GA site:

Set the visit duration goals at any intervals you think make sense for your overall targets.

There are other goals that can be set, such as URL Destination, Pages per visit, and Events. The same logic applies. By clearly defining your desired business outcomes you can drill down to the specific metric you need to measure in order to track your progress towards your overall business goals.

Funnels

Now, let us suppose that another benchmark that gets publishers’ attention is a large mailing list. You decide to add a monthly newsletter opt-in page to your blog, so you can begin to capture names and email addresses. Again, with some research you determine that 100,000 is the magic number of regular subscribers that you need to get publishers interested in your book. It is easy enough to keep count of how many new addresses you collect, but that is not actionable data in terms of site improvement. What is actionable information is the pathway that people use to complete the sign up process. By watching their actions in this funnel, you can figure out where people abandon the course. You can then optimize your site to insure more people make it all the way through to complete the sign up procedure.

In order to set up a funnel, we go back to our goals tab and select the second goal set, and choose the goal type, URL destination. We plug in the address of the page that subscribers will see once they have successfully completed signing up for the newsletter. In this case, it is a thank you page.

By checking the “Use Funnel” box at the bottom, you can then add the steps in the funnel that bring visitors to the ultimate destination of the “thank you” page. Once you have added each of the steps the visitor must complete in order to successfully sign up for the newsletter, you then have the ability to see where people abandon the process. You can then look at the pages where they bail out fix any issues. Anyone can count new sign ups, but only someone deeply invested in their goals will think to add a funnel to their clearly defined goal in order to determine site obstructions to their goals.

Filters

Filters are another tool designed to help you get down to actionable data.

Google Profile Filters allow you to define rules that permanently modify your data as it flows into your account profile. If you want to screen, suppress, or shape the data that enters your profile so it doesn’t clutter the picture of your ecommerce business, then Profile Filters are an important feature to implement (Stearns, 2010, para.6).

There are advanced filters you can set up for doing things like segmenting out organic search traffic from paid search traffic, but for our purposes here, I will relate just the basic filtering options.

One important note about filters is that once you apply a filter, you cannot retroactively “un-apply” it. Once the data is filtered, you cannot get the entire data set back again, so keep one profile that is completely unfiltered that includes all the data compiled from your site. If any issues arise, you can always refer to the data in the unfiltered profile.

An easy and useful filter to turn on is one that separates out traffic coming from your own ISP domain or IP address. So, going back to our goal of an average of 50,000 visitors per day, if you are visiting your site 100 times per day, your visitor count is going to be inaccurate every day because of your own visits. With filters, you can tell Google Analytics not to count traffic coming from your own domain or IP address. You can designate it to exclude traffic from certain sources or include traffic to particular subdirectories or hostnames. Filtering lets you see the only data you want to see.  

Below is an example of how to set up a filter for your own IP address.

Using goals, funnels and filters, you can make your web site’s analytic data more actionable—as long as you have tied each back to your business goals. Because, in the end, actionable data is the only data worth having. 

References

Kaushik, A. (2008, July 21) Consultants, analysts: Present impactful analysis, insightful reports. Kauskik.net. Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/consultants-analysts-present-impactful-analysis-insightful-reports/

Stearns, M. (2010, February 4) Google Analytics: Use profile filters, advanced segmentation to understand your visitors. Practicalecommerce.com. Retrieved from http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1623-Google-Analytics-Use-Profile-Filters-Advanced-Segmentation-to-Understand-Your-Visitors