Any successful business owner will tell you that each month, quarter and year, they create goals for their business to ensure that their business continues to thrive. In order to keep track of these goals, owners will create KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) to measure their success. This same strategy can be applied to the digital side of the business as well.
One of the most important things a business owner needs to set up in order to measure the digital success of their business is goals in Google Analytics 4. These goals and indicators are what give a business owner visibility into how many visitors to the website are converting to new customers or performing site specific actions. Knowing how the business is acquiring new customers or other desirable outcomes digitally then allows business owners to see their ROI (return on investment) on online marketing efforts. Knowing the ROI for the online marketing efforts then allows business owners to make consistent adjustments throughout the year to give them the best chance of achieving their business goals.
Get More Customers to Your Website Effectively
Google Analytics 4 is an extremely powerful platform that collects countless bits of data that lets business owners know who, when, how, and the number of people that are visiting their website. In addition to just seeing the amount of traffic a business website gets, unlike traditional marketing methods, business owners can identify which of these visitors became customers by setting up goals in Google Analytics. With goals set up, a business owner will have the data to make adjustments to their online presence and marketing efforts in order to improve costs while attracting new customers.
Let’s imagine you are selling a line of homemade soaps on your own eCommerce website and are advertising your product online. However, without a clear advertising strategy, you consistently run out of advertising budget within the first 1-2 weeks of each month which causes a decline in sales at the later end of each month. Setting up goals in analytics will tell you the differences between those who have purchased your homemade soap versus those who have not. Knowing this information will allow you to adjust your advertising strategy to only target visitors who resemble your purchaser’s demographic. This simple adjustment tends to lead to a lower advertising cost while increasing the sales of your homemade soaps.
Improve the Usability and Effectiveness of Your Website
Not only will goals in Google Analytics 4 reveal who a business’s customers are, it will also tell a business how visitors are interacting with the website itself across desktop, tablet and mobile. Perhaps the business got the right message to the right person at the right time but, when that person got to the website, they became lost and frustrated with the website experience and left without becoming a customer. Identifying this behavior by analyzing the Google Analytics 4 goals, a business owner can adjust their website experience to make it easier for visitors to become customers.
Let’s take the same homemade soap business as our example again. As the business owner, we have made adjustments to our advertising to get more visitors to our website but we are not seeing an increase in the number of sales. Diving deeper into the analytics, we see that visitors are coming into our website but are not finding the products page of our website that allows visitors to purchase the actual product from us. To solve this issue, we decided to add more buttons and links throughout important sections of the website so that visitors are able to easily find our products. Through our goals, we should soon see an increase in the number of visitors getting to our products page and see an increase in the number of sales.
Constantly Monitor and Improve the Digital Experience
With Google Analytics 4 goals set up and improvements made, Google Analytics goals become a benchmark for refining and improving a business’s digital presence proactively to continue to increase sales and grow the business on an ongoing basis. Due to the fact that Google Analytics 4 tracks performance over great lengths of time, a business owner can go back and see what measures were taken in the past to find the strategy that performed best and allowed the business to achieve their business goals.
Going back to our homemade soap business, consider our objective to sell more soaps. Through our ongoing analysis, we find that a common search that brings people to our website is “stress relieving soaps”. Upon visiting our site and seeing we do not offer this kind of soap, these visitors leave our website and continue their search elsewhere. Finding this information becomes an opportunity to increase sales. After the product is ready, a new campaign is created to attract traffic looking for stress relieving soaps to our website. We, once again, use goals specifically created to track the website traffic and the customer acquisition where we continue to monitor and improve our campaign.
Setting Up Google Analytics 4 Goals
For more information about Google Analytics 4 Goals and helpful instructions for how to set up goals, please refer to the Create and Manage Goals section of Google’s own Support website.
The Bottom Line
The online world of business offers tracking and data to help constantly improve one’s business. Setting up goals in Google Analytics allows a business to identify the number of customers that are coming from the website, improve the efficiency of online campaigns, and consistently refine the marketing and the website experience to help increase sales and continue to grow the business.