As you work to increase traffic for your site, you expect that the targeted actions of visitors on the site will also affect business indicators, such as profit and turnover. In Internet marketing, a “target action” is a user action that is useful for your business.
For example:
- added an item to the shopping cart
- signed up for the newsletter
- I left my contact details in the feedback form
- I bought a product
- viewed the contact page
Goals may be different for each site and for each type of business, and tracking of targeted actions may be configured differently.
Adding a new goal
To set up a goal, you need full access to the tag.
- Go to the tag settings and go to the Goals tab.
- Click on the “Add Goal” button
- Select the type of goal to add:
- Page Views
- Page URL
- Event
- Composite goal
If you want to show it in the future using Yandex.Direct advertising to users who have completed certain goals-enable the “Retargeting” option.
The following restrictions apply for goals:
- 200 goals for a single site.
- Yandex. Metrica takes into account actions that were completed only after the goal was created.
- When editing an existing goal, data about its completion is not recalculated.
Goal “Page Views”
A condition for completing a “Page Views” goal is for the user to view a certain number of pages.
For example, you think that a user who has viewed 5 or more pages on your site is successfully attracted by an advertising campaign.
To set a goal of this type, just enter the desired number in the Views field.
Goals like “Page Views” should be used as micro-conversions, or if you have a content project that earns money from ad impressions and you need users to view as many pages of the site as possible.
The “Page URL”goal
If a Page URL goal is completed, the user must view a specific URL or set of addresses.
For example, these pages may include:
- order confirmation page (for an online store);
- registration completion page (for the forum);
- newsletter subscription confirmation page;
- Contact Us page or driving directions;
- page with a list of dealers selling your products;
- click on the “Download price list”link;
- download presentations about your products;
- adding a comment.
A goal of this type is defined by a set of “condition – content” parameters, where:
- The condition can take the values “url: matches”, “url: contains”, ” url: starts with…”, or “url: regular expression”.
- URL — the full URL, or part of the target page URL, or a regular expression (URL template).
Click Add Condition to add several parameters to the goal. These parameters will be combined with the logical “OR” operator: the goal is achieved if the user visited a page whose URL matches at least one of the conditions. You can specify a maximum of 10 parameters per goal.
If the custom goal describes a shopping cart or order confirmation, then check the box “Types of online store goals” and select the goal type:
- this goal applies to the shopping cart on my site
- this goal describes order confirmation on my site
A goal of the “Page URL” type supports transmitting parameters for online stores.
This setting allows you to pass order parameters to Yandex. Metrica:
- order structure,
- cost of ordered goods,
- delivery information and other data related to the completed order.
Event Goal
A condition for completing a Page URL goal is to perform the target action without changing the page address.
For example:
- Send an order using the “Submit Order” button
- Downloading a file
- Click on the “like” button
- Click on an ad
- Viewing videos
An Event goal also allows you to send data about custom events to Yandex. Metrica.
When the user performs a target action, we call the function:
yaCounter123456.reachGoal('event_name');where:
123456— your tag number;event_name– goal ID (name of the event selected as the target action). For example,click_to_like_button.
Example of setting a goal in the source code of your page:
<html>
...
<a href="#" onclick="yaCounter123456.reachGoal('click_to_like_button'); return true;">Like</a>
...
</html>After adding the method call reachGoal to your page code, go to Goal settings. In the “Goal ID” field, specify the ID that you assigned in the method reachGoal(In my example – click_to_like_button).
Note:
If you want to use this goal in Google Tag Manager to track the firing of any triggers — you can output code that captures the goal’s execution using Custom HTML Tag:
<script type="text/javascript">
(function() {
yaCounter123456.reachGoal('click_to_like_button');
})();
</script>Composite Goal
A condition for completing a Composite Goal type goal is to complete a sequence of steps that the user takes on the way to completing the target action.
This will help you analyze statistics for each specific step and understand at what stage of the path to the goal site users are experiencing difficulties.
A composite goal takes into account the steps performed during a single site visit and in the specified sequence.
To view data for a Composite Goal, click the funnel icon in the Conversion field.
When creating a Composite goal, pay attention to the following::
- A composite goal can consist of a maximum of five steps.
- You should choose the chain of steps in such a way that each subsequent step is impossible without completing the previous one. For example, if a user can complete the second step without going through the first step, the goal is not considered completed.
- The steps don’t have to be completed in a row: the user can visit other pages on the site as they move towards the goal.
- If the user leaves the site for the time specified in the session timeout option, the goal is not considered completed.
A “composite goal” can include two types of goals::
- the “Page URL” goal
- Event goal
That’s all there is to it.
Remember that the type of goal you choose should depend on the metrics that you use to measure your site’s performance in terms of business efficiency.
