What Are Goals and Conversions in Google Analytics?

The goal of your website might be to grow monthly traffic, improve the conversion rate of a product purchase, etc. In GA, you can set specific goals and assess whether your efforts fulfill the goals. 

Whereas, goal conversion is when a visitor takes some action that is being tracked. For example, the visitor adds products to the cart, purchases something, or joins your mailing list. This is conversion. 

There are four types of goals in Google Analytics: destination, event, duration, and pages per session.

• Destination

Destination goals are those goals that you can set for specific pages that appear after an action from the user.

For example, it can be a Thank You page that appears when someone fills the contact form. So, the Thank You page here is the destination, not the contact page. Every count for the destination goal is a conversion. 

• Duration

The duration goal is used to track the time spent by a user on a specific page. This goal is used when you want to analyze the engagement on your primary web pages to further improve things. 

• Pages per session

This goal is used to find the number of pages visited by a user during a single session. If the bounce rate is low, the pages per session will be high, and vice versa.

• Event

This is a special kind of goal that can be set to track some specific actions taken by the visitor. This can be downloading an ebook, watching a video, etc.

1. From the Admin panel of GA, choose the Goals.

2. A new page will open. Click on the “+New Goal” button.

3. From here, you can either create a custom goal or choose from a number of available templates. The goal templates are also good for most of the websites. 

4. Creating a custom goal is also easy. Name the new goal.

5. GA will show four types of goals to choose from- Destination, Duration, Pages/Screens per Session, and Event. 

6. After selecting the goal, you will have to enter some details about it depending on the goal selected by you. 

7. Click on ‘Create Goal’ to finish the set up of a goal. 

Google Analytics will now start collecting data on the basis of your goal.