Don’t Worry, Here’s How You Can Fix It
When we start working with new clients, we often find that their Google Analytics account is crowded with goal conversions that are making their data incorrect.
From not having the goal set up correctly to tracking aspects that are unnecessary, you could have a completely incorrect impression of the success of your current efforts.
4 Things to Check
To start, go to the admin area of your GA account and click on goals in the third column to check the following items:
1. Are you tracking PDF downloads?
While it is great to know whether someone is taking action on your site through CTAs, or anything of that nature, these clicks don’t necessarily correspond with gaining a new customer. Instead of tracking this goal, just check in GA how many times the page has been hit to see how users have interacted with it.
2. Are form submission goals tracking a thank you page?
One mistake we often see is destination goals for contact forms are set up improperly, and that businesses are sometimes just tracking hits to the contact page itself. Make sure that these goals are set to a unique thank you page that is attached to your site’s form.
If you have multiple goals like this, it might be easier to go to Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path to check them all at once.
3. Are clicks to random pages being tracked?
Similar to #2, make sure that you are not clogging up your goals with visits to specific pages. The point of conversions in GA is to help you track success to get a much better sense of ROI. Data related to pages you want to track can be found in the Behavior area of analytics.
4. Is more than one goal tracking the same thing?
Say you have two different forms on your site, one main contact form and another for quote requests. If you want to track the metrics of these forms separately, you will need to make sure the forms have a different thank you page, and different goals. Otherwise, there will be duplicate data.
An easy way to spot this is if you notice two goals have recorded the same number of hits for a period of time.
Why You Should Consolidate Your Goal Tracking
While we know it is nice to have the freedom to track a variety of things, when it comes to the bottom line, it is much easier to read and digest your site’s data when you are only tracking instances that led to gaining a lead. This can be from form submissions like we mentioned, but also from phone calls or even chats you receive via chatbots.
