On every website, there are key actions that the website owner wants visitors to perform. Website owners want their visitors to stay on the site as long as possible, navigate between pages, view content and videos, fill out forms, and perform additional actions. Knowing how many of your visitors perform certain actions on the site and when these actions take place are important things to examine in order to generate business insights and maximize the traffic coming to the site. Goals and events refer to actions performed on the site, but they are completely different actions. In this article, we will cover the difference between Goals and Events and how to set them up in Google Analytics. Anyone unfamiliar with the terms goals and events is welcome to read about them in the glossary of relevant terms for Google Analytics, and it is important before starting to define goals and events for your site, to read the guide Google Analytics for Beginners and the guide to Reports in Google Analytics.
What is the difference between Goals and Events?
We are going to cover one of the Google Analytics questions that we get asked the most: What is the difference between Google Analytics Events vs. Goals? Both goals and events are important tracking tools that greatly affect the success of your marketing efforts. Although both are deceptively similar, each helps you develop business insights from the audience coming to the site and generally helps your business grow in diverse ways.
While Goals measure conversion actions that will usually also affect your revenue, Events measure website behavior that may or may not affect your main goal. Here are some examples of goals:
- A visitor who completes a purchase on your site and is redirected to a “Thank you for your order” page.
- New leads collected through a contact page or a landing page
- Downloads of gated content requiring the user to fill out a form with their contact details
- Newsletter signups
Unlike goals, events help you track metrics that are not considered a specific conversion or key actions taken by visitors. Here are some examples of events:
- Video played
- Button clicks that lead the user to different pages on the site
Also from an internal system perspective, you will find these two in separate reports. While goals are in the Conversions report, events are in the Behavior report.
How to set up Goals?
Your first stop is the Admin panel in Analytics. From there, select the ‘Goals’ option, as shown below.
Next, a new page will open where you need to click the ‘+ New Goal’ button. You can then decide whether to use an existing goal template or create a custom goal. First, give your goal a name. This name will appear in every report that includes data about the goal, so choose something clear and memorable. Then you need to choose one of the four different goal types that Analytics offers:
Every goal in Analytics records a conversion when a site user performs a specific action. Which action? It depends on the type of goal you choose.
- Destination – When a user visits a specified URL, a conversion is recorded.
- Duration – When a user spends a certain amount of time on the site, a conversion is recorded.
- Pages/Screens per session – When a user views a predetermined number of pages in a session.
- Event – When a user performs a specific action. For example, clicking a link or playing a video. (We will explain below how to create an event).
After choosing the type of goal you want to create, there are several additional steps. Google Analytics provides clear on-screen instructions. Generally, you need to enter the specific details of the goal you want to track. For example, for a destination goal, you need to provide the website URL where a visit will trigger a conversion:
Duration goals and pages-visited goals are simple to configure. There are only a few fields to fill in with information about the exact nature of the goals. Event goals are a bit different. To set them up, you first need to configure ‘Events’ through Analytics. You can scroll down to see how to set up events.
After creating the events, choose the event you want to associate with the goal and then fill in the other simple fields displayed above. For any type of goal you have configured, click the ‘Create Goal’ button to finish the process. Data related to the goal will begin being collected by Analytics.
How to set up Events?
Click on the Admin menu > Goals > New Goal > Custom Event
Select “Event” from the available options
Under goal details, enter the category, action, label, and value of the event we want to track. You can choose whether they are equal to, begin with, or are regular expressions (regex), meaning they match a specific pattern. Every event in GA consists of four components. These components allow events to be categorized accordingly, which is reflected in reports:
- Event Category (Required): A category is an assigned name that you create to group your events. For example, if you want to measure clicks on a video, you would enter “Video” in the category.
- Event Action (Required): The action label is typically used to illustrate the type of event or interaction you want to track. So if you are looking at clicks on a video, we would use action labels such as “Play”, “Stop”, or “Pause”.
- Event Label (Optional): With labels, you can provide additional information about the event you are tracking. For example, you might want to track the titles of specific videos, which would warrant a label like “Oil Painting 101 Tutorial”.
- Event Value (Optional): Value reflects a numerical value assigned to a page element. For example, it might be the time it takes for a video to load or a monetary value based on how far the user got into the video.
When you set up an event in your dashboard, you will add a category, action, label, and value for each event.
Then click Save.
Now, test your goal and make sure everything is configured properly. In Google Analytics, click on Real-Time, then on Conversions, and then on the button or link corresponding to the event goal you just set up. If everything was configured properly, your goal should be recorded and you will know because there will be a 1 next to the goal in the Active Users column. If your event goal was configured incorrectly, return to Admin and make sure you followed the exact steps in the guide.
Summary
Now that you understand which events and goals can be measured in Google Analytics, you should make use of the available options to obtain as much data and information as possible about visitor actions on your site and how to maximize the traffic coming to it. By setting goals and events, you will be able to understand which content interests your visitors, which call to action converts the most, which traffic source generates the most conversions, and plenty of other relevant information.
About the Author
Ben Knaani, Campaign Manager at Fialkov Digital. 26 years old, #1 optimizer and campaign manager at heart. Loves sports and mom’s cooking
