Google Analytic Goals For Financial Reporting

Showing the Cold Hard Cash with Cold Hard Facts: Setting up Goals and gauging the financial value of your digital marketing

Why it’s important

Most marketing professionals try to show off keyword rankings, clicks, impressions and other ancillary metrics to show an ROI on efforts. I am here to tell you that cash is king – it’s true in the real world and the world of digital marketing is no different.

If you are reading this as a Marketing Manager

If you’ve hired a digital marketing agency and they don’t have the concepts implemented in this tutorial, fire them and laterally move their retainer to your salary. Seriously!

Agencies that don’t track their financial return don’t have your business’s best interest in mind. If you hired an agency to market your business, to grow your business, and make more money, and they can’t tell you how much money their efforts are making your business – fire them.

If your agency is goal tracking with measurable financial success, then congratulations, you have a rare breed of agency and you should cherish them.

If you haven’t hired an agency but want to show worth to yourself, peers and boss for the credit you deserve, and the raise you deserve, keep reading, you’re about to do just that.

If you are a marketer at an agency, like myself, this tutorial will be a great audit to win on your accounts by showing them exactly what the fiscal return is on your efforts – and ask for what you are worth.

It is a win win for everyone involved.

What we will cover

In this next tutorials we learn how to enable features to track the actual monetary value of your campaigns. In order to run the financial reports in my other tutorials will need to define the goals on your site and the value associated with those goals. Setting up the goals on your site is the secret sauce to understanding your value. Let’s begin!

We are going to focus on some very simple objectives in this tutorial. There are a lot of different “Goals” you can set up in Google Analytics but I only want to focus on the ones that are the most accurate to track financial return.

Understanding goals and objectives

Defining your Goals: One of the most common ways businesses want their web traffic to engage with their site is by filling out contact forms and getting the sales process started to ultimately result in a sale: bringing in CASH!

Requirements for goal

1. We want our traffic to navigate to Goal Page with a contact form
   1. Contact forms. These could be requests for consultations, quotes etc.   Leads that submit a request to contact you for your product or service are very “bottom of the funnel” leads; meaning, they are qualified as hot leads who are more likely to convert to a sale over an individual that visits your homepage or reads your blog alone.
   2. We don’t want to track the goal page alone since much of your traffic will go to your goal page and not fill out a form. These are not qualified leads
   3. We only want to track users who fill out a form since these are individuals most likely to complete a purchase
2. We want our users to fill out a form so your sales team can follow up and make the sale and make your business revenue
   1. It is important to redirect a form to a specific thank you page with a unique URL aka “Permalink” because we will be tracking this page since it can only be accessed when a user fills out a form.
   2. It is important the thank you page has a custom Permalink because you will want to set up individual goals on your site and in order to do this we will need a unique page with a unique URL/Permalink relative to the goal. If this doesn’t make sense, it soon will.

 

Step 1: Goal Setup

1.1 Navigate to our Admin panel > View > Goals > Set up goal

1.2 Select “+New Goal”

1.3 Select Contact Us

Step 2: Goal Description

Change your goal name to be specific to your goal. If your call to action is to contact your business about a service, change the name to be specific to that service

Step 3: Goal Details

3.1  Find the destination, or, the permalink of the page you want to track on your site

• Remember, the link should not be the page with the form, it should be the link of the thank you page which the user should be redirected to after they fill out the form

 

• If you don’t have a form on your goal pages, or a thank you page to redirect users to, you can check out this tutorial on setting that up: Need Tutorial

 

3.2 Add the destination permalink to your destination section in Google Analytics

Note: The permalink is the string of text directly after your main URL

Step 3 Click Save

Congratulations, your goal is now setup but you’re not done just yet. Understanding how and where your traffic converts is important but not all goal conversions are created equal.

 

Next you will learn the art of defining your goal value.

Defining and adding Goal Value

Each service or product marketed on your website has a different value when purchased. Not all products or services are worth the same, so why track them all the same?  Adding separate values for each goal completion will enable you to better understand the value of your marketing and how to prioritize efforts based on return.

Moving forward these metrics will be applicable to acquisition, content, behavior and keyword reports but also for understanding patterns and different conversion models.

Using My Goal Value Calculator

This proprietary goal calculator will help you define your goal value:

• Navigate here and copy/download the spreadsheet
• Fill out everything in blue – you may need to work with sales and your financial dept to get these variables
• The end result will be your Goal Value

Example

If you have 10 users to fill out a contact form for SEO, and 1 of those users becomes a client worth 15k per year, you know that it will take 10 goal completions to get to 15k – so, each form submission is worth on average 1500.

• 10 form submissions = 15k
• 1 form submission = 1500
• A form submission = 1 goal completion
• Each goal completion is worth 1500

Click save and you have officially set up your goal properly!

Understanding how much areas of your website are worth will help focus your efforts on the campaigns that give you the highest return.

 

Life Pro Tip:

You should have 1 form, and 1 thank you page per goal, so keep that in mind when setting up your system.

In our next tutorials, we are going to be using the work from this tutorial to run reports to define the value of every metric available in the Google analytic suite.