One of the things I like to do with this blog is talk about what tools we are using at the University of Northern Colorado. We have been using Google Analytics for quite a while now (along with our log based stat tool) and have gathered a lot of data. One of the problems is that we have all this data but don’t know how to use it, or don’t have the time to look through it.

After attending a webinar last week about this very topic, I set up a goal on the tour form. To request a visit to the university, first you navigate to the visit page, find the type of tour you are interested in and then fill out a form. Each of these steps has a page associated with them so it was easy to track.

Setting up the Goal

From the dashboard, I clicked on “edit” next to the profile. I have the Admissions site (where the tour form exists) in a sub profile, but I used the main profile (which includes all of unco.edu) so I could see where people were coming from.

Click “Add goal”.

On the next page fill out the Goal Name and Goal Type; for the Goal Details:

Goal Details

• Match Type – Head Match
• Goal URL – the final “Thank you for Registering Page”
• Case Sensitive
• Goal Value – if you have figured out the cost of each completion you can put that here. Since I am only counting tour signups, (which are free) I left this blank.

Goal Funnel

• Here is where I put in the two pages following the signup, the Visit Page and the Signup Page. I did not indicate “Required Step” because if you knew the URL you could go directly to the sign up form.

Click “Save Goal” and wait a few days.

Viewing the data

Under the profile, click on “Goals” and you can see how many visitors have completed the goal. I am still learning a lot about this section, but the really neat thing I found was under “Funnel Visualization”:

On the right side are where people are coming form. We are doing a redesign of the homepage right now and it will be important to leave the “Visit” link since that is where the majority of the people come from. On the left side are the users who exit, and where they exit to. Our Visit page is a little complicated (reasons beyond my control) and this data will be used to show the Admissions folks that only 14% of the visitors actually continue the form.

I hope to be able to use this data to convince Admissions to relook at the usability of their visit page.

Tags: Google Analytics