Track goal conversions without actually setting goals in Google Analytics

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The reason why Google Analytics (GA) is sought after is that you can track website traffic for a complete process defined in an online business model. One can set the ultimate target as the goal for GA tracking and GA will track every step of the process until the defined goal.

However, the problem is that GA does not reprocess historical data.  GA will only start to track goal conversion data from the day you set the goal in GA. Nevertheless, here is a simple way to track goal conversions without setting goals in GA for historical data as well. To do this, here are some conditions:

1) You should tag your entire website by the proper Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC). At any rate, pages from the landing page to the goal conversion page must have the proper GATC.

2) Here are two examples:

Case I:

The URL of the goal conversion page should be different from the other pages.

Example of unique URLs are:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – www.mysite.com/landingpage.html

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

Here the URL from the Sign up Form to the Final Goal Page has unique URLs: ‘www.mysite.com/sign_up.html’

The ideal path should be as follows:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – www.mysite.com/landingpage.html

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – www.mysite.com/thanksone.html

Case II:

The page title should be different for each step despite the unique URLs.

The page name is mentioned between title tags of the page e.g. <title> Page Name </title>. For example, you can check the website www.position2.com where the home page is titled:

<title> Social Media Marketing & Search Engine Marketing Company – Position2 </title>

Therefore, the steps to take for different page names are:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – Your Air Ticket

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – Registration Form

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – Thanks for signing up!

Here is how you can get goal conversion values in GA:

1) Go for Advanced Segments

2) Create new segment ‘Goal Conversion’ for Case I above. Use the thank you page request URI ‘/thanksone.html’ in the value field for this segment. Then save the segment.

For Case II, use the page title of the thank you page ‘Thanks for signing up!’ in the value field for this segment. Then save the segment.

3) Choose two segments such as the one from Default Segment and another from Goal Conversion. Apply it to the report.

4) You will see the output as:

Here you can clearly see that out of 1,123 visits, 67 visits were converted. We found 98% accuracy of achieving goal conversion numbers through the Advanced Segments approach. You can apply this segmentation to all reports excluding goal-reporting suit.

Contributed by Bhagawat Jadhav

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Tags: GA tracking, Goal Conversion, Google Analytics, Google Analytics Tracking Code, Web Analytics