Getting the Full Value of Google Analytics: The Importance of Monetizing Your Goals: Unofficial Google Analytics Blog

By Meredith Smith, Director of Marketing

Google Analytics is so customizable it can sometimes be challenging to decide exactly what the best route to take for your situation would be. When you set up Google Analytics, the call on whether or not to monetize your goals can be one that is particularly baffling, but it doesn't have to be.

I'll spell it out: if you don't have a straight-up e-commerce site, monetize your goals. You'll be glad you did!

If you DO have e-commerce enabled, then there are a total of 81 reports available in Google Analytics, and 43 of those reports contain financial information. So 53% of the total number of reports offered use financial data to convey complete sets of data. Plus, this is data you really want - - what the return on investment is on a certain campaign or your revenue from that transaction, etc.

Ok, so far everybody out there is nodding their heads saying, "Yeah, that's common sense for an e-commerce site! Tell me something I don't know".

Well, the part that might not be immediately apparent is that for NON e-commerce sites there are a total of 60 reports available in Google Analytics [everything minus the e-commerce section at the very bottom], and 23 of those reports contain financial information. That's 38% of the total reports offered!

So if you have a non e-commerce site and don't monetize your goals, then you are not getting the full value from 38% of your reports within Google Analytics.

Hopefully (my fingers are crossed) most of you are now ready to run off and monetize your goals right this second. There's only one little problem... how exactly do you do that?!

Goal Value.JPG

Rest easy! It's very simple. Assume that an average successful sale is worth $500 to you, and you know that about 1 in 10 submitted leads become a paying customer. Just divide the average sale by the total submitted leads, and you get the goal value: $50. See? That wasn't too bad!

Comments

You say: "So if you have a non e-commerce site and don't monetize your goals, then you are not getting the full value ..." and then go on to give an example that would only apply to an e-commerce site! So, how do you "monetize" a content-only site, where nothing is sold?

Posted by: Ward Conant at August 1, 2007 1:05 PM

that is one way to look at it...."goal value." during my tenure in the DRTV space we looked at it as ratios. so if we spent $5,000 on a media buy and we generated $25,000 in sales/revenue we would call it a 5:1 "ratio." we knew the goal value, where we had to be.....typically anything above a 2:1 ratio was considered fairly good for some companies, but not all.

Posted by: Jim at August 1, 2007 2:06 PM

It does mean that I can only define my goal value when I get to know how many leads takes to become a customer, right?

Posted by: Lucas at September 11, 2007 5:49 PM

Meredith,

Any tips on increasing the number of submitted leads?

I have a brand awareness and lead generation site with a newsletter sign-up and some free articles and videos but we have a very low rate of viewers filling out the sign-up page.

Tim

Posted by: C. Richardson at September 12, 2007 5:41 PM

Lucas: Yes, that's right. You need to know how many leads it takes to become a customer. At first, you can use a guess to get you started, but be sure to replace it with a more accurate number once you have more data!

Posted by: Meredith Smith at September 14, 2007 11:35 AM

C. Richardson: What a great question! I'll have to post an entire blog article on that subject.

Posted by: Meredith Smith at September 14, 2007 11:36 AM

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Getting the Full Value of Google Analytics: The Importance of Monetizing Your Goals

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