Tracking Your Blog Goals with Google Analytics

What action do you want people to take on your blog?

Usually, one or more of the following:

  • Subscribe to your RSS feed
  • Sign up for your email newsletter
  • Buy one of your products (or an affiliate product)
  • Hire you

Every time your user takes one of these actions, it’s a conversion. A visitor becomes a subscriber, a subscriber becomes a customer (sometimes, a visitor becomes a customer), and so on.

You might not see the point of tracking these conversions – if you’re getting sales, you’ll know about it, right?

But tracking conversions allows you to do some power stuff:

  • Identify the websites that send you valuable traffic (as well as the dead wood) – and adjust your promotions
  • Measure how changes in sales copy and design effect your sales – and optimize your sales efforts
  • See what search keywords tend to send you the most valuable traffic – and target them
  • Track which posts attracted the subscribers (or sales)

If you’re happy to wing it and keep feeling your way forward, by all means carry on – but this guide isn’t for you.

“Goals” are how Google Analytics tracks website conversions.

Setting them up is relatively straightforward. Let’s walk through it.

Example: tracking newsletter subscribers

This is a common goal for a blog. Maybe you offer a free ebook to visitors who subscribe to your newsletter.

Tracking newsletter sign-ups with Google Analytics means you get to see where the people who subscribe came from.

When your readers subscribe, they should up on a “thanks for subscribing” page – where it’s not a bad idea to let them know what to expect, how to ensure your newsletter doesn’t end up in the spam folder, etc.

Let’s say the URL, or address, of your “thank you” page is http://www.yourblog.com/newsletter-thanks/.

Every time a visitor hits this page, you’ve gained a new subscriber. So this is the page you want to track as the final step in your Goal (you can track up to 20 goals per profile in Google Analytics).

Here’s how to set it up:

  1. Head over to Google Analytics and log in to your account
  2. Click on the “Edit” action next to your blog profile
  3. Under “Goals” click “+Add Goal” next to the first unused goal
  4. Complete the form as below (click to enlarge) replacing the “Goal URL” field with your URL:

The bottom portion of the form (“Goal Funnel”) is optional – it’s mainly used for multi-step checkout processes. It doesn’t apply too well for newsletter signups. Just scroll down and select “Save Goal.”

With this done Google Analytics will start tracking Goal completions which you can measure against just about any metric:

  • Traffic sources (what search engines / websites send the most subscribers?)
  • Keywords (what keywords refer the most subscribers?)
  • Content (what blog posts / pages convince users to subscribe?)

To view this data you simply navigate to the corresponding report (such as Traffic Sources > Referring Sites) in your Google Analytics Profile and click the “Goal Conversion” tab at the top of the table.

goals-tab

You can then sort by Goal Conversion Rate and view the traffic sources that send users most likely to download your eBook.

There are other actions that users can take that closely relate to your goals as a blogger that don’t drive them to a “thank you” page – such as when a user clicks on your RSS feed link to subscribe to your posts.

With a simple edit on the link to your RSS feed you can track a users click on your RSS link as a page load – which lets you track the action as a goal just as we did above with the newsletter sign-up “thank you” page.

Tracking links as Goals with the trackPageview() function

Fear not: this isn’t as complicated as it sounds. You just need to edit a little HTML.

When a user clicks your RSS feed link you can trigger a Page Load event with Google Analytics. How? By inserting a short bit of code into your link:

RSS feed link example before adding the trackPageview() function:

<a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/YourBlog">
Subscribe</a>

How it should look when you add the trackPageview() function:

<a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/YourBlog"
onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/rss');">
Subscribe</a>

The “/rss”  in the parentheses following “trackPageview” above can be customized as you see fit.

Then, following the Goal setup instructions above, simply add “/rss” (or the URL you chose) in the “Goal URL” field.

Now when you browse to the metric or report of your choice – say “Referring Sites” – and click on the “Goal Conversion” tab, you can see what websites refer users who tend to subscribe to your RSS feed. Want to grow your subscribers? Focus on finding ways to attract more traffic from these high-quality referring sites.

You can use the methodology above to track any link on your blog.

Go back to the Blogger’s Guide to Google Analytics.

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