How to Set up Goals for Your Digital Marketing Plan

How to Set up Goals for Your Digital Marketing Plan

When it comes to analyzing the return on investment (ROI) of your digital marketing efforts, be it website, social media, or other Internet marketing tactics, you are going to love Google Analytics.

It will show you categorically what worked, and what didn’t. However, as you start looking to Google Analytics for more assistance, you will start feeling the need for custom reports, rather than the default ones. And that’s when you would want to set up goals for your digital marketing plan.

Setting up Goals for your Digital Marketing Plan

1. Start with one to two goals as a best practice, maybe a newsletter signup, or even tracking the checkout page of your website.
2. Go to Google Analytics > Admin > View > Goals to start setting up goals. Click on “New Goal” and choose from one of the templates, or create Custom for Goal Setup. Add the Goal description and Goal details, and be sure to click on the “Verify this Goal” to make sure everything is working fine.

Now you’re almost set. The only step that remains in this exercise to set up goals for your digital marketing plan is to set up the reporting to look at the data for these “goals.”

So go to Google Analytics > Customisation and click on “New Custom Report.”

Since we are at the beginner level, don’t set up any filters – let’s look at the clean data first. Add the newly added goals in the “Metric Groups” and dimensions in the “Dimension Drilldowns” respectively. I usually add “Source” as a dimension in the “Dimension Drilldowns” because that tells me from where the visitor is originating, but you are free to add the other available dimensions too. And finally, remember to save the report.

In Conclusion

Once you’ve set up the goals in Google Analytics, give it at least seven days to look at the “goal” reports before attempting to redefine your digital marketing plan. Ideally, you should wait for three months to get a good amount of data to analyze, but even a month’s data is worth the time to spruce your digital marketing efforts.