Funnels, Filters and Goals (Oh My!): Finding the Courage to Take Action

Funnels, filters and goals, oh my! For the inexperienced web analyst, these terms sound scarier than flying monkeys, which are pretty scary! In reality, these terms are fairly easy to understand and extremely important to fully understanding web and business goals and successes. To start, I will briefly explain these concepts as they apply to Google Analytics (GA). 

Funnels 

A funnel is the set of steps or page views a visitor takes to achieve a goal. By tracking a funnel, you can see drop off points and determine what needs to be fixed. For example, on an e-commerce site, a funnel might be the shopping cart, payment page, and confirmation page. If a lot of traffic drops off on the payment page, there could be an issue with inputting payment date, or it could mean that visitors are leaving to go in search of a coupon. 

Filters

Filters will remove data that is not pertinent based on the parameters setup by the administrator. It is important to note that once filters are setup on a profile, the filtered out data cannot be retrieved and re-filtered. Because of this, it is recommended that a profile be maintained that includes all data. GA allows each domain to have up to 50 profiles. Many companies will use a filter to exclude their IP address, that is, their employees. If GA tracks all IP addresses, company employees who regularly hit multiple pages every day can skew reporting. 

Goals 

As I have mentioned previously, metrics are just numbers without human analysis. After determining which metrics are important to your business, you can set up goals within GA to track those specific metrics. There are four ways to measure goals (Lofgren, n.d.):

1. URLs – when a user lands on a specified URL, like a thank you page, PDF or confirmation page.
2. Time – When a visitor spends more or less than a specified amount of time on the site. 
3. Pages/visit – Tracks when a visitor has visited more than, less than or equal to a specific number of pages during a visit.
4. Events – When a visitor completes an event. The event is set up and then tracked once its been triggered. An event could be a download, social shares, time spent watching videos, etc. 

Once goals are setup in Google Analytics, they can easily be tracked and viewed in GA reporting.

So, how do these apply to a real company with real website goals? Following is an example of how these tools can be used at my place of employment, Greenville College.

Earlier this year, Greenville College sent a postcard to current teachers in their target market directing them to a landing page for information about degree programs that could help them advance their career. The preferred funnel was 1) the landing page; 2) one of four program pages; 3) request information page; 4) confirmation page. We also included a contact form on the landing page, but we expected recipients to click-through to more detailed information before submitting contact information. In order to track the effectiveness of this campaign, I could use funnels, filters and goals. 

With funnels, I want to see how many visitors followed the funnel to completion. If the report shows that only a few visitors followed that exact funnel, I can take a step back and see which users went from the landing page to the program page, and then follow where they go from there. In this case, most users clicked through to the program page then dropped off. There are a multitude of possibilities as to why they drop off at this point. It could be that the program was not interesting to them, or maybe the request info was not clear on the page (which I believe it is not). I can only hope that these users will come back again later, from either bookmarking the page, hitting the landing page again, or a simple Google search. In the future, I could use funnels to track A/B tests and determine which landing pages resulted in the better funnel flow (Alexander, 2012). 

Filters can be utilized to see where we had the most effective reach. 

1. Filter by state. To see interest in Illinois, I could filter out all states except Illinois. Or, I could reverse that to see if our message is effective outside Illinois. With state laws and certification requirements varying from state to state, this could be highly useful information.
2. Filter by city. Like point one above, seeing city-level data could help us determine where our message was most highly received. If the cities within a 30-mile radius are the most effective, we may want to focus our marketing efforts in that radius. Or we may find cities where we have done little marketing previously, that had a high response rate. 
3. Filter by technology. An interesting filter to utilize would be the mobile filter. This filter could help me determine how many users are accessing the landing page via mobile phone, and if it affects their traffic patterns.

There are a lot of possible goals to use in this scenario. 

1. I want to collect contact information from both the landing page and the request info page. I can set the confirmation page used on these pages as a goal and track.
2. If I want to know when visitors are downloading course descriptions for the programs, I can set this simple goal to trigger when visitors click on the link, which automatically downloads a PDF.
3. I also want to know any time a visitor directly emails the admissions representative from the website. In order to view this information, I would first need to set that action as an event, then set the event as a goal. 

Google offers a library of information about each of these topics, with detailed explanations on how to set them up on your website. For further reading, click here.

So, how can you use filters, funnels and goals (oh my!) in your web reporting? Can you muster up the courage to give it a try? If so, let me know how it goes in the comments below.

References:

Alexander, D. (2012, September 10). Google Analytics goal flow: More funnels with less work [Blog post]. Luna Metrics. Retrieved from http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2012/09/10/goal-flow-more-funnels/

Lofgren, L. (n.d.). 4 Google Analytics goal types that are critical to your business [Blog post]. Kissmetrics. Retrieved from http://blog.kissmetrics.com/critical-goal-types/