So you’ve got your new sales plan in action and you’ve set up unique goals in Google Analytics. Are they tracking what you think they’re tracking? Are you sure they’re giving you reliable data?

If you’ve audited your analytics setup, you might have noticed any number of incorrect audit checks about how you’ve set up custom events for your Google Analytics (GA) goals. Goals are used to make important business decisions, such as where to focus your design or advertising spend, so it’s essential to get accurate data about them.

In this quick video we cover common issues with setting up Google Analytics goals, including:

• Tracking pageviews rather than completed actions
• Selecting the wrong match type
• Inconsistent naming when tagging marketing campaigns
• Filters in your GA view rewriting URLs (so what you see in the browser is different from what you see in GA)
• Issues with cross-domain tracking

In GA, a goal is any type of completed activity on your site or app. GA is a remarkably flexible platform, so you can use it to measure many different types of user behaviour. This could be visitors clicking a subscribe button, completing a purchase, signing up for membership — known as ‘conversion goals’ — or other types of goals such as ‘destination goals’, when a specific page loads, and ‘duration goals’, when a user spends over a particular amount of time on a page or set of pages.

That all sounds well and good, but trouble comes if you simply set up goals and then trust the data they give you in GA, without double-checking to make sure that data’s consistent and reliable.

We hope you find the video useful. And don’t despair — even a little extra time spent on your GA setup can yield awesome results. Sign up for the Littledata app to audit your site for free, and let us know if you’ve experienced other common issues with setting up goals in GA.