Creating Goals and Events in GA and GTM

Google Analytics won’t tell you how your business is performing without some additional set up. Every business has different success metrics. For example, leads, trial sign ups, account creations, newsletter sign ups are just a few examples of what we actually want people to do on a website. It’s important to measure more than just page views and visitors.

This is where goals and events come in. It’s crucial to set up goals and events in Google analytics, so that you can find out how a website is actually helping your business.

Let’s start off by defining what a goal and an event are in Google Analytics.

What are Goals In Google Analytics

Goals are set up in the ‘Goals’ section of Google Analytics to track KPI’s (key performance indicators). These are used to track interactions that specifically align with the businesses goals. These can be (but are not limited to) newsletter sign ups, phone calls, emails, contact form submissions, or page views. If it’s a clients goal to increase the number of phone calls they receive, then we will track those to ensure that we are improving that number.

Goal conversions are viewed in the ‘Overview’ section of ‘Goals’.

What are Events in Google Analytics

An event is a user interaction that triggers when someone performs a certain action on a page. Events don’t align with a specific business goal, but are useful to track overall website improvement. These can be a video play, scrolling to a certain point on the page, landing on certain pages (during a sale for example), etc.

How To Set  Up a ‘Phone Click’ goal

Let’s start off with a simple link click goal.

For this example, we will be using the Alpha Digital website. Below is a screenshot of the Alpha Digital footer. Notice under ‘Brisbane’ there is a phone number. We want to know how many people click this number (or any other Brisbane phone number on the website).

Step 1. To track this link click we will first go to the Google Tag Manager Workspace > Tags.  Click on ‘New’ and rename the tag to ‘Phone Click Goal’. After this click on the ‘Tag Configuration’ box and select ‘Universal Analytics’ from the list.

Step 2. Select Track Type > Event and name your Category, Action and Label. These sections will match with the corresponding sections in Google Analytics, so make sure you always name these something descriptive.

Step 3. Leave the ‘Non-Interaction Hit’ drop down as False as we ARE setting up an interaction hit. Select the Google Analytics variable in the drop down. If this does not exist then you will need to set this up. To do so, click ‘New Variable’.

Name this ‘Google Analytics’, insert the tracking ID and leave the Cookie Domain settings as auto. To find the Analytics tracking ID you can go to Admin > Property > Tracking Info > Tracking Code.

Step 4. After that’s set up we can move onto triggering. Click on the triggering box and select the + symbol in the top right to make a new trigger.

Step 5. Rename your trigger to ‘Phone Click Trigger’ and click on the ‘Trigger Configuration’. In the trigger type list you’ll see a few different categories. For this one we will be selecting ‘Just Links’ as a phone click occurs when a user clicks on a link rather than a button or another element.

After you’ve selected ‘Just Links’, select ‘Some Link Clicks’ otherwise this trigger will fire whenever ANY link is clicked on the website. We only want this trigger to fire when the phone link is clicked.

After that you’ll need to select when your trigger will fire. To do this pop open the first drop down and click on ‘Click URL’. If you don’t see this as an option then go to Variables > Configure and click the check boxes of the ones you need.

Step 6. Go back to the website that you are tracking this goal on and right click on the link and ‘Inspect’ the page.

This will ‘inspect’ the code of the website. If you’ve clicked directly on the link then it will be highlighted when the inspect box pops open. If not, look for a line with the phone number in it. Next you’ll want to copy everything within the href=” “.

Add the tel: link to your trigger and make sure that you have set the second drop down to ‘equals’. This means that when a link is clicked which equals the link in the box, this trigger will fire.

Step 7. Save your trigger and tag then click on the ‘Preview’ button and open up the website in a new tab within the same window. You’ll notice that a GTM box will appear at the bottom of the website when opened. This is the live preview tool. Before publishing your changes, always test them with this tool.

This tool contains a breakdown of everything that has ‘fired’ and ‘not fired’. Each time you interact with the page, this will give you a real-time look to show you if your new tag is working.

To check that your new tag is working, click on your link. If you see your tag appear in the summary then it has worked. If not you will need to do some de-bugging.

Step 8. Publish your container and add any notes on the update.

Step 9. Open Google Analytics and go to Admin > View > Goals and click ‘+ New Goal’. Scroll down and select ‘Custom’ and continue.

Name your goal and set it as an ‘Event’ then continue again.

Remember how we added names to the Category, Action, and Label? We now need to add these to Google Analytics. Make sure these match up exactly to what they are in GTM.

Step 10. Now save the goal and go to Real-Time > Conversions. This is where we will make sure that our goal comes through Analytics correctly.

Now open your phone and turn off the wifi. This is because the Alpha Digital IP address is excluded from the Analytics account and a goal will not come through if you use the wifi. When you go to the website, click on the phone link and watch to see if a real-time conversion comes through the website.

Once clicked, a blue bar should appear within a few seconds and a 1 will be attributed to the exact goal you have set up in the list below.

Congratulations you have now set up a phone click goal!

Find out more about digital marketing tracking here.