Today we wanted to highlight some recent enhancements to goals in Google Analytics.

More goals and Goal Sets
You can now track even more visitor actions and behaviours on your site within one Google Analytics profile. Previously in Google Analytics there was a limit of 4 goals per profile, but now we've increased this to 20 goals to ensure you can track every important performance metric for your site. These 20 goals are broken down into 4 Goal Sets, each with 5 available goals. You can use Goal Sets to group similar marketing objectives together.

Engagement goals
In the past a goal was tracked by specifying a URL on your website that represented a completed action, such as a 'Thank You' page. Now we've introduced Engagement Goals to allow you to see visitors Time on Site and Pages per Visit as defined goals or conversions.

These two metrics allow you to gauge visitor involvement with your site and measure engagement with particular content for a specific amount of time, or to measure visitor interaction with your site in terms of the number of pages viewed.

Engagement goals are just as easy to set up as URL destination goals...

Within your chosen profile in Google Analytics, visit the 'profile settings' page:

You can then select 'add goal':

Finally select the specifics of your new Engagement Goal. You also have the option of assigning a value to this goal:

Now that you can track more goals, and new engagement goals, you will have the opportunity to track macro and micro conversions on your site. 


Here's are some examples of how different sites may organise their Goal Sets...

Digital print store and photogrpahy site

Marketing objectives: sales and growing registered members of community

Goal Set 1:

Goal 1 - completed purchase
Goal 2 - completed add to cart
Goal 3 - brochure download

Goal Set 2:
Goal 1 - sign ups to online community
Goal 2 - new posts to forum
Goal 3 - sign ups to monthly newsletter
Goal 4 - time on site

Local news & weather site

Marketing objective: increasing visitor engagement and serving third party

advertisements


Goal Set 1:
Goal 1 - Spend more than 5 mins on site
Goal 2 - View more than 10 pages per visit

Goal Set 2:
Goal 1 - Completed site feedback form
Goal 2 - Signed up for site newsletter


To learn more about creating goals in Google Analytics and accessing your goal reports check out the YouTube video below:

We hope you find these new goal types useful!


Posted By Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics Team

A new year tends to bring new year's resolutions, so why not make one now to get even more sales and leads from your AdWords campaigns?

To help you do this, we'd like to share the new Google AdWords Optimisation Centre with you. This is an online guide focused on helping you access lots of useful information even faster to improve the success of your advertising campaigns.

For easy usability, our AdWords specialists have organised the navigation of the site in three different ways:

1. View tips by level of expertise so that the advice matches your AdWords knowledge. You can choose to start with basic tips, move on to more intermediate techniques and finish up with advanced advice.


2. Click directly on the account features you'd like advice on. You’ll get detailed suggestions on topics ranging from writing compelling ads to using advanced bidding techniques.

3. Read strategic tips that our AdWords experts have put together based on your potential advertising goals, such as increasing sales, or improving clickthrough rate.

Visit the Google AdWords Optimisation Centre today to find answers easily and become an AdWords expert!

Posted by David O'Donovan, Google AdWords team

Now that the Christmas peak is over you may be thinking about how to drive more traffic to your AdWords campaigns during 2010 and in turn drive more sales/leads on your website.

Millions of people use Google each day to find products and services by searching on various keywords. This means that by including all keywords that are relevant to your product or service in your campaigns, you can ensure as many potential customers as possible see your ads.

To help you do this, you can use the Search-based Keyword Tool to quickly identify relevant keywords which are not yet included in your AdWords campaigns.

Check out our new YouTube video below to see how the tool works and how it has already helped one AdWords advertiser to increase sales:



To see keyword suggestions for your AdWords account today go to www.google.com/sktool, sign in to your AdWords account and enter your website URL.

Posted by Donal Mac Manus, Google AdWords team.