Google Analytics – creating multiple goals
Posted by Brett Pringle on April 21, 2009 in Analytics
For many Google Analytics professionals this may be fairly straight forward, however many people using analytics on occasion require more than 4 goals for the website profile they are currently tracking.
The answer is very simple, a website profile is exactly that, it is a profile for a website. Need more than 4 analytics goals for a website? The solution, simply create a duplicate website profile for you site.
Login to your Google Analytics account, select your analytics account where the website you are currently tracking is located. Remember that analytics accounts contain website profiles. The analytics account dashboard will then display the website profiles that are associated with the selected analytics account and it is from here that you are able to create additional website profiles, setup goal tracking and manage filters.
At the bottom of your analytics account dashboard you will see 3 options, “Add Website Profile” , “User Manager” and “Filter Manager”. The “Add Website Profile” option you will also notice can be accessed in a number of ways including links along the righthand side of the dashboard as well as in the top righthand corner of the dashboard.
Once you have selected the “Add Website Profile” you will be taken to a screen where you will need to choose between either creating a new profile for a domain (used when adding a new website to your analytics account to track) or the option to create a profile for an existing domain.
We are going to be using “add a profile for an existing domain” to create a duplicate website profile for a website you are currently tracking in Google Analytics. Fill in the details and remember to create a unique profile name for this duplicate profile that will help you differentiate between the duplicate profiles. Click Finish, and your duplicate profile has now successfully been created.
Please note as this is now a “new” profile, analytics data will only be gathered from the profile creation date. If you require historical data within this duplicate profile, ensure that you create your additional duplicate profiles when you setup your analytics account. Each profile will allow you up to 4 analytics goals per profile and you are able to have a maximum of 50 website profiles per analytics account. Creating multiple profiles for websites can be used for a number of other analytics tracking options, not just to maximise your goal tracking, but can be used in conjunction with analytics filters to track specific traffic (only want to see paid search analytics data?), subdomains and even social media data tracking. The options are limitless for their uses.
NB. When applying filters to a website profile, this will affect the data processing for that website profile. You will be unable to remove filters and see RAW data afterwards. In otherwords, once data has been processed with the filters associated with that website profile, you will be unable to reverse the filtered data. It is always a good idea to create 1 unfiltered backup website profile to refer to when in need.
Update:
Google updated goals within analytics in October 2009, now allowing up to 20 goals per profile. There are now 4 goal sets that can contain up to 4 goals each, allowing more freedom in what you may want to track as goals, from downloads through to purchases.
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This work by Brett Pringle is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.5 South Africa License.
Based on a work at brettpringle.com.
4 Comments on Google Analytics – creating multiple goals
By Amy Ganderson on July 29, 2009 at 12:48 am
I have set up one account with multiple profiles, so I can see both the traffic to our overall site and the individual subdomains broken out separately.
I’d like to see my goals be calculated the same way. All in one account – with goals in both the global profile and broken out in each sub domain profile. Currently I only see completed goal data coming through my profile with the sub domain only (not the global profile). Can a goal be tracked in only one place?
Also, how would I set up a separate filter to track the data from my main domain (example.org)?
I tested using:
filter type “Custom filter”
Include
Filter Field “Hostname”
Filter Pattern “example\.org”
The test brought in data from everything in my global account, include all of my subdomains like: blog.example.org, my.example.org, and example.org. I’d like to see only example.org without including blog.example.org, my.example.org, etc. How should I rework the filter to accommodate this?
By Brett Pringle on July 29, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Hi Amy,
Goal data you wish to track, is it subdomain specific or sitewide? Goals are pretty much profile specific, so i’m just assuming based on your comment above that you are looking for to have all data displayed for goals (including the subdomains) within the parent domain? However you are able to track global goals within the parent domain profile if you have customised your parent domain filters to append the hostname to your request URI, you should be able to track goals across all domains for example:
thankyou.asp is the confirmation page you wish to track, and the parent domain profile has the filter for the hostname, it will track goal data from say blog.example.com/thankyou.asp in the parent profile. Only catch is, you will need to be very careful with the goal setup if you are using goal funnels.
Ahh, regular expressions, boy those give my brain a hard time sometimes. Have you tried adding the “www” to the filter pattern, to specify the entire hostname for the parent domain?
By Amy Ganderson on July 30, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Thanks Brett. I tested out the goal data to come in sitewide and it worked. I’ll try the regular expression with the www in the filter pattern. Fingers crossed
By Brett Pringle on July 30, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Great
Let me know how things turn out