By Adam Kearney, MemberClicks Creative Director

Goals – What Are They?

Put simply, a goal is an action a user can take on your website that leads to a positive result for your organization. This could be a sale of a product, a registration for an event, or a new signup for a membership. Or it could be something much more intangible, such as filling out a survey or answering a poll question. Maybe you have written an article that you want your membership to read – in that case, the goal is as simple as getting them to the page. You will likely have several goals on your website, and they may change over time.

Whatever the goal is, setting up and monitoring the metrics for a goal in your analytics solution will save you time by providing a quick snapshot of the success or failure of an initiative. Instead of digging down through your analytics reports and manually looking to see how many hits you’ve gotten over time, if you have set up a goal, you can instantly see if it has been successful or not.

The most common way to set up a goal is to have a page act solely as the end point for a goal. That way, whenever that page receives a hit, you know that the goal has been accomplished. Some examples of this sort of goal include:

• A ‘thank you’ page after a user has submitted information through a form. You would use this type of goal to track newsletter signups, email list subscriptions, application forms, contact forms and many other similar forms.
• A purchase confirmation page or receipt page
• An ‘About us’ page
• A particular news article

Once you have decided what you want to measure, you should think about what type of goal will best help you determine success.

Types Of Goals

The most common type of goal is a URL Destination. The examples given above are all URL destinations. These are easy to measure as each hit the destination receives counts as a positive result. In this way, you can establish realistic, tangible metrics for how many hits each goal should be receiving. If you have a membership of 500 individuals, and you want at least half of them to read a particular “members-only” article, in this case, you’d be looking for 250 hits for that article.

One thing to keep in mind about URL Destination goals is that you need to specify the correct page as your goal. You might think that you should target the first page of a form as your goal, but this will only tell you how many people reached the front page. That number will include people who go to the page and leave or who start to fill out the form but quit halfway through. Since you wouldn’t count those as succesful objectives, you want to set the “thank you” or “confirmation” page that appears only after someone has successfully completed the form as your goal. The only people who will get to that page are the ones who have filled out the form successfully.

A second type of goal is Time Spent On Site. Let’s say you have lots of content on your site – news, articles, updates or any kind of content you want your visitors to see – and you want to know how engaged your visitors are with new content versus old content. Time Spent On Site goals will show you how much time visitors spend on specified pages. You can compare these numbers across different types of content to see which sections of your site are most engaging.
While Time Spent On Site goals are useful for comparing large amounts of data to one another or relatively measuring how engaging some types of content are in comparison to others, these types of goals are not good for very precise metrics. The biggest problem with measuring the amount of time a user spends on a particular page is that it may not accurately reflect how much time that user spent actively interacting with a page. After all, with tabbed browsers and computers that can easily perform several actions at once, many users will leave sites up on their screens or on a hidden tab without engaging with the site.
The third type of goal is Pages Per Visit. This measures how many pages each unique visitor navigates to on average when they visit your site. This type of goal is useful if your site contains a great amount of content or you want your visitors to go to many different parts of your site for some reason. A large Pages Per Visit number will tell you that a visitor is very engaged with your site, while a small number will tell you that they aren’t as involved.

What Comes Next?

Once you’ve determined how you want to use goals, setting them up should be an easy process. Google Analytics makes it easy to define goals and then view those goals in customized reports. But whatever analytics solution you’re using, it should provide you
the tools to easily define your goals. And once those goals are defined, you’ll be able to concretely measure how successful your website is in your own terms.

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By Adam Kearney, MemberClicks Creative Director

We recommend using Google Analytics to track your website’s performance. It is freely available, constantly updated and extremely customizable. To get started with it, go here: http://www.google.com/analytics/.

Once your account is all set up, you need to add the tracking code to your site. Google walks you through this process, but if you are using MemberClicks to host your site, the process couldn’t be easier. Just go to Website > Site Settings and enter the code that they give you in the box provided for it at the bottom of the page. MemberClicks will automatically add the code to all of your pages. That’s all you have to do. After that, you’ll be able to pull up analytics information for your site within minutes.

What Comes Next?

Once you have a web analytics solution in place and have a clear idea of how you want your site to perform, you can explore all the opportunities available to you. You can optimize your site to increase the traffic you get from search engines. You can buy pay-per- click advertising to drive traffic to specific pages or to your site in general. You can even sell ad space on your site and earn non-dues revenue by attracting a large base of regular visitors. We’ll explore all these topics in later articles in this series.

For now, you’ve got everything you need to understand about web analytics. You know what it is and how it works and have an idea of what it can do for you. And you know how to get started. So what are you waiting for?

You’ve chosen a web analytics solution, and it’s tracking data about your website. You can learn a few things just by looking at this data, such as what your visitor demographics are like or what pages they are hitting. But how do you measure the success of a website? Is your website successful because you get 500 hits each day? What if you get 5,000? What if you only get 5, but each of those 5 hits makes a donation or joins your organization?

These are the kinds of questions that will help shape your website moving forward as you define and measure goals.

Don’t forget – October is Small Staff Appreciation Month! If you haven’t entered our giveaway yet, what are you waiting for?! You could win an iPad 2!

Happy Friday! I don’t know about you, but it is HOT where I live! It felt like 100 degrees Fahrenheit at 9:30 this morning! It’s one of those days where I just want to sit in the air-conditioning all day, ya know?

So, without further adieu, and in the spirit of AC and iced coffee, here is today’s Friday Top Five.

1. Maddie Grant shared a few great tools for supercharging your association’s content: Scoop.it and Twylah. She gave some great uses for each and I think they’re worth taking a look at for small staff associations.

2. This week, Jeff Hurt challenged the traditional notion that we interact face-to-face first and online second. He points out that we register for conferences online, buy movie tickets online, make appointments and reservations online… Heck, I even order food online! Definitely worth a read.

3. Tom Morrison shared a new concept he adopted at his association called Staff Meeting 24/7. It’s a online repository for ideas, concepts and directions that only staff members can see. Tom shared how it has streamlined internal communications for his association and encourages every organization to use its technology to the fullest – something we wholeheartedly support!

4. Cynthia D’Amour wrote this week about the importance of setting up for success. I think this is something we all know deep down, but can be difficult to put into practice. Do you help your members lean into the learning process so they’ll be as successful as possible?

5. Just in time for ASAE’s Annual Meeting and Expo, Engage 365 posted a great article by Jody Urquhart: Seven ways to get the most out of attending a conference. The number one rule? Network, network, network! Where else will thousands of association professionals be under one roof?!

Happy Summer Solstice!

I love each time of year when the seasons (officially) change. It always feels like a jumping-off point for all of the awesome things each season brings. For summer, that means the beach (or pool), barbeques, music festivals, block parties and street fairs. I also like to set new goals – personal and professional – each season. Having several smaller goals to keep me occupied helps me work toward larger, more over-arching goals.

So, in honor of the new season, let’s have some goal-setting tips, shall we?

1. Set goals for yourself – not for others. Let’s be real. If your goals don’t really matter to you, or if you set a certain goal to prove a point, you’re far less likely to achieve it.

2. Write. It. Down. Whether you use a pen and paper or an electronic to-do list, having goals in writing can seriously make a difference. Once it’s out there, it’s out there . You’re committed.

3. Be specific. Give yourself quantifiable benchmarks. Otherwise, how else will you know when you achieved it – or if you need to reevaluate?

4. Reevaluate. There’s nothing wrong with changing up your goals to better suit your schedule, capabilities and responsibilities. We all have lots of things on our plates, and it’s important to not stress yourself out just because you gave yourself an arbitrary deadline.

5. Try something new. Routine is great, but so is trying new things. Whether it’s a new method of reporting, a new email marketing strategy or anything else, think outside the box and get creative.

What’s your number-one tip for setting (and achieving) your goals?

You never know how far you’ll go until you try.

I ran my second half-marathon this past weekend, and sometimes I’m convinced running is just one big metaphor for life. I was the kid who hated running, despite having two (former) runners as parents. But somewhere along the line (coincidentally, when I didn’t want to pay for a gym membership), I just started running. I’m slow and I take walking breaks, but I’m still a runner.

The same principles apply to our professional lives. If you just keep plugging away, you’ll succeed. Just setting a lofty goal can be motivation enough. And it doesn’t matter if you’re the first one or the last one to cross the metaphorical finish line.

Whatever your big, scary career goals are, sometimes you just have to go for it. Whether it’s increasing your membership by a certain percentage, organizing a big conference without a hitch or getting a promotion, the first step is the most important one. Because if you never take that first step, you won’t even have a shot at crossing the finish line.

What first step can you take today to reach your goals?

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