If you want your blog to be successful, you’ll need to know what makes it successful. A good way to do this is to have the best possible understanding of your visitors and how they interact with your blog. Google Analytics is awesome, but you’re missing out on a lot of useful information if you haven’t gone the extra mile and setup goal tracking. Not only do you need to setup goal tracking, but first you need to identify what the right goals are to track. The following is a list of 23 goals you should be tracking on your blog if you aren’t already.
Google Analytics Goals You Should Track
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Advertisement & Affiliate Clicks
Track Google AdSense ad clicks, Affiliate images & text links, Banner ads, etc.
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Social Follows
Track when visitors follow you on any of your specific social media accounts.
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Social Shares
Track when visitors share your content on specific social media channels.
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Blog Searches
Track when people perform searches on your blog.
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Author Clicks
Track when people click on items surrounding your blog authors, this indicates interest in the individual which generally indicates these users are true fans.
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Email Clicks
Track when users click on your email address (if you list it on your website that is).
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Code / Syntax Box Clicks
Track when users click on specific code you’ve shared, indicating they have copied and likely used it.
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Elements of Interest Hovers
Track when users hover over elements on your website that are related to conversion, but aren’t links or actionable in and of themselves.
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Phone Number Clicks
Track when mobile visitors click on your phone number, indicating they attempted to call your website phone number.
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Specific Sidebar Links
If nobody clicks on certain links, images, widgets or other types of elements in your sidebar you should probably just remove them or replace them with items people do click on.
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Specific Button / CTA Clicks
Track specific buttons or other calls-to-action to see which ones are most effective.
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RSS Feed Clicks
Track when users click on your RSS feed icon, indicating they are attempting to subscribe to your feed.
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Image Zooms
Track when visitors zoom in on images on your website if you use a JavaScript image zooming library such as lightbox, indicating they are interested in that specific image or it’s thumbnail is simply not nearly large enough.
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Video Plays, Stops & Pauses
Track how users interact with your video content. Wistia is best for this, but you can get some insights without it.
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404 Error Page Views
Track what URLs people are visiting that return 404 errors and how frequently these pages are visited. You should know if lots of people are hitting 404 pages on your website and how they’re getting to them.
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Subscribe To Blog Form Submissions
Track when people subscribe to updates on your blog.
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Address / Map Clicks
Track when visitors click on your address, indicating they are figuring out how to navigate to your office or simply curious where it is.
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Contact Form Submissions
Pretty damn obvious.
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Partial Form Fills Without Submission
Track when users partially fill out your forms without attempting to submit them.
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Form Error Messages
Track the occurrence of specific validation errors in your forms.
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External Link Clicks
Track all clicks on all of your external links.
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Comment Submissions
Track when people write comments, these are particularly engaged visitors and usually your biggest fans.
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File Downloads
Track downloads of any files on your site
What Goals Do You Track?
Did I miss a goal that you find to be absolutely critical? If so, please share your wisdom in the comments!
How about instructions on setting up these goals?
Could you provide instructions for how to setup AdSense clicks as a goal?
I’m going to rewrite this post and provide instructions for how to track everything in my recommendations. In the meantime; however, SEOBook has a post that walks you through how to do this: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001370.shtml
It’s a lot easier to just link your Analytics and AdSense accounts though and while it won’t allow you to track goals, it does provide much deeper integration and can show you on which pages you’re getting clicks, as well as how much you’re making per page. instructions for linking them can be found here: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/2495976?hl=en
Sorry for the very delayed response.
I’d be interested in learning how to actually set these up too. I’ll bookmark the post and await the update.
Rather than update this post I decided to create a new one entitled WordPress Google Universal Analytics Events Tracking Guide: https://penguininitiatives.com/wordpress-google-universal-analytics-events-tracking-guide/
Hey
Tell me how I can set to goal for adsense click.
Could try this proposed solution: https://www.reddit.com/r/analytics/comments/43m95g/how_to_track_adsense_clicks_as_events_in/?st=ivltty9g&sh=1309149d – haven’t used AdSense for a long time so I don’t have the embed code handy. I recall it used to be in an iframe, if that’s still the case you probably can’t. If you link Google AdSense to Google Analytics you can’t you get the information you’re looking for?