So everyone, including myself, was excited about the new type of engagement goals and the increased number of goals in Google Analytics. No question, they are very helpful. With this new feature you can now quantify the portion of your visits based on their level of the engagement with your site. However, if you have used this new feature, you are probably starting to notice some strange issues.

Here are the new features:

• 4 sets of goals with 5 goals in each set, thus up to 20 goals available
• 2 additional goal types: time on site and pages/visit goal; also called threshold goal or engagement goal

The problem

You would think it is very logical, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could set up multiple levels of engagement goals since Google is offering 20 available goals out there?

If you want to find out how many visitors spent at least two minutes, at least four minutes, at least ten minutes and so on, and if you want to find out the same about the number of pages viewed within each session, you must set up goals for at least two pages, at least four pages and at least ten pages for each session.

I agree it is straight forward if you are ready to check out how engaged your traffic is at different levels.  But think about this:  What if one visitor spends ten minutes and views ten pages during one session. Then you would find one visit with a 600% total conversion rate. This is because Google counts the goal three times for each type of the goals. In theory, Google is right in terms of the goal number; however,  the total goal conversion rate is very confusing.

The other problem with the new goal set is very obvious¾Google has not updated its custom report for goal 5 to goal 20. Its default interface will allow you access to those goals; however, if you try to set up your own custom report with more than four goals, you are going to need some manual calculation for the additional goals.

The best practice

• If you can, only use one engagement goal for each type
• If you like to measure the different levels of engagement, don’t use the total goal conversion rate metrics, and only look at the performance of its individual goal

Landing URL tagging refers to adding special tags at the end of a landing page URL.  Those tags contain variables, such as campaign name, medium, term, content and so on. Without tags, an analytics package treats all traffic—organic and paid the same.

If you are only concerned with cost data or click data (i.e., impression, cost, CTR, etc.), then you do not have to worry about your tagging strategy. You can find that information on your CPC platform (e.g., AdWords). But if you want to find out visitors’ behavior after they click on your ads and visit your site, behavior such page views, bounce rate and time on site, you must use an analytics package like Google Analytics and tag your campaign correctly.

Google Analytics offers both auto and manual tagging options. With auto tagging, you don’t have to do anything other than make sure the auto tagging setting is on. Google automatically adds GCLID tags without any manual process. This code is unique at a keyword level.  The resultant URL looks like this: www.mysite.com/?gclid=123xyz. But auto tagging is only for Google’s AdWords campaigns. Therefore, if your clients are only running campaigns on Google, we would recommend this. It is easy to set up and it is more accurate.

If your ads are across multiple engines, you would have to manually tag CPC campaigns for other engines. Manual tagging requires appending campaign variable tags to the end of URLs. You can use Google’s URL Builder tool to do this. Here is an example of the manually tagged URL:

If you do manual tagging, here are the two common problems faced:

1. Google Analytics does not give ad group level information. It only shows the campaign- and keyword-level data.
2. In order to identify the paid keywords, you must fill in each keyword in the “Term” field in the URL Builder tool. If you have a big account with millions of keywords, this could be a very complicated process.

We recommended the following solutions for these two problems:

1.Use a unique ad group-level identifier for campaign names. For example, you can use campaign name and ad group name together to represent the ad group.

Campaign name: all product

Ad group Name: discount product

Campaign name to tag: all_product_discount_product

In this case, by looking at your campaign name, you would be able to see ad group-level information, within your campaign level reporting.

2. Use a dynamic key to catch the actual keywords

A dynamic key is a word that picks up the actual keywords. By using a dynamic key, you are able to save the actual step of putting in the real keywords. We have tested some dynamic keys for ads on major search engines on our own campaigns. The result shows the following three work the best.

• Yahoo: use {YSMKEY}
• Bing: use {Keyword}
• Google: use {keyword}

By using a dynamic key, your URL tag will look like this:

That’s it for this quick tag strategy. Please keep us posted if you have found other solutions or have any questions regarding the above content.