Creating Goals in Google Analytics – Step by Step Guide

In order to track the success of your business advertising campaign through any channels of marketing, it is important to track specific goals and measure the different actions. Goals in its simplest sense lets you measure those important actions.

Steps to Setting Up a Goal in Google Analytics

Step 1

Log in to your analytics account and click on the website for which you want to track the goals.

Step 2

Now click on Admin. Then, click on goals located under the profile section.

Goals as displayed under the admin section

Step 3

Now, click on “Create a Goal”. We come to the three step process of creating goals namely goal set up, goal description and goal details.

Step 4

Select a goal template with pre filled configuration. You have 5 choices, namely, Revenue, Acquisition, Inquiry, Engagement and Custom settings.

Goal set up template

Step 5

Now choose the goal description. You have 4 types of goals to choose, namely, Destination, Duration, Pages/Screen per visit and Event. These 4 types are explained below:-

Destination – Choose destination when the visitors need to reach a particular location. Ex- a thankyou page after completing an order.


Duration – Choose duration when you want your visitors to spend a minimum amount of time on the site. Ex- 5 minutes spent on the site.


Pages/Screen per visit –  Choose pages/screen per visit when you need to track how many pages a user loads after visiting the site. Here, every unique visit is counted. Ex- a user loads 10 pages in a visit.


Event – Choose event when you want to track some kind of action performed by the user. Ex- clicking on an ad.

Goal description

Step 6

Now, enter the goal details. In case, you want to track how many people are visiting your thankyou.php page after successfully placing an order on your e-commerce site. We need to specify the URL of that page in the destination URL field as shown below:-

You can additionally assign a monetary value to the conversion or specify the goal path. But, these are optional. Monetary value will help you determine your profits for every conversion and lets you calculate your total conversion profits easily. Specifying the goal path helps you identify the path that the users are following in order to reach the thankyou page. This gives you an idea regarding your best performing products.

Now, click on create goal and your goal gets created. In order to check how goals are performing, you may check it under the admin tab of your site by clicking on goals.

So, now that you have learnt about how to set up goals in Google Analytics, start setting up and experimenting with your own goals.

Also See:-

Custom Variables in Google Analytics
How to Create a New Dashboard in Google Analytics?
Understanding Goal Flow in Google Analytics
Google Tag Manager
Multi Channel Funnel in Google Analytics
Regular Expressions on Google Analytics