Glad you like the blog and find it useful.

To answer your question, no, there is no way to make an event a goal. Goals are pageviews. And pageviews are fundamentally different data types in GA. They’re different than events.

My suggestion would be, if you need to simply count something, like a click, use an event. But if you need that click to be a conversion, use a pageview.

Thanks for the question,

Justin

I just stumbled across your blog whilst searching for an answer to a particular question – seems very useful and thorough, I’ll be keeping an eye on it from now on! :)

However, my question is, is there any way to set an event tracking value as a Goal? e.g. if I have an action as ‘Click’, can that be one of my goals? This would be very useful as the Event tracking does not seem to be as ubiquitous as Goal reporting.

Thanks,
Tim.

Thanks, glad you find the blog useful.

I think the biggest problem is that some people will add items to the cart during their visit. Because a visitor can only convert once per visit we won’t capture every time a product is added to the cart.

With that said, I wonder if it’s possible to use event tracking to track something like this. Perhaps you can use capture the product view as an action and then the add to cart for that product as an action. You won’t get the report that you’re talking about, but you’ll have all the data in the event reports, which should make it fairly easy to calculate.

Thanks again for reading,

Justin

I’d like to compare add-to-cart conversions for a bunch of different products… say p0.php to p9.php, with the cart page being cart.php. I guess I’m looking for a table with the following columns:
– product page URI
– # distinct product page views (a)
– # *subsequent* cart views (b)
– % add-to-cart conversions (b/a)

like this:
p0.php 1234 123 10%
p1.php 1024 51 5%
etc.

The challenge I realize is that GA seems visit/session-based, so that it normally doesn’t report the immediate sequencing of pages (with the exception of the Navigation Summary)…

If I didn’t care about sequencing, the closest I can imagine is making Goal1=cart.php a custom report with dimension=Page and metrics={UniquePageViews,Goal1_Completions} … but I’m not sure if that data is right, and besides, the lack of sequence-awareness dilutes its meaning significantly.

So since goals don’t seem to consider sequence, it seems like that’s not the right tool. Is there another way to get the above table out of GA?

The funnel visualization report is based on unique pageviews. So, the number of times that a visitor hits a certain page in the funnel should match the number of unique pageviews in the content reports.

Try reconciling those numbers, they should match.

I also wanted to point out that if you plan to use the technique above you should make the first step in the process a required step. That’s the key to showing the relationship between the conversion and a piece of content.

Hope that helps and thanks for the question.

Justin

I have set up funnels in GA that look to be working properly. The 1st step of the funnel is the home page and is not marked as required. When i look at the number of visits in on the homepage within the funnel visualization report, there is a discrepancy with that of the content report for the same page. Are the Funnel reports tracking absolute unique visits, total visits….? can you help explain why the numbers on the content report would differ to those on the funnel report for the same page?

thanks for the help.

-Michael

I don’t know of any issues. Have you segmented the data to determine if the drop off is due to a particular segment?

Also, have you made any changes to your account? A new filter might be having adverse effect.

Hope that helps.

Justin

May I know that did there happened technical issue in GA please?

It’s because I found out that my site’s total visits & pageviews has dropped more than 50% as compared with previous days.

Thus I try to observe in another report:
Visitors>>Visitor Trending>>Pageviews by hourly

The pageviews has a sudden drop from almost 3k to 100+ since 11am which seems very abnormal. And this scenario has continued till 29thJuly..

Do you have any idea on this please?

Thanks,
Crystal

Great observation. Site overlay does something very similar. However, site overlay is buggy at best. Plus, if there are multiple links on a page that point to the same destination, then the site overlay will show the same data for both links.

Finally, this method can be used to literally associate a click with a conversion, something that can not be done with site overlay.

Thanks for the comment,

Justin