How to track more than four goals in Google Analytics (Part 1 of 3)

by Heidi Edelmuller

We love Google Analytics here at Quirk. It’s really useful, its free and even some of the suits have figured out how to use it, so it definitely gets the all-round thumbs up.

One thing that gets the thumbs down, however, is the fact that you can only track a maximum of four goals (conversions) in a profile. The site I am currently working on has several PDF downloads, and I would like to keep track of each download as a separate goal. Currently I’m tracking four of those PDFs using the goals tracking function. But I need to track more!

I asked a few of the QuirkStars if they knew how to get around this problem and nobody seemed to have a firm answer. So, I decided to investigate.

It seems that there are at least three ways of getting around the four goals problem:

1. Comparing content stats in Analytics
2. Setting up additional profiles for the same site
3. Pseudo ecommerce

Method 1: Comparing Content Stats in Analytics

If your code is implemented correctly, Google Analytics should track every url on your website. That means that even if you haven’t set up conversion goals, you can tell how many visitors reached a goal by looking at how many times a conversion page url was accessed.

For example, my site has a Downloads section with a list of PDF downloads. I want to know how many times a certain PDF was downloaded in the last month and compare it to how many people visited the Downloads section. This is how to do it:

1. From the Dashboard page, click on “Content” in the main navigation. The content section summaries the activity that each urls on your website has experienced.
2. Click on “view full report” at the bottom of the “Top Content” section to see a full list of the urls on your site that were accessed.
3. Search for the relevant url in the search box (in my case I searched for “.pdf” to see all the PDF downloads).
4. Use the stats to compare conversion rates (in my case I compared the number of times a certain PDF was accessed with the number times the Downloads page was accessed).

This method is easy enough to do and doesn’t require any set up beyond implementing Google Analytics on your site. However, at the end of the day it’s simply a manual process of comparing page views. And because it’s not actually a feature of Google Analytics (like the bone fide goal tracking) you also don’t get any graphs, or the functionality that comes with the graphs like being able to compare different time periods. In my opinion it’s too basic, and not really the result I was looking for.

In my next post I will be covering what promises to be a better option – Method 2: setting up additional profiles for the same site. In the meantime, if you know of more options than the three I have mentioned, please feel free to share ;)

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