GA custom reports involving pages and goals - what are the metrics saying?

[debi_zyx]

Hi, All!

I would like to create a custom report that will enable me to see which of my pages are contributing to goal completion on my site (so I can then optimize the pages that are contributing the most, with maximal ROI for the optimization investment). If I make the dimension "page/page title" and the metric "goal X completions" - which would make sense - what exactly are the numbers that I am seeing telling me? Is it how many times a person started the goal funnel from that pages (meaning every goal would appear only once and there be no overlap)? That doesn't appear to be the case with the numbers, because the headline in the main "Goals" section tells me I have 30 goal completions for that goal, for example, but the headline in the custom report (which is adding up all the numbers) is, say, 100. Or does it mean the number of times that this page was ever in the navigation path of someone who ended up completing a goal? Then the same goal would be counted multiple times, for each page in the path.

Additionally, I see this strange thing on some of my reports where the actual funnel pages appear as contributing towards goals, which I guess makes sense, but again the numbers don't match up. If the goal was to get to page B, and the funnel was A->B, and there were supposedly 30 goal completions, my custom report says that A gave 28 goal completions and B gave 25.

Anyone know for sure - or through testing - what the case is with all these things? Any explanations will be much appreciated!

[KeriMorgret]

Debi'Z, did yo uget the second part of your question answered, or do you still have questions?

[TomCritchlow]

Can you post some screenshots for the goals issue? I think it might help explain a little more clearly.

$ index supports weighted sort which will take care of figuring out which are the most important pages to work on for you

[debi_zyx]

Thank you so much!

This was definitely helpful - especially the post from Distilled highlighting the practical use of the metric in analysis.  I'm not sure this will be the most helpful metric, though, when deciding what pages would be the most valuable to optimize, because the number is an average.  The Distilled post did mention filtering pages that had a lower number of pageviews, so that might compensate, but still you might end up choosing pages that have a higher $index but far less pageviews, meaning their overall contribution to revenue is less.

Is the implication of the goals metric that I mentioned above the number of goals the page contributed towards without averaging (kind of like the beginning of the $index metric, just counting "1 goal" instead of "x dollars" and not divided by pageviews)?  Or is it with averaging?

Do you have an idea about the second question mentioned above - why the actual goal or funnel pages show less goal completions than there were actual goals?

Thanks!

[TomCritchlow]

Hey, I think you're asking for something like $ index. You should assign a $ value for your goal and then you'll see this metric start appearing in your reports. For more info on $ index check these out:

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=86205

http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/google-analytics-index-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it/

Does that help?