Hi everybody, my name is Alex Centeno with Merkado’s and Shark media Design and I want to walk you again to this series of podcast. Well, thank you very much for watching and for taking the time to try to improve your online marketing campaigns out there.
First of all, I want to direct you to our web sites Merkados.com and sharkmediadesign.com. Please visit our web sites and please send us an email or give us a ring if you have any questions regarding this podcast or any podcast. If you have any questions or if you have any online marketing needs, consulting needs just give us a ring. I would love to hear from you.
In this podcast, what we’re going to be talking about is how to set goals properly in Google analytics. So one of the things that happens most of the time is that if you don’t have what is called the canonical redirect or the 301 canonical redirects in your site then sometimes you can set your goals in an incorrect manner in Google analytics and therefore, your going to end up with less than accurate information for your goal conversions. So what you want to do, is either improve the way that you’re setting your goals in Google analytics or set up your server so that it actually does what is called the canonical redirection or 301 canonical redirection. So if you don’t know what I’m talking about then let me just explain for a second what a canonical redirection is with sharkmediadesign.com.
So if we g to sharkmediadesign.com, you can see over here—let me just zoom in a little bit in there. as you can see over here, right over here, very interesting. Ass you can see over here, it has the www.sharkmediadesign.com but if I take that off of there, that www, it would automatically include www regardless and what its to the process that its doing, its actually redirecting the sharkmediadesign.com with a 301 server response code to the www version. What happens is, sometimes if you have both versions running then you can encounter duplication of your content and search in the optimization. But also, what happens is that your host name is reference in both ways with the www and without it. So when your setting your goals in Google analytics, if you said an exact match then if you include one of the two hosts if one of your users, one of your you know potential clients uses your site and it lands in a goal conversion with the wrong host, then you may not see that as conversion in your Google analytics.
And for example, if we were here to set up an exact match for a goal and again we’re in Google analytics in the section for goal settings—so if we will activate the goal and we would set up an exact match and if we include it here for example the URL with the www like that then what it would mean is that if somebody was to visit the goal page without the www, then it wouldn’t be tracked by Google analytics.
So what you want to do is again one of two things, you want to—in the exact match start with only the matching of the request without the host name or you want to implement a 301 redirect in your site and I know this sounds a lot more complicated than what it is but bottom line is, if you are not using 301 redirecting your site and your not interested in implementing 301 canonical redirecting your site then its important that when you use the exact matches for setting your Google analytics goals that you start by the end—let me rephrase that. If you include the host name in the goal URL and you have no 301 redirects in your site then you’re going to miss out on some of your goal conversions so you need to only put here the request and not the host name.
So for example, if our conversion page of our goal, URL was thank you that HTM then we would do this instead of including also for example, the sharkmediadesign.com like this. And in this way by just including this, what you would do is it would match exactly this request without the host name. I know that make sense. I hope that it’s kind of clear and again, if you guys have any questions, please just let us know. Send us an email. Hopefully this is helpful for you guys out there. We usually get a lot of questions about why are my goals in Google analytic is not retrieving the right information. We have five people converting and buying our products or 10 people buying our products and Google analytics only was reflecting five or half of them are. And sometimes this is as easy as just changing the goal URL in the goal settings.
So anyway, thank you so much for watching. Hopefully this has been helpful and yeah before we finish let me just redirect you again to Merkads.com or sharkmediadesign.com, our web sites and just let us know if you have any questions. Thank you. Bye.
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