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Goal Examples: hap.gmu.edu

CHHS recently worked to set-up conversion goals on hap.gmu.edu capturing clicks to their various online applications:

  • Apply: www2.gmu.edu/admissions-aid/apply-now
  • Apply: HAMPCAS
  • Apply: Online Informatics
  • Apply: Online MHA

Examples of links to these online applications can be found on the HAP Graduate Admissions Page

Apply: www2.gmu.edu/admissions-aid/apply-now

This goal captures user clicks to the central apply now page. The setup is straightforward: it is triggered when an event occurs with a category of “outbound link” and a action of “https://www2.gmu.edu/admissions-aid/apply-now”.

If directing people to the central application is a function of your website, this is probably a goal you should set-up in GA.

Apply: HAMPCAS

This goal captures user clicks to the HAMPCAS application page. The setup is straightforward: it is triggered when an event occurs with a category of “outbound link” and a action of “https://hampcas.liaisoncas.com/applicant-ux/”.

Apply: Online Informatics and Apply: Online MHA

Since both of these application links direct to the same URL, the setup for these goals were slightly more involved.

Since both of these links point to the same URL, simply providing the event category criteria (“outbound link”) and the event action criteria (“https://apply-now.force.com/?acctid=0013200001GuY7C”) are not enough to disambiguate these two different links.

In this case, they were able to disambiguate them by providing an additional criterion on the event label field, which stores the hyperlink text. Because the informatics link always contains the text “informatics” and the MHA link always contains the text “MHA” somewhere in the link text, criteria specifying the relevant text in the event label field was used to distinguish between the two. This is a good solution.

However, note that this means that if a link were ever included on the website to this URL which didn’t contain either the text “informatics” or “MHA”, or if one of these links were later edited in such a way that it no longer included this text, the link would not trigger the goal.

Goal Values

Note that goal values were established for each goal with a value of $1.

Providing a goal value is useful as it unlocks the “page value” metric in your GA reports, which can be very useful in determining which pages are relevant in driving people to complete the goal.
In cases like this, where there is no ‘real’ goal value, or the actual value is difficult to determine, using a value of $1 provides a nice round number to work with.