Setting goals in Google Analytics is essential for understanding how your website is performing and making informed decisions about how to improve it.
To accomplish this type of task, you must have a Google Analytics implemented within Google Tag Manager (GTM) to implement the necessary tracking for your specific actions on your website.
To do that, here are the steps in creating the tracking in GTM and see it on Google Analytics.
Step 1: Map out specific actions
Clearly map out what specific actions you want to track down, i.e.:
- Form Submits
- Button Clicks
- Outbound Link Clicks
- CTA Clicks
Step 2: Go to your GTM account
Go to your GTM account and click on “Preview”. Input your website URL and then click “Connect”.
After clicking Connect, you will be redirected to the website and see a tag assistant page open. Just click “Continue” when you are in the tag assistant page.
Step 3: Choose your goal/objective
At this point you should already have a specific goal on what you want to track. For this example, we would track the CTA, click on the homepage for a costumer story page.
Clicking on this CTA would send information to the tag assistant on what are its variables. And that’s what we primarily need in order to track a specific event in the page.
Step 4: Go to tag assistant
Go to the tag assistant tab and click on “Link Click”, then click on “Variables”. This is because this CTA is a link click leading to another page within the site.
Scroll down till you see a “Click Text” variable.
Copy the text that is in the click text variable and go back to the GTM tags. This is so that we can create a tag to track this specific event.
Step 5: Create a tag
Now create a tag for that specific event, name your tag based on what type of event it is. Then, select the tag type as Google analytics GA4 Event.
The configuration type should be the GA4 connected to your GTM (already implemented at this point).
Then enter the name of the event that you want to track in Google Analytics 4 in the Event Name field.
Step 6: Trigger Configuration
When it comes to triggers, the Variable click text that you copied is important. Create a new trigger like this.
First, create an appropriate name for the trigger. The trigger type would be “Click – Just Links”, this is because this type of event is a link click event.
The trigger would fire on “Some Link Clicks”. Then find the “Click Text” variable as a condition, and equals the text that you have copied before, then click save.
After creating the trigger, save your newly created tag by clicking the “Save” button.
At this juncture, close the previously opened site with tag manager and also close the tag manager. This is so that we can preview if the newly created tag is working properly.
Also, open the debug menu of your GA4. We are doing this to make sure if this event is also reflecting in the GA4 before we publish the tag.
Step 7: Open the debug menu
To open the debug menu of your GA4, first go to your GA4 account and click on “Admin”. It is the cogwheel icon on the bottom left of the interface. When you’re in the admin setting, scroll down till you see the “DebugView” option.
Here in the debug view we can see what events are happening in the site, with this opened let’s go back to the GTM and preview the tag we created.
Step 8: Go to your GTM account
Go to your Google Tag Manager account and click “Preview” then type in your domain name and click “Connect”.
Step 9: Tag assistant
Using Tag Assistant, we can see that our created tag is not firing yet. This is because we have properly put in the restriction on when it should fire.
Step 10: Test the event
Now, test the event by clicking on the “Read more about Pointtaken” button in the site so that we can see if the tag will fire properly.
When that’s done, check your tag assistant and the link click event to see if the tag fired correctly.
Step 11: Check the debug view
Here we can see that the tag has fired properly in the GTM, now let’s go to GA4 “Debug view” to see if the information is passed.
Here we can see that the event is also relayed to the GA4. With this done we can close the GA4 tab, website and tag assistant tab.
Step 12: Submit the Tag
Tags are fired in the GTM. We can now submit this tag by going to the GTM account and clicking the “Submit” button.
Conclusion
To track specific website actions in Google Analytics, you must first implement Google Analytics within Google Tag Manager (GTM). Once you have GTM installed, follow these steps to create the tracking and see it in Google Analytics:
- Create a trigger in GTM that fires when a user performs the desired action.
- Create a tag in GTM that sends a goal hit to Google Analytics when the trigger fires.
- Deploy the changes to your website.
- Verify that the goal is tracking correctly in Google Analytics.
By following these steps, you can gain valuable insights into how your website visitors are interacting with your content and make informed decisions about how to improve your website’s performance.
