Measuring Conversions with Smart Goals

What are Smart Goals?

Smart Goals are a new type of goal in Google Analytics (GA). They help you recognize your most engaged website users and count their visits as conversions.

Key Benefits

• With Smart Goals, you can measure your most important website visits across 30+ metrics, such as session duration, pages viewed, user location, device, and browser.
• Smart Goals help you optimize campaigns imported into AdWords.

Who can benefit from Smart Goals?

• Advertisers who don’t track conversions

Smart Goals let you measure more than just impressions and clicks, but also go deeper. However, you should only create them if you don’t have the ability to track real conversions like purchases, leads, and calls.

• For advertisers with low conversion volumes in AdWords

Creating Smart Goals will help you better track conversions. This will allow you to make more informed decisions and use automated bidding and other tools effectively.

• For advertisers who only track engagement, session duration, or pages per session

Smart Goals allow you to track these metrics in an advanced mode. As a result, you can effectively optimize your campaigns and increase conversions.

Want to optimize your campaigns?

Then create Smart Goals and import them into AdWords.

Just a Few Steps

Step 1: Enable Smart Goals in Google Analytics

Find out if your account is eligible.

• Link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts.
• The linked AdWords account must have sent at least 500 clicks to the selected Analytics view in the last 30 days.
• The view must receive no more than 10 million hits per day.

If the view meets these requirements, you can create a Smart Goal for it.

• Go to the Admin tab and select the desired view.
• In the View column, click Goals.
• Click + Goal.
• Choose Smart Goal (if available).
• Enter a Name and click Save.

No additional settings are required, which is why these goals are called “smart”!

Step 2: Import Smart Goals into AdWords

To optimize your ad delivery with Smart Goals, you first need to import them into AdWords. Here’s how:

• Log in to your AdWords account, click the Tools tab, and select Conversions.
• In the left-hand menu, select Analytics.
• Check the boxes next to the goals and transactions you want to import. Click Continue.
• On the next page, configure the settings for all selected goals and transactions. Click Import goals.

AdWords will now begin importing data from your Analytics account. Any data collected before this feature was enabled will not be transferred.

Step 3: Optimize your AdWords account with Smart Goals

To optimize your AdWords account with Smart Goals, you can set your CPCs manually or use the flexible Target CPA bidding strategy.

After importing your Smart Goals into AdWords, allow some time for it to collect enough data. Data from 50-100 conversions is sufficient.

If you have a Target CPA, divide the cost of your ads by the number of Smart Goals completed. This is your CPA. You can set this as your target in AdWords. Be sure to set the Conversions column to show only Smart Goals.