For example, a quick look at goal completion by device reveals that mobile visitors subscribe to the blog newsletter much less frequently than desktop and tablet visitors. That could be because it's difficult to subscribe to the newsletter on a phone, or it could be that mobile users are searching for one thing and logging out as soon as they find it. You'll need to dig deeper to decide which is the case.
Target URL
Knowing that a goal was met isn't useful in itself; you also need to know where it happened. Suppose you embedded the same form on three separate pages of your site.
It's great that Daenerys Stark from Dragonstone, Blackwater Bay just filled out a form to contact a consultant, but which page did she fill it out on?
The Goal URL report shows this. It breaks down conversions by “Goal Completion URL” (read: where it fell off).
Inverted target path
The unsung hero of the Conversion section, this report lets you see the last three pages a user visited before completing the goal.
This is useful for goals that aren’t sequential. Maybe you have a contact country b2b b2c email list form that appears in multiple places on your site, or there are two different paths that lead users to purchase an eBook. With this report, you understand the different ways people get to the final destination and don’t need to set up a funnel.
I typically filter towards a specific goal fulfillment location or the previous step 1, 2, or 3 of the goal.
For example, since I'm interested in seeing which blog posts generated leads from content downloads, I added "Goal Previous Step: 1 containing blog.hubspot.com" to the filter.
This is what I got:
"(Entry)" means the user arrived at the site at that step; "(Not Configured)" means the user did not complete any steps before that one, because they were not yet on the website.
For a complete exploration of the reverse goal path, check out OnlineMetrics’ guide.
Funnel visualization
For sequential goals, Funnel Visualization is your go-to report.
Going back to the eCommerce example, the last goal would be, “Reached the order confirmation page.” The previous goal, or goal #3, would be, “Clicked to checkout.” The previous goal, goal #2, would be, “Add something to cart.” And the previous goal, goal #1, would be, “Viewed the product listing page.”
At each stage, you can see user abandonment. This helps you identify areas where you can improve conversion rates – for example, maybe you’re losing a lot of users during the checkout process. Change the flow so they can pay as a guest (rather than having to create an account), which dramatically reduces checkout abandonment.
To see this level of detail, you'll need to plot your goals as a series. If all of your goals are simply the end goal, such as "Reached the order confirmation page," you won't be able to reverse engineer your users' progress.
The Funnel Visualization report also requires marking the first step in the goal path as required or not. If you tell GA that yes, the first goal must be completed, Funnel Visualization will only show sessions where the user completed the first goal #1. If a user skips goal #1 and goes directly to goal #2, this session will not be represented here.
