One of the Google Analytics goals for our site can be to get RSS subscriptions.

When someone clicks on one of the subscription links there is a way to record page hit in Google Analytics. Each subscription link generates a different page hit. Here’s what the page hits look like:

/blog/lisaconsulting/rss/rss /blog/lisaconsulting/rss/google /blog/lisaconsulting/rss/yahoo /blog/lisaconsulting/rss/bloglines /blog/lisaconsulting/rss/newsgator

So the goal is to get someone to reach one of those ‘pages’. Rather than create a goal for each of the above, use a regular expression to match then all. Then I only need to create a single goal. The regular expression that I use for the goal looks like this:

/blog/lisaconsulting/rss/

Here is the neat part. Google Analytics has a special report that will explain which of the links were hit. Remember, I’m using a regular expression that can match all of the subscription links (5 different links). While it is valuable to see the overall number of times the goal is reached, it is even more useful to understand which of the 5 links actually contributed to the goal.

The report is called the ‘Goal Verification‘ report and it is located in the Content Optimization > Goals & Funnel Process reports.

Goal Tracking Report shows the total Number of goals achieved

This is fun, let’s keep digging into this data! In our example, a visitor can reach my goal from any page on the site. It would be interesting to see which page they were on prior to hitting the goal.

Google Analytics has a ‘Revers Goal Path‘ report. This report, found in the Content Optimization > Goals & Funnel Process section, shows the path that the user took to reach a goal.

Looking at the report we can see that two people landed on my homepage and subscribed to the Google RSS feed. This report is great because it can show the ‘high value’ pages that people need to see on the way to your goal page.