Again this article is written for the office newbies/interns and will assume no knowledge of analytics, I was asked a question relating to this, so instead of having to go through it a million times I figured it would be easier to just blog it down. So if you’re looking for some really advanced stuff look elsewhere. I’d recommend here for a more intermediate level http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/ga-goal-funnel-tracking.html

Ok, well the 1st thing you need to know is where to go, start in the Admin section, the 1st time I did this it took me a while to figure that out, maybe I was being a little soft.
Then it really comes down to simply setting your goal page, there are other versions of Goals to set (event, page/visit, and time) but for most purposes these won’t really be too important. So after admin we click on profile, then goals. Following that you will be able to choose a Goal type. This will then open up your list of options.

The next step is to set your Goal page, nice and simple. If someone signs up to your newsletter and then that takes them to a thank you page that would be your goal. If your ecommerce then the order/transaction complete page would be what you use to track orders and so on.

The match type is the bit that can be a little bit tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing. Basically it is split into 3 types that take into account variables or in the case of exact don’t. Assuming that your URLs stay static (1 URL that doesn’t have any conditional qualities) then you should use the Exact Match type.

If you have dynamic URLs then there are two match types. The Head Match and the Regular Expression Match, the Head Match applies to all pages which have identical characters up to the point you specify. Ie if you specify http://www.example.com/purchase/thankyou.cgi then it will also track anything on http://www.example.com/purchase/thankyou.cgi?page=randomletersandnumbers
The Regular Expression match will use what you enter as a sort of wild card, this is useful if you have various subdomains or other expressions which will change both before and after the page that you wish to track. To use the example from Google’s webmaster tools example. checkout.cgi\?page=1 will match http://sports.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=002 as well ashttp://fishing.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&language=fr&id=119.

There you go nice and simple. Now you’ve set up Goal Tracking. I’ll come back and go through Funnel’s, Ecommerce Tracking and Setting Goal Values and other things in another post – yes I will more than likely have to give a training session on it all at some point in the near future so it saves me dealing with questions afterwards.