Setting Up Google Analytics Goals Based on Google Tag Manager Events

If you’re not measuring your business and its performance, chances are — you won’t have a business for long. The simplest way to assess the effectiveness of your marketing activities is to install Google Analytics on your website and configure goals.

Sure, this may sound a bit plain without all the fancy buzzwords like “return on ad spend” or “customer lifetime value calculations,” but in some cases, it’s no less effective. Everyone starts somewhere. And even if you don’t have the budget or resources for advanced analytics, setting up goals is something anyone can do.

• Sending Events via GTM
• Working with Events in Google Analytics
• Setting Up Google Analytics Goals Based on GTM Events
• Final Thoughts

Before we begin, there’s something important you should know:
Google Analytics has four types of goals, but when working with GTM, you’ll only need one — the event-based goal.

That’s the one we’ll be focusing on today.

Sending Events via GTM

Before you can set up a goal in Google Analytics, you first need to configure a tag to send event data. Depending on the type of event you’re tracking, the tag configuration will differ.

You’ll find detailed guides on this blog that cover various event tracking setups, including:

• Tracking clicks on social links, phone numbers, and emails
• Tracking button clicks and other site elements
• Tracking video interactions
• Tracking scroll depth
• Tracking form interactions with GTM

Working with Events in Google Analytics

Once you’ve configured the necessary events and are sending them to GA, data collection begins automatically. At first, the events will appear in the Real-Time reports:

And then in the standard reports as well:

Based on this data, you can start making informed decisions and evaluate the performance of your content or marketing campaigns.

For example, with a custom report like this one, you can identify which videos your users engage with the most:

However, some events may hold more value for you. For such important actions, it's best to configure goals — they’re simply easier to work with inside your GA account.

Setting Up Google Analytics Goals Based on GTM Events

If you take a moment to reflect on the phrase “event-based goal,” the whole setup might seem almost laughably simple — and yet, I still see many common mistakes being made.

In reality, you just need to know which event you want to track as a goal and specify the details in the Category, Action, Label, and Value fields.

To get there, go to Admin and, at the View level, select Goals:

Let’s say I’m sending the following event via GTM:

Then I would enter the following values in the corresponding fields:

As you can see — nothing complicated. Just enter the same values you used when setting up your GTM tag.

But here’s where the misunderstanding often begins.

If your GTM tag looks like this:

Then your GA goal might end up looking like this — which is incorrect:

Why is this incorrect?

Because Google Analytics doesn’t process the variable name — it only receives the actual value of the variable at the moment the event fires.

So, when configuring your goal — don’t forget to enter the actual value, like this:

In this case, we’ll track all events with identical settings as a goal. The only drawback is that in our case, the Label contains a specific page, so our goal will only work for that one. To fix this, it’s worth using one of two solutions:

• Use regular expressions. This way, you can enter something like this into the Label field:

• Leave unnecessary fields blank. If you leave a field blank, it won’t be used as part of the goal condition.

In other words, in our example, we’ll capture events with Category = Engagement and Action = Active Time 30 and Scrolling 50, regardless of what’s in the Label field.

Don’t forget to test your goal configuration in real-time reports.

Instead of conclusion

Setting up goals is a very straightforward process. Still, I often notice mistakes — the same ones outlined in this article. Hopefully, you’ll be able to avoid them now.

If you still have questions about goal configuration — drop them in the comments.

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