What is the difference between goals, events, and KPIs?

 

Goals: The desired final outcome. 

KPIs: Key metrics indicating whether your performance is good enough to achieve your goals in the end.

Events are not related to your organization's KPIs; they are just actions that someone would take on the way.

1. A goal provides additional data, specifically conversion data. It's really important to record your conversions and conversion rate, because it is the best way to understand how your website and marketing activities are actually performing.
2. A goal will only record once per session. So, say someone signs up to a newsletter twice with two separate emails this will only be recorded as one conversion. Events on the other hand will be recorded as often as they occur.
3. An event can be anything. A goal has to be a destination, duration, pages per session or based on an event.
4. A goal can be based on an event. A good example of this would be downloading a pdf, which could be of great significance to your business. The extra features for goals, including goal funnels and the extra data available make it worth basing a goal on this rather than leaving it as just an event.
5. A really useful feature of Google Analytics is the goal flow report, but there is no equivalent for events. The goal flow report, found in the conversion section of Google Analytics, allows you to visualise the process customers take towards reaching your goals. In the report box, nodes represent one of each of your funnel steps for your goal. The final node represents the goal. By clicking on any of the nodes you can see the percentage of people who dropped out of the funnel at that point. This will indicate which parts of your site might need improving. It is worth pointing out that goal funnels can only be based on destination goals.