How to set up basic goals in Google Analytics v5

Google Analytics (GA) is one of the most powerful web analytics tools out there, and best of all it is free. More and more businesses are using it everyday, and the recent upgrade to v5 didn't fail to deliver with improved usability, funnel reports, social metrics, real time data and more.
Now not everybody out there has the time (or will) to get into the features available, so today we're going to go through one of the key tools in GA: Goals.

Goals are basically essential metrics that you want to monitor for your website. The goals in GA are fully customisable and can give you great insights into users behaviour, but today we'll only cover the set up of basic goals to get you started.