A goal is a specific action that visitors can perform on a website that marketers want to monitor and have declared on purpose.
You can use goals to:
Goals are particular activities that marketers want their visitors to achieve on their site(s) because they are directly related to your business objectives or significant to evaluate your site performances (or KPIs).
On the technical side, goals are always related to one of following events:
To make applying goals more effective, the jExperience GUI encapsulates this technical distinction behind a more functional approach.
You can define goals at the site level (site metrics entry in the left menu) or for a particular campaign. In both cases, available goal types are the same, as well as the way goals are created, the data collected and the reports provided. The differences are the:
A goal is generally defined by an entry condition, which defines what demographic segment jExperience should use to perform calculations plus an end point, which is the fulfillment of the goal itself. Based on those two elements, jExperience can calculate in real-time the success rate of your goal, which is called a conversion.
You can find view goals by navigating to jExperience>Projects>Site metrics>Site dashboard.
In jExperience, you can track the following types of goals:
Lets review each type of goal, the data jExperience is storing and how some calculations are performed.
This goal simply counts the number of visits including a specific page. A conversion rate is calculated by comparing the number of matching visits with the entire number of different visits on the site. The conversion rate may not be of critical interest but it does give an idea of how popular this page is.
Calculation
Conversion = (number of visits including target page) / (total number of visits)
To create a page visit goal:
This goal measures the number of visitors starting their visit (or user sessions) by visiting a particular page (hence, the term landing page) and calculates a conversion rate based on the number of people that achieve a particular action (a visit to another page or a form submission). Incidentally, these are the two most common actions marketers want their visitors to do when building landing pages.
Landing page goals can be seen as a very simple type of campaign (see next chapter). They are faster to set-up than a complete campaign but offer fewer capabilities.
Calculation
Conversions: (number of visits started by landing page which reached the success goal / number of visits started by the landing page) * 100
To create a landing page goal:
The funnel goal allows you to define two pages - one being the start page, and the second being the end page. A conversion occurs as soon as a visitor who has entered the start page also reaches the end page.
Note: this goal is very similar to the Landing page goal, with the main difference being that landing page goals are limited to entry pages of your site (the first page of the user session). The distinction between both goals is done more for ergonomic reasons (to more rapidly find your goals) than for functional or technical ones.
Calculation
Goal conversions: (number of visits with start and success page) / (number of visits with start page)
To create a funnel goal:
jExperience can track how your videos perform on your website, by measuring how many times a video has been launched.
Calculation
Conversion: number of visitors having started the video / number of visitors having seen the page containing the video
To declare a video goal:
As of today, jExperience works with standard HTML 5 video players. Note that if using custom players the start event on videos may not be correctly recognized.
This goal simply counts the number of visits in which a particular file asset has been downloaded. There is no conversion rate as there is no trustworthy and meaningful method to count how many visitors have been presented with the asset as a downloadable item. (The same item can be downloaded from multiple places, the download can start automatically or after a form submission, etc.)
Calculation
No calculation. Provides an absolute number of visits including at least one download of the target file.
To track a download:
This goal counts the number of visitors that have opened a page containing a form and those who have submitted the form.
Calculation
Conversion: number of visits including at least one submit of the form / total number of visits
To declare form submit goal:
This goal counts the number of visitors that have opened a page containing a link and those who have clicked on the link.
Calculation
Conversion: number of click on link / number of times the page was viewed. A goal can only be reached per session.
To declare click on link goals:
jExperience provides, in the Site metrics panel or in each campaign dashboard, the essential data for each of the goals you have defined.
Goals are structured by type in order to make them easily searchable.
For each goal, jExperience provides:
Those figures are displayed for the time period currently selected in your dashboard.
If you click on a goal in the dashboard, jExperience will show detailed information about your goal(s) performance.
The timeline provides an immediate view of the level of activity for this goal. Depending on the type of goal, there can be one or two curves. Remember that you can refine the scale of time by using the date pickers. The scale of the graph will adapt accordingly to the elements selected.
In addition jExperience provides absolute numbers about the population that has been qualified for this goal, as well as the population that has achieved this goal.
Finally, jExperience provides the conversion rate (where applicable), which is the % of visitors who have reached this goal versus the total population qualified for this goal.
For instance, if you set a form goal, the population qualified is the total number of visitors who have reached the page containing that form and the population who has reached the goal is the total amount of people who have submitted the form.
In the goal report the Quantitative analysis and the Performances analysis tables are displayed that allows to dig into the results. The way these reports work is explained in the Concepts chapter.
Declaring your goals in jExperience is not only useful to get performance statistics. You can also use goals or, more precisely, the fact that a visitor has reached a goal as a condition for personalization.
The fact that a visitor has achieved a goal, or has not achieved a goal can be used as a condition to define a segment. Examples: visitors that has not achieved the goal download white paper, visitors that has reached the goal product demo video
Goals can be used to define a personalization and push relevant content at any time.