Learn what optimization goals are and how they're used.
Everyone who visits your site has objectives they want to accomplish — gather info, check out pricing, purchase something, subscribe to a newsletter, and so on. Similarly, you have objectives that your website aims to achieve — collect revenue, get user sign-ups, lead generation, and so forth. These shared objectives are called goals. Goals are key for website optimization.
How optimizations use goals
Results are measured against goals. If a visitor takes the action defined in a goal, that counts as a conversion. How the target goal is leveraged per optimization type:
- Test optimizations — the goal determines which variation is declared the winner. Optimize then highlights the top performer and suggests how to proceed or end the test based on results.
- Personalize optimizations — the goal helps you measure performance within each segment. All variations stay live until you choose to pause or archive them.
- AI Optimize optimizations — the goal powers the AI. The system uses the goal to learn which variations drive the most conversions, then adaptively shows the best one to each visitor.
About the target goal
You can add multiple goals to an optimization, but only the target goal is used to measure success and, for AI Optimize optimizations, help the AI determine what to optimize for. Other goals attached to the optimization still collect data, but are only used for reporting purposes. Think of these extra goals as tracking goals. You can switch between goals while viewing the optimization's results to see another goal's metrics.
- If an optimization has one goal, it's automatically the target goal
- If an optimization has multiple goals, you can set which goal to use as the target goal
Goal types
Every visitor action tells you something, whether they click a button, view a page, or fill out a form. Goal types let you zero in on the specific actions that matter most to your business, so you can measure exactly what drives results instead of guessing. These are the goal types you can leverage:
- AutoGoal — Optimize automatically generates an AutoGoal for each optimization. The AutoGoal can track how visitors interact with your site after viewing a variation (e.g., clicking links/buttons/CTAs, navigating to another page, or leaving your site).
- Click goal — you can create click goals that target specific clickable page elements (e.g., track when visitors click one of the "Subscribe" buttons on the page).
- Page view — you can create page view goals to track when visitors view one or more of your site pages. Only the first view of the page(s) in a session is counted, so if someone viewed a page multiple times, it only counts as one conversion.
- Form submission goal — if you integrate with Marketo or HubSpot, you can track forms to add form submission goals. Each time a visitor submits one of these forms, a conversion counts towards that goal.
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Custom goal — custom goals tracks custom events using the
sendEvent()API. Use this for purchases, custom form submissions, or other interactions not captured by clicks or pageviews. You can also include a monetary value.
Goal scope
Your website should have one or more key objectives. An ecommerce site's key objective, for example, is to increase total sales (i.e., completed purchases). In Optimize, a site's key objectives are site goals. These are north-star conversion metrics (e.g., total revenue, total leads, etc.) that live at the site level rather than inside a single optimization. Learn about site goals.
- Site goal examples — demo requests, form submissions, accounts created, subscription signups, and bookings
- Site goals are sitewide — site goals are added to every optimization for use as tracking goals or the target goal
Each page in the flow can have its own page-level objective that supports the broader site goal. This is often to drive visitors from their current page to the next step in the funnel or flow. These page-level goals are temporary goals in Optimize.
- Temporary goal examples — CTAs to the next page in the funnel or flow and secondary objectives
- Temporary goals are not sitewide — goals you make in one optimization can’t be reused in other optimizations