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:
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Manual personalization — goals display performance
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Traditional tests — goals display performance and determine which variation wins
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AI-optimized — goals display performance and determine for what the AI is optimizing (i.e., which variations drive the most conversions for a given audience)
About the target goal
You can add multiple goals to an optimization, but only the target goal is used to measure success and help the AI determine what to optimize for (in AI-optimized optimizations). Other goals attached to the optimization still collect data, but are only used for reporting purposes. You can switch between goals while viewing the optimization's results to see another goal's metrics.
Compare the different goal types
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 custom 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.
Optimization-specific goals vs. reusable goals
Some goals can be reused in multiple optimizations, while others are available only within the optimization where they were created.
Optimization-specific goals
Goals created at the optimization-level are only available for that optimization. Optimization-level goals are created while editing an optimization from the Optimizations dropdown > Goals & Settings. AutoGoals are also optimization-level goals.
Reusable goals
Goals created outside of an optimization can be added to any optimization. These include: