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.
Results are measured against goals. If a visitor takes the action defined in a goal, that counts as a conversion.
About the target goal
Multiple goals can be added to an optimization, but only the target goal is actively used to measure success. For AI-optimized optimizations, the target goal also helps the AI determine the optimization strategy.
All other goals added 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.
How optimizations use the target goal
Each optimization type leverages the target goal a little differently:
-
Manual personalization — goals display performance
-
Traditional tests — goals display performance and determine which variation wins
-
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)
Goal types
Every visitor action tells you something, whether they click a button, view a page, or fill out a form. Different goal types let you zero in on specific actions that matter most to your business, so you can measure exactly what drives results.
-
AutoGoal — Optimize automatically generates an AutoGoal for each optimization. It 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 or more "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 page view 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 form submissions as goals. Each time a visitor submits one of these forms, a conversion counts towards that goal.
-
Custom goal — track conversions beyond clicks, page views, and form submissions. Custom goals come in two types: direct conversions, which use custom JavaScript to track on-site actions (e.g., a checkout completion your site code reports), and indirect conversions, which track off-site actions like conversions that happen on a phone call or in-person.
Goal scope
Not every goal works the same way behind the scenes. Some goals define your site's key objectives, others are built to work in any optimization, and others are isolated to one optimization. For example, an ecommerce site's key objective might be increasing total sales, while a landing page just aims to get visitors to click to the next step. Understanding a goal's scope helps you decide whether to set it up once and reuse it site-wide, or contain it to a specific page or funnel step.
Temporary goals:
Sometimes you just need a goal for a local objective (e.g., driving visitors to the next page or next step in the funnel). While these smaller goals often support the broader key objectives, they may only apply to one set of variations. You can create these single-use goals within an optimization: Optimizations dropdown > Goals & Settings
- These goals are "temporary goals" and can't be used in other optimizations or tracked as site goals
- AutoGoals are also temporary goals
Site-wide goals:
Goals created outside of an optimization can be reused in any optimization and/or set as site goals (i.e., key objectives).
-
Reusable goals — goals created outside of an optimization can be added to any optimization. These goals include integration form submission goals (e.g., Marketo or HubSpot integrations) and goals created on the Goals page.
-
Site goals — these are north-star conversion metrics (e.g., total revenue, total leads, demo requests, accounts created, or subscription signups). Site goals are added to all optimizations as tracking goals, and they report the same way across all of them, giving you one consistent metric to measure impact site-wide. You can also set a site goal as the target goal.