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 primary goal is leveraged per optimization type:
-
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)
About the primary goal
You can add multiple goals to an optimization, but only the primary 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 for each optimization. Click goals let you pick specific clickable page elements to target as the goal (e.g., track clicks of the two "Subscribe" buttons on the page).
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.