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Lesson 9 –
Incorporating Business Goals |
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Goals and Desirable Outcomes
What do you want your visitors to accomplish when they come to your site?
Whatever that may be, it is valuable to track how many visitors actually do what
you want them to do. In a retail model, you would want them to purchase
something, or, to put it in web site terms, you want them to reach the
“Thanks for your order” page. In a health services model, you would
want your visitors to find the information they need as quickly and easily as
possible. You may even have more than one desirable outcome, depending on the
type of customer that reaches the site.
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| Figure 1. Goals allow you to qualify visits
that reach particular pages on your site. |
Summary has a feature called ‘Goals’ that allows you to qualify
visits based on whether they got to a given page on your site. Summary will then
track this unit for many reports, allowing you to qualify referrers or search
terms, for example, or evaluate monthly metrics based on how many visitors
reached your defined goals. In Summary’s configuration you define which
requests represent a goal for your site. You can include wildcards or multiple
patterns, so that you can have several goals in your reports. The
Goal report in Figure 1 shows how the
widgetmanager.com site has defined goals for their online store and product
downloads. The Hits column shows that most users who make it to the online store
also download the product. Looking at the Requests over Time column, you can see
that the traffic patterns are the same for the store entrance and the product
download for the past 30 days. Apparently, the percent of shoppers who actually
buy the software is fairly consistent.
Target Groups
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Often you will have different goals for different types of customers. By
segmenting your customers into particular categories, you can better market to
each group and develop a stronger customer relationship with them. In Figure 1
we showed two goals in one report: shoppers and buyers. When your goals are not
related, it may not be valuable to include them in one report. In that case you
can build a subreport (see Lesson 8 - Examining Subsets
of Traffic for details) for each distinct group and assign goal patterns
within the subreport definition.
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Figure 2. Weekly Metrics shows what percent
of visits have achieved one or more of your goals. |
To illustrate this, let us say a health services site has identified two
distinct services it provides: An online survey for anonymous self-evaluation
of health related matters and an encyclopedia of health related terms, concerns,
problems and solutions. The site developer wants to make sure that the survey is
being used. It is several pages long so he configures a subreport to track the
final page of the survey as a goal. Using this subreport, he can see what
percent of their visitors are actually completing the survey with the Weekly Metrics report, Figure 2, in the Goals % of
Visits column.
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Figure 3. The Local Search Word report
helps define what to include as a goal. |
The content author for this site is concerned that visitors to the
encyclopedia may be having trouble finding the information they need. The
encyclopedia is very large and contains too many pages to include as goals. If
all pages were included she would not know whether the visitors were finding the
right page. Instead she looks at the Local Search Word
report, Figure 3, to see what the most common search terms on the
encyclopedia are.
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Figure 4. The Goal report shows how many
visitors are reaching each goal page. |
Then she sets up a subreport to track the encyclopedia pages
related to the primary search term as a Goal. By comparing the Percent of Hits
for the first search term in the Local Search word report to the total percent
of hits for all the encyclopedia pages in the Goal
report, Figure 4, she can see that most of the users searching for
‘flu’ are finding the right pages in their visit.
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Another approach to defining target groups among your visitors is to use
Summary’s Groups feature, which we mentioned in Lesson
5 - Revenue Modeling. You can assign the distinct set of goal requests to
each group and use the Content Groups report to
compare total visits, hits or pages for each set of goals. This allows you to do
a comparative summary, but does not give you the goals column to use in other
reports.
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Goals and Desirable Outcomes
Target Groups