New Feature: Goals + Value = Awesome
A "Goal" is any event that you place value on and want to specifically track.
Any of these events are goals (and can be tracked right now!):
- A visitor reaches your FAQ page. (specific web page is reached)
- A visitor fills out the "contact us" form. (form is filed out)
- A visitor downloads your installer. (executables)
- A visitor downloads a PDF whitepaper. (arbitrary media)
- A visitor clicks on your FeedBurner link. (outbound links)
The future these types of events will also be available as goals:
- A visitor spends a certain amount of time on your site.
- A visitor provides a valid email address (any form).
- Someone installs your software.
- Someone purchases your software.
- Someone responds to an automated follow-up email.
Not all goals are equally valuable to you. Each goal is configured with a relative "value," encoding how much that event is "worth" to you.
I recommend you think of that value as currency, i.e. "dollars" or "euros," in this sense: "How much would I pay for this event to occur?" There are several benefits to this:
- It's easier to understand the meaning of "Total value generated by this ad campaign."
- It's easier to recognize when a value needs to be adjusted.
- It's easier to compare relative values.
Goals are ready to go, right now. Here's what works today:
- You can create goals and tie them to events, similar to how campaigns are tied to certain fields.
- You can create, modify, and delete them at any time, and they will apply to historical data, not just the data that appears after defining the goal. (By the way, no other analytics tool I know applies retroactively like that!)
- Metrics displayed: Total goal value (per goal), Total goal value (per campaign), and average visitor goal value (per campaign).
What you should expect in future:
- Campaign ROI. If you can input how much money you spent on a campaign, and we know how much goal value you got out of it, we know campaign ROI!
- Funnels. This is a complex topic, but defining goals is the first step to having funnels because you're defining potential steps in the funnel.
- Revenue driving goal value. Guessing at the right dollar value for each goal is a good place to start, but better is looking at actual revenue and then propagating that back to how many goal events (in that funnel) were required for that amount of revenue. Then you have real goal values, which (a) is awesome sales intelligence for you and (b) leads to more accurate "value of this campaign" reporting.
As you can tell, goals are the building block for more complex but extremely valuable sales operations.
Let's talk about what you need from the system to define exactly the goals you want, and what reports and decision-support you need after that.
Enjoy!