Create and understand goals

  • Updated

In Optimizely Content Recommendations, a Goals are a set of behaviors you want site visitors to perform, such as filling out a form, requesting a demo, downloading a resource, or viewing three pages of your company's website. These actions are tracked as conversions. You can use goals to identify visitor interests by tracking how many visitors meet the goal’s defined rules. If a large number of visitors viewed pages that contained related topics (like mortgage, loan, or credit), it could indicate their interest in a bigger topic, such as housing.

In Content Recommendations, goals are mainly used for the following purposes:

  • For analytics - To understand the aggregate interests of users who convert against a goal, such as topics that interest users who subscribed to a newsletter.
  • To measure conversion - To view the number of users who converted against each goal after clicking on a recommendation block.  

You can track conversions for a goal by recording a conversion event, typically through your tag management system. Goals can also be hard-coded into your pages. Conversion events can represent any user action, such as a form submission, page view, or element click. Only the conversion event itself is captured. Additional data, such as transaction amounts or visitor attributes, cannot be passed to the service for tracking.

Create a goal

You must create goals while installing Content Recommendations. Goals are implemented using JavaScript. 

Edit, delete, sort, and search for a goal

To edit a goal, complete the following:

  1. Go to Insight > Goals.
  2. Click the Edit icon in the same row as the goal you want to edit.
  3. Edit your goal by assigning a Monetary Value to each conversion or user converted. Assigning a monetary value to each conversion helps you measure its business impact and prioritize high-value actions.
  4. Click Save to save your goal.

To sort, search for and delete a goal, complete the following:

  1. Click the drop-down list to sort the goals by ascending or descending order.
  2. Enter your goal name in the search bar and click Go to search for a goal. 
  3. Click the Bin icon to delete your goal. The goal is moved to the Bin tab.
  4. Open the Bin tab to view your list of deleted goals. Click the Restore icon to restore your goal. You can also edit your goal by clicking the Edit icon.  

View goal analytics

When you have created the goal, you can see the following metrics in the Content Recommendations UI:

  1. Go to Insight > Goals.
  2. Click a goal, for example, Video watched. 

  3. Select a time period for which you want to see the conversions. For example, to see the conversions for the first quarter, click the date filter drop-down list and create a Custom Period. Click Apply to display the data for that time period. 

  4. View the following performance metrics in the Activity tab: 

    • Conversions – Displays the number of conversion events recorded within the selected time period.
    • Users Converted – Displays the number of users who performed the conversion events. 
    • Value Realized – Displays the monetary value derived from the number of users who converted against your goal. You can edit 
    • Line chart – Displays the number of Conversions and Users Converted on a specific Hour, Day, Week, or Month within the selected time period. 

  5. Open the Profile tab to view the Topics associated with the goals. Click on individual topics to see topic details.

  6. Click Compare to see how the data from the selected time period differs from the preceding period. The dashed line in the graph displays the interactions in the previous period (Conversions in Previous Period and Users Converted in Previous Period). You can follow it to see whether there were more or fewer conversions or converted users for your goals.

Use filters

You can filter performance metrics by using relevant fields such as Currency, Name, and Monetary Value. Filtering lets you define specific conditions and targets to refine your data view. This helps you focus on the most relevant metrics, making it easier to analyze results, compare goal performance, and identify areas that need improvement. 

For example, if you select the field Monetary Value, the condition is greater than or equal to, and enter the target 10, you can find the goals that are valued at 10 or higher. Using this specific filter helps you identify high-value goals or those that contribute the most monetary impact. By narrowing results to goals with a monetary value of 10 or higher, you can focus your analysis on the most profitable conversions and prioritize optimization around the actions that deliver the greatest return.