Define sub goals means more conversions

January 16th, 2008 · No Comments

There are a lot of webmasters who underestimate the use of setting goals on their websites. Happily, we see more often webmasters who set the actual sale as a goal.

For example, the page “thanks for your order” will be the goal. But what do you have to do when visitors don’t buy immediately. Don’t these visitors achieve goals? Of course they do. The only thing is you don’t measure them.

I have made a picture of a conversion triangle to visualise this topic:

Online marketing conversion funnel

You can see there are three stadiums. The ultimate goal is always conversion. (E.g. an actual sale, filling in a form, a registration etc).

As mentioned above, lots of webmasters only measure the ultimate conversion. But what do you have to do when a visitor is downloading a brochure, or is sending an email or takes another action.

These are goals also! Normally a person who has downloaded a brochure will read this brochure or will show it to someone else. There is a big chance that one of these people will order eventually.

It is very important to measure these goals also. Why? You can take action!

For example: when hardly anybody is using the tell-a-friend-button, or nobody is printing your brochure you can try to optimise your site. When visitors start using these tools, you know the optimisation was correct.

First, I will list a number of sub goal, which are quite easy to measure:

Printing tool
Tell-a-friend
Subscribing to a newsletter
Subscribing to a RSS feed
Downloading an article or brochure
Making contact/ sending an email

It is quite easy to set these sub goals in Google Analytics:

Tell-a-friend: the page “Your email has successfully been sent to xxx” can be set as a goal;
Subscribing a newsletter: the page “Thank You for your subscription” can be set as a goal;
Sending an email: the page “We have received your email” can be set as a goal;

Sometimes, there are sub goals where the visitor won’t be sent to a separate page. For example; downloading an article or printing a specific page.

As you can see, these sub goals DO NOT take place on your own website. The action takes place on your visitor’s computer.

Of course Google Analytics can measure a lot, but measuring someone’s computer is too much.

But there is a way for Google Analytics to measure the sub goals.

I will explain it with the following example:

When you don’t use a contact form you probably use the mailto: info(at)webaddress.com. When somebody clicks on this link, the visitor’s email-program will open automatically.

We can set this “click” as a sub goal in the following way: