How to Track Goals and Conversion Rate?

Goal Tracking and Conversion Rate monitoring is one of the most important activities of Digital Marketer. Together with other metrics, goals and conversion rate can answer how well the campaign is performing, is Call-To-Action doing its jobs, and whether the copy of the landing page make the right impact.

To cut it short: Goal Tracking and Conversion rate enables to answer a question: Does it convert?

What are goals?

This really depends on your business. In Wide Angle Analytics, we support defining goals as actions. These actions can be:

Click on web page element
Request to download of a file
A custom action from your website code, for example:
Hovering over a web page element
Selecting a form
Closing a pop-up
etc.

How to Define a Goal for Goal Tracking?

Chances are, that if you already created a Custom Action in Wide Angle Analytics, you already know how to create a goal.

A Goal definition is an Action, which has been marked as a Goal.

If this is your first time, don't worry, we will show you exactly what to do.

How to Create Goal Definition with Discovery Wizard

Navigate to the Configuration > Action menu and press Discover Actions.

Here, you can generate goal definition by drilling down on various event types and their parameters.

In this example, we will create a new Goal, which will track newsletter subscriptions.

Before pressing Save, be sure to mark this Action as a Goal. This way you will be able to see it in your reports.

If you make the Goal public, other users with access to the Site, will be able to find it in their report. Otherwise, if it is not public, only you can view the goal metrics.

The wizard shows only events and their parameters from last 90 days.

How to Create Goal Definition Manually?

You can skip clicking though wizard and diver straight to the definition screen. This can be helpful if you:

want to create a definition for events that were not recorded in the last 90 days,
already know the parameters you are interested in, or
you have numerous parameters, making it hard to find the right actions

The process of creating a Goal Definition manually assumes you know parameters and their values.

First navigate to Configuration > Action menu and select Add Action Definition.

Pick type of event. In this example, we want to measure the performance of page visits originating from a Facebook post.

Give your definition a meaningful name and mark as a Goal.

Next, press Add parameter and proceed to provide event details. In our example, we are interested in page view with ref parameter equal to facebook-post.

Your new goal has been created as is now accessible on the Visits and Users Dashboard.

How is the Conversion Rate Calculated?

The conversation is percentage of events that meet your goal definition vs event count. We report two Conversion Rates (CR). The Total and for Users.

The Total Conversation Rate is calculated as the number of events occurrence against the total number of events of any kind. For example, if a single user clicks twice on a button which generates a tracking event, this will be counted twice in the Total CR.

Total CR = (goal events #) / (page views + click events + download events + custom)

The Total CR provides a simple overview, but can be heavily skewed.

The Users CR is much more reliable as it uses unique events in unique sessions. Following up on the previous example, if the same user clicks the tracked button twice, this will result in a single User Goal event.

User CR = (unique events per user) / (unique number sessions across all event types)

It is worth mentioning that the number of unique sessions used for Conversion Rate calculation may differ from the Total Users value. The former uses all supported even types, while the latter uses only Page Views.