Defining goals in Sitecore

In the digital age, nothing is more significant than understanding your consumer. This is why tracking and measuring goals help to know user behavior and in turn, helps to improve engagement with them. You can also know which campaigns are successful and measure the engagement value your visitors generate through their journeys. Let’s find out how:

Before delving deeper into details, let’s first understand what goals mean in Sitecore. Goals are activities that users can perform on your website - so what you essentially do is create goals so that visitors can engage with your website and campaigns and you can track its success. This works for both online and offline campaigns. Some examples of goals include: Download a brochure, register for an email newsletter or sign up for an online demo.

Once you create these goals, you can then measure the conversion rate for every single goal and in fact, check the percentage of users who have achieved that particular goal. This can be accessed through Experience Analytics.

Experience Analytics

With Sitecore Experience Analytics, one can access dashboards and reports to analyze patterns and trends in experience data that is collected from their websites or any other external data sources.

Here’s a look at a sample report:

The moment you open Experience Analytics, you see a dashboard, which gives you a lowdown on all the experience data. There are several categories of reports that contain charts and graphs. With this data, it becomes simpler to analyze the performance, optimization and the interest of the visitors on your website.

When you need to perform more advanced tasks, there’s always the option to use Visual Studio and Sitecore Rocks to create new reports, edit, add charts and graphs or even create advanced filters.

Here are the categories you can view using Experience Analytics:

Dashboard: This provides an overview of key analytics by displaying a selection of charts and performance indicators.
Audience: Gives you an understanding of the users on your website
Acquisition: Shows you what is driving traffic to your website
Behavior: Helps you analyze the behavior of your visitors
Conversions: The percentage of visitors that achieve a particular goal

Understanding goals and goal facets

By using goals, you can measure visitor engagement by analyzing conversion rates. For example, it is simple to create a marketing automation campaign that uses goals and this can help you evaluate which actions should be taken at different stages of the campaign.

That’s not all - you can also create personalization rules that are based on goals that a user achieves during a visit. For example, if a user signs up for a newsletter, you could create a personalization rule that shows relevant content to him/her instead of the sign-up item time and again.

Coming to goal facets, when you go to the Marketing Control Panel under marketing taxonomies, you can find this option. This basically helps to describe different aspects of a goal that you would want to track. These could be categories for your goals or even descriptions that you can apply to multiple goals.

With goal facets, you can create and implement personalization rules that show content to your contacts basis the type of goal they have triggered. Besides, you can also create custom reports for deeper insights.

Associate a goal with an item

Since goals help you track and measure how visitors engage with your website and campaigns, you can associate goals with content - landing pages, search fields, and registration forms. That’s not all - you can also associate goals with media items, which means PDF files or videos.

What you need to do is associate a goal with a content item in the Experience Editor or Content Editor.

1. From the Sitecore Launchpad, open the Experience Editor or the Content Editor, then navigate to the relevant content item.

2. In the Attributes group, click Goals.

3. In the Experience Editor, this is located on the Optimization tab.

4. In the Content Editor, this is located on the Analyze tab.

In the Goals dialog, select the goal that you want to associate with this item and click OK.

Associate a goal with a media item

Here are the steps you need to follow:

1. On the Sitecore Launchpad, open the Media Library.

2. Navigate or search for the content item you want to track.

3. On the ribbon, on the Analyze tab, in the Attributes group, click Goal

4. On the Media Library ribbon, click Save.