An introduction to goal actions

Actions are an essential part of the success of your goal.

In each stage of a goal, we have up to three different actions. Each action competes to be more effective in converting visitors to the next stage.

An action is a visitor journey that can interact and target your visitors in a few different ways. We'll go into more detail in the article on the actions editor.

What is a visitor journey?

A visitor journey is a map of how Embedery can interact with your visitor.

For example a user journey could be:

1. A visitor arrives to a page
2. The visitor is using Google chrome
3. We show a popup to show the visitor a product we are selling
4. The visitor clicks on the button in the popup
5. The visitor arrives to the product detail page

So as you can see the flow above is quite basic, but the objective of the action may be to get the visitor to the product detail page. If the above flow happened, then the action would be successful.

3 actions

So in the goal stage, we only allow for 3 actions. This is to help you focus and to not break your traffic into too many groups.

If you have all three actions enabled, then we divide your traffic into three. One group for each action. Then depending on the outcome of the action, the action may take more share. This is a bit more complicated, but the primary goal is to increase the effectiveness of acheiving your goal.

The winner

After a while, a winner action will emerge. This is determined based on which action is most effective, as in the least amount of steps to convert a visitor to the next stage in the goal.

The winner action will become the benchmark for the other two actions to compete against, they can copy the winner action and make further optimisations to keep increasing your stage effectiveness score.

Right now this is mostly manual, but we introduce some automation to improve the experience.

Journey forks

One last important point to mention on actions are journey forks.

So looking at the example flow above, which was:

1. A visitor arrives to a page
2. The visitor is using Google chrome
3. We show a popup to show the visitor a product we are selling
4. The visitor clicks on the button in the popup
5. The visitor arrives to the product detail page

We have a potential fork in this flow. At stage 4 the visitor is expected to click on the button in the popup, but what if they don't? Then we need to handle the fork in the journey, this path is called the dismiss path and we can easily add extra blocks to handle the journey if this happens.

There is only so far we can go to interact with visitors, with the dismiss path we can repeat the show popup step after a few hours if the visitor returns to the website. But normally this result would reduce the effectiveness of our action.