Getting started with Goals

Goals are a key part of Embedery. With goals you can achieve the goals of your website in a approachable and effective way.

Goals break down the objective into small pieces called stages, at each stage we engage with visitors to help push them to convert. With each small conversion, the visitor is one step closer to converting to acheive your goal.

We engage visitors using elements, which you can read more about in a more detailed article in the elements category.

An example

To help explain what a goal is, here is a small example on what a goal involves.

Let's say our goal is to increase sales around a certain category for an e-commerce website. In the example the category is "Dresses".

First, the goal is broken down into stages, at each stage we want our visitor to be one step closer to purchasing a dress from the category. So the stages may look like:

1. Visitor arrives to website
2. Visitor visits the dresses category
3. The visitor visits a dress product page
4. The visitor adds the dress to their cart
5. The visitor goes to the checkout.

So in the above stages, you can easily see how the visitor is expected to travel as they visit your website. In the real world case, visitors will drop off at certain points of the journey. This is where we focus on optimisation to increase the conversion metric. With Embedery we provide the insights and the tools to help you quickly make intelligent changes and maximise the customer journey.

At stage, we also have up to 3 different actions that are constantly competing to make the stage more effective. You should ensure your actions are constantly being optimised and improved.

Stage 1, Visitor arrives to website

At this stage we will have a condition set that will determine if a visitor should join the goal. Since we are collecting all traffic, this will just check if the user arrived to any page in our website.

In the stage we will be able to see the amount of visitors who have be added in the last 24 hours. And we can optimise and refine our stage actions to help convert these visitors to the next stage.

Also it's good to note that a visitor may naturally move to the next stage without the help of an action, although the visitor may already have an action assigned, the action will benefit and reflect the change. We will refine this logic over time depending on the impact.

Stage 2, Visitor visits the dresses category

At this stage the vistor should have passed a previous page and then arrived here. We then push the visitor to try to visit a dress shown on this page. There are a number of factors to consider here, so depending on the website and the normal behaviour of visitors on this website, the stage actions may change to increase their effectivness.

Stage 3, The visitor visits a dress product page

So finally one of your actions has convinced your visitors, the vistor arrives to the dress product page. Here we need to convince them to add the dress to their cart.

Some methods to encouraging the visitor to purchase the dress could be by showning a popup before they leave the page or even a simple change like changing the add to cart button color.

Stage 4, The visitor adds the dress to their cart

The visitor now has the dress added to their cart, they may continue to browse your store, but its important to remind them that they have something in their cart. You can easily do this by showing a top bar letting them know their cart has something and if they click on the topbar, they will be directed to the checkout page.

There are tons of methods you can apply here, but please ensure when you are implementing your actions, you do not annoy your visitors, the actions are meant to slightly optimise the experience to make your website more effective. If you annoy or spam your visitors, they will more likely leave than purchase.

Stage 5, The visitor goes to the checkout.

Finally we make it to the last stage, in this stage we only want the visitors to go to the checkout page.

Reflection

With this approach you will quickly see where the bottleneck is happening in your customers journey and work to improve how your stage actions interact with your visitors. Eventually you'll have a well polished visitor journey and your traffic value will increase by directly impacting the success of your website.

Templates

We have a number of templates that setup the basic stage and goal structure to help you get started, you will still need to optimise your actions and stage conditions to suit your website. But the tools are here to help you get started.