Tracking Goal Conversions

Goal conversion tracking is one of the most efficient ways to measure and improve your business objectives. For Ecommerce shops, you can use Analytics Ecommerce reporting.

What is a Goal in Piwik?

A Goal in Piwik is your strategy and priority. It can entail many things: “Sold item”, “New customer”, “Downloaded brochure”, etc. What do you want your users to do on your website?

Conversion tracking is a great way to identify whether you are meeting your current business objectives, identify new objectives, view and analyse your performance, and learn how to increase your conversions, conversion rates, and revenue per visit. Goals can be triggered based on user actions (download or plays a video, for example), or when user visits a given page (e.g. checkout.html, thank-you-for-your-purchase.html).

Goal tracking is also very useful to measure performance of SEM Campaigns and their conversion rate, to the campaign and the keyword level.

Examples of Useful Goals

• Contact us – track when users contact you for more information or help.
• Newsletter subscriptions – keep track of how many people are signing up for your newsletter.
• View/Request product demo – useful if your website sells a product.
• Ecommerce tracking – to track and get useful Ecommerce Analytics reports, we recommend using the Ecommerce Analytics functionnality.

Create a Goal

When the Goals plugin is enabled, you can see a “Goals” tab on the Piwik dashboard. This tab opens the Goals dashboard, and lets you create a new Goal:

A Goal is defined by:

• Goal Name. The Goal name describes your business objective eg. “Signup”, “View product demo”, etc.
• Goal Type and Goal Pattern. These define how the Goal can be converted: matching a URL, downloads a specific file, clicks on an external link,  or Goal manually triggered using the trackGoal() JavaScript function for specific user actions
• Goal Revenue (optional). When you specify a Goal revenue, Piwik will report both total revenue and revenue per visit for each Goal. It is a good exercise to try and evaluate how much money each conversion is worth. For example, you could create a “contact product” Goal to see how many times people have asked for more information about your product. If you know that 10% of these contacts end up as customers, and you sell on average of $100, you know that each “Contact product” Goal conversion is worth on average $10.If you want to set a different revenue for each conversion (for example depending on which “plan” is being bought), read below.

A goal can only be converted once per visitmaximum. Piwik considers that the same Goal triggered twice or more is mostly likely because of spam or double clicks behaviors.

A same visit can, however, convert several Goals (eg. “Buy a product” and “Contact support”). A visit that converts one or more goals is reported as a “Visit with conversion”.

Goal Overview Report

This report provides a quick glance at all goals defined for the website. You can also see reports by Country, Keyword, Websites, Campaign keyword, with all columns showing the goal metrics – conversions, conversion rate and revenue per visit – for all goals.

Goal Detailed Report

The Goal report displays detailed reports about a specific goal. The graph of the last 30 days shows the evolution over time. Piwik also displays a quick summary of the segments that converted best for this goal.

You can also access the report table, broken up into the following sections: Countries, Continents, Websites, Search Engine, Keywords, Campaigns, Time of day.

Note that for many reports (Search Engines, Keywords, Countries, etc.) you can access the Goal table by clicking on the flag icon at the bottom of the tables:

Report Analysis: What are the Top Converting Segments?

Piwik Goal reports will help you answer some of these questions (and more!).

1. You are buying advertisement on Google, Yahoo and Facebook. How can you measure the quality of the traffic sent by these ads, which campaigns and which keywords work best to convert visitors? Out of all of the websites bringing you traffic, which websites send you visitors that convert most? Can you develop stronger links with these websites, or find similar partners?
2. If you use Piwik Campaign tracking, you can track the performance of your Newsletters, PPC Campaigns and keywords to see how each contribute to your Goal conversions and overall revenue. You can see exactly the revenue and conversion rates for each campaign and keyword. If you have affiliates linking to your pages, you can see exactly which affiliates bring you visitors with the most conversions and/or which have the highest revenue per visit.
3. What time of day sees the lowest activity? By checking Goal conversions by hour, you can decide what time is best for migrations and system updates.

Track a Custom Revenue for each Goal Conversion

Goals can be defined with a default revenue, and each Goal conversion will use the default revenue.

It is common for “Goals” on a website can have a different revenue. For example, if you sell a service there might be “Bronze”, “Silver” and “Gold” package. You would want Piwik to report accurately your Goal conversions and revenue per visit for all visitors.

Important Note: if your website is an Ecommerce shop, or if you sell various products with different prices, we highly recommend that you use the Ecommerce Analytics functionality instead of Goal tracking. Ecommerce in Piwik is deeply integrated and produces reports tailored to Ecommerce activity.

If you are only tracking only one product (with different prices), you can use Goals as a simple yet efficient way to measure your performance and evolution over time.

An example of custom revenue tracking:

• Create a goal “Package ordered”.
• Set “Allow multiple conversions per Visit” to “Allow goal to be triggered more than once per Visit”. This will ensure that if a user makes several orders per visit, Piwik will track one goal conversion for each order.
• Look at the goal id, which can be found in the first column of the “Edit goals” table.
• Users will then purchase a package on your website. To register a Goal conversion when someone buys a package that costs $39, you can call the JS function to register a Goal in Piwik.
  In the footer of your checkout page, inside the Piwik JS code you already have, you would simply write: _paq.push(['trackGoal', 7, priceOfMyObject]);
  The variable priceOfMyObject can be dynamically set by your website software.

For more information about manually triggering a Goal conversion via the trackGoal() function, see the Piwik JavaScript API documentation.

Goal Reporting Online Demo

Check out the live example of Goal reports in the Piwik online demo.

We hope you enjoy Piwik Goal reports, and we wish you all the best for reaching your business goals & objectives with Piwik!