What “Sale” Are You Optimizing For?

One of the ways businesses hurt themselves most in the analytics department is by only setting up one type of goal. And I know exactly what type they already set up without even looking at it.

Bottom of funnel goals.

When done right, top and middle funnel goals are much, much more useful than bottom of funnel goals.

Let’s pretend you only set up and run tests on bottom of funnel goals — everything is for “sales” or “leads” or “sign ups”. Senior management will applaud you. “Everything is about revenue. Great!” No. Not great. Why? It’s the last 2% of the user journey that gets glorified. What’s worse is the user likely already made up their mind earlier on your site, and now they are on a mission to fill out the form even with bad UX.

By creating different “sales” goals across the site (events in your analytics platform of choice), you are able to measure not only more of the complete user journey, but also the specific hypothesis for a test.

Example of language I use with clients:

“We’re running this navigation test so that users will have better product discoverability so that we can get more PDPs views so that we can get more add to carts so that more users will reach the checkout so that more users will buy”.

I don’t usually go that in depth, but I do let the analytics (a funnel dashboard) speak for itself knowing “if we do ‘x’ then we’ll get more of ‘y’”.

Why Sales and Marketing Aren’t That Different

Any great sales professional would tell you, closing sales is the easy(-ier) part. Going deep to truly understand the prospect’s motivations is the hard part.

“It’s crucial to slow down initially in sales conversations so you can speed up later on”

Matt Easton, Easton University

Let’s face it, users are having a conversation with our website. The problem is we are only listening to a fraction of the conversation.

Can you imagine how ineffective selling would be if you could only pitch your product and ask for the sale? The whole “marriage on the first date” analogy would be on full display, 24/7 😳

Of course, we would never do that in real life as a sales professional… yet, marketers do this in analytics “setups” ALL THE TIME.

A More Actionable Measurement System

Let’s be better than only bottom of funnel goals and built-in “engagement rate”, time on page, pages per session, and avg. session duration type metrics.

Today you will go home with action that will be useful 💪🏼

With ACTing in mind, I have an acronym that might be useful in remembering different goal types to set up in your analytics/testing tool of choice:
A – Awareness Goals

C – Consideration Goals

T – Transaction Goals

Awareness Goals

Here are some recommendations on Awareness-type goals that I’ve found to be useful.

The idea here is that a user has to be aware of your product/service (well they are on your site so that’s a given), how it works, the value it provides, FAQs, pricing, trust of your team, before considering further.

• A new user to the site
• A user is exposed to seeing “how it works” on your site (or a PDP if you are Ecom)
• A user sees your offer

Salesperson analogy: Sales professionals are often in “NSO” (next-step obsessed) mode throughout the day and even during calls. After hearing the prospect’s top pain point, the salesperson might ask, “I have a solution that other businesses like yours have found useful, would you be open to me sharing it?”

What they are doing is looking for their first “yes” in order to know if they can continue. If they don’t get it, they will know they need to work on the initial conversation points first.

Marketer/Analytics Analogy: If marketers are seeing their reports show that users are getting to the site just fine (overall traffic is up), but when users read and watch the “How it works” video, no one is clicking “learn more” or investigating further on the site, that could either mean they understand and it doesn’t resonate with them or they don’t understand and decide to leave. Either of which needs work, and focusing on your pricing strategy when product/service clarity isn’t there is fixing the wrong area of the business and funnel.

How to Set up an Awareness Goal in GTM for GA4 and Convert

Consideration Goals

There should always be more Consideration goals vs. any other type. That isn’t a rule, but if that isn’t the case with your setup, you probably aren’t thinking about them right.

Think of “engagement” as another word for consideration. The point being this is generally “the middle” of your site in terms of a website flow for a user.

They are aware of key things on your site (from our previous goals above) and now they are considering various things like:

• Return visitor
• Pricing
• FAQs
• Website chat
• Reading customer reviews/testimonials/case studies
• Watching demo on the site

Salesperson analogy: This might be a second call or waiting for the manager to bring on the Chief Marketing Officer in order to get some FAQs answered and share a demo of what the product is all about.

Marketer/Analytics analogy: Often marketers will make changes without knowing if a user even saw it. We changed the homepage hero but the button clicks decreased – but did the user actually read the homepage hero? If they spend 2 seconds there, they couldn’t have… so why are you thinking of changing it? Or, “they played the demo video but didn’t convert into a free trial” – but did they see the free trial offer at that part in the video? If not, then that doesn’t mean the offer/how it was presented is bad.

How to Set up a Consideration Goal in GTM for GA4 and Convert

Transaction Goals

These are what everyone already sets up. You don’t need coaching here. But you do need to think about the “by” questions.

Sales “by”

• Product
• Product category
• User type
• First time purchaser or repeat?
• Discount code used?
• Traffic sources (session source and first user sources)
• Landing page they first entered on (if you have subdomains or cross domains then you pretty much have to use BigQuery here)
• Content group of landing page

Salesperson analogy: Closing techniques here for the sales professional but the work was probably done upfront, so just take a skilled way of letting them choose and feel empowered: “Does it make sense to sign the contract?”

Marketer/Analytics analogy: Did you want to see related products? Did you want to sign up the rest of your team? Did you want to upgrade to annual to save money?

How to Set up a Transaction Goal in GTM for GA4 and Convert

Why Full Funnel Goals Solve More Users’ Problems, Keeps Testing Alive

Setting goals along the entire user journey (not just at the end to make the C-suite happy) is the right thing to do.

Will your navigation test lead to more revenue? Maybe. But why are you setting the test hypothesis as revenue with a navigation test?

Even in a tightened economy, you can still show massive value in your CRO program without over-indexing on revenue constantly. Because you’ll be solving more problems users have on your site so that they can get further in the funnel so that they can increase bottom of funnel goals… and that’s how you can tie it back to ROI for the C-suite.

Note: Make sure you are validating any and all of these top and middle of funnel tests. Users adding to cart at scale, without following through with the purchase, is not the idea. Keep an eye on the prize even though the test hypothesis might not be revenue driven for the main goal.

Happy goal planning/creating/measuring 🤓!