What are conversion goals?
A conversion goal is a website goal that requires a user to take a specific action, like making a purchase or submitting a form. Website conversions can help a company learn more about their customers, find new ways to succeed, and identify where to make improvements.
Conversion goals should be measurable, otherwise, there’s no way to know if goals have been reached. These goals should also support the organization's overall website objectives.
As organizations decide which conversion goals to focus on, they often turn to marketing analytics software to manage, evaluate, and control these marketing efforts and measure the performance of these goals.
Types of conversion goals
The type of conversion goal an organization has likely depends on their industry and the kind of website they have. Some common conversion goals are:
- Purchase: The most common conversion goal is the sale of a product or service.
- Form submission: Enticing a member of a targeted audience to sign up or request additional information, such as a newsletter, product demo, or price quote.
- Sign-up: When a customer joins an email list or agrees to text message subscriptions. Essentially, sign-ups are how an audience subscribes to more content or information.
- Clicking a button: This goal is more vague, but a conversion goal can include clicking a button on a landing page. Buttons can lead users to download a guide, a specific product page, or pricing information.
- Create an account: For e-cprove thommerce websites, a popular conversion goal is for customers to create an account, which can help ime shopping experience. It can also help businesses track how many new customers they’re obtaining.
- Content shares: Because content is king, tracking the number of shares your content gets is an important part of a content marketing strategy.
- App installs: If an organization has a mobile app, getting customers to download the app can help market it to the right audience.
Benefits of using conversion goals
There are several benefits for organizations that track different types of conversions and establish goals. Some of these benefits include:
- Smarter, data-driven decisions: Setting conversion goals and understanding what works and what needs to be changed leads to more successful campaigns and a website that converts.
- Highlight website improvements: Low conversions can indicate where a website needs updating, improving, or tweaking if customers aren’t submitting forms, signing up for more information, creating an account, or clicking in the right area .
- Optimize the website for better performance: What works for one conversion goal may not work for another, but having data around the conversion signifies how a team can optimize the site for each type of goal.
Basic elements of conversion goals
When establishing the right conversion goals, it’s best to consider basic elements that can make or break these goals. These elements are:
- Design: Components like branding, graphics, fonts, colors, and layout go a long way to provide an exceptional user interface and customer experience.
- Development: The site architecture, coding, load time, and functionality need to work together for a customer to convert.
- Content: The messaging and information provided upfront should help move the conversion goals in the right direction.
Conversion goal best practices
When an organization sets conversion goals, there are best practices to follow to ensure the goals are as accurate and well-defined as possible. These best practices are:
- Know what success looks like: Defining which conversion goals to focus on depends on the desired end result. Typically, establishing a more significant goal can help an organization know which conversion goals to set. For example, a business looking for increased sales will focus on purchases or sign-ups.
- Keep it simple: When focusing on form submissions, keep the form short, simple, and don’t ask users for too much information. Consider using A/B testing software to determine the best way to design a form and how to ask for customer details.
- Understand the audience: Knowing what an audience wants from the business is a great step towards creating a successful conversion path. Segmenting an audience based on interests can better develop buyer personas for teams to use when targeting audiences.
- Make the offer clear: When promoting an offer on the company website, make the offer as clear and enticing as possible. Make sure the target audience knows what to expect once they convert and why they should choose specific products or services.
- Use the right call to action: Calls to action (CTAs) play an important role in getting customers to convert to the next step. Depending on the conversion, use CTA language that makes the customer want to click. For example, between “Sign up today!” and “Sign up to receive 15% off today!” it’s likely the CTA offering up a discount will lead to stronger conversions.
Mara Calvello
Mara Calvello is a Content and Communications Manager at G2. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Elmhurst College (now Elmhurst University). Mara writes content highlighting G2 newsroom events and customer marketing case studies, while also focusing on social media and communications for G2. She previously wrote content to support our G2 Tea newsletter, as well as categories on artificial intelligence, natural language understanding (NLU), AI code generation, synthetic data, and more. In her spare time, she's out exploring with her rescue dog Zeke or enjoying a good book.
