Goals in Optimize

A goal is a measurable action you want visitors to complete, like clicking a call to action, reaching a page, or submitting a form.

Optimize uses goals to measure how visitors respond to your variations and whether an experience is helping drive the outcome you care about.

You can create several kinds of goals:

• Click goal: Tracks clicks on a specific button, link, or call to action. Use it for actions like clicking Start free trial or Book a demo.
• Page view goal: Tracks whether a visitor reaches a specific page, like a signup, pricing, or confirmation page.
• Form submission goal: Tracks supported HubSpot or Marketo form submissions, such as a completed demo request.
• Custom goal: Tracks actions the built-in goal types don’t cover, like a custom interaction, embedded third-party form submission, bookings, or other configured event.

Once you’ve created goals, you can use them in two ways:

1. Site goal: to define the most important outcomes for your site
2. Optimization goal: to measure a specific optimization

Start with your site goals

Before you build an optimization, start with the bigger question: What are the most important actions you want visitors to complete on your site?

These are your site goals — the north-star conversion metrics that tell you whether your website is driving the outcomes your business cares about.

Once you set up a site goal, it automatically appears on every optimization you create, so you don’t need to assign it manually each time. You can then add more optimization-specific goals when you need to measure the particular experience you’re working on.

For example, your site goals might include:

• Start a trial
• Request a demo
• Make a purchase
• Subscribe

You can have more than one site goal when your site supports multiple important business outcomes.

Once you create your first site goal, Optimize also creates an aggregate goal called Total Leads that combines all of your site goals so optimizations can consider them together. You can rename that aggregate goal in Settings using one of several predefined labels, including Total Leads, Total Conversions, or Total Revenue.

[IMAGE: Total leads goal created with setting to change the name]

The goal isn’t to track everything — just the conversions that matter most to your business.

Key takeaway: Site goals = the business outcomes your optimization program is ultimately trying to improve.

Set goals for an optimization

Once your site goals are in place, choose what each individual optimization should measure.

An optimization can track multiple goals. If you add more than one, you choose one as the target goal — the primary outcome used to evaluate that optimization.

Supporting goals can give you extra context, but the target goal is the one that matters most. With AI Optimize, it's also what the system optimizes off of.

[IMAGE: One optimization connected to Target goal: Trial starts, plus CTA clicks and Pricing-page views as additional tracked goals.]

You’ll see performance for each goal in the optimization results. This lets you evaluate the optimization against its target goal while using the other goals to better understand how visitors responded.

Note: Every optimization starts with an AutoGoal. It automatically tracks broad visitor activity after someone sees a variation, so you have some behavioral data from the start. For a clearer measure of success, you’ll usually add a more specific goal and choose one as the target goal.

See it all together

Imagine one of your site goals is Trial starts.

You’ve noticed that mobile visitors rarely click the primary CTA on your homepage, so you want to test moving it higher on the page.

For that optimization, you might track:

• Trial starts — the business outcome you ultimately care about
• CTA clicks — whether more visitors engage with the CTA
• Pricing-page views — another signal that visitors are moving through the funnel

If Trial starts happens often enough to give you useful data, it can also be the target goal for the optimization. That keeps the test directly tied to the business outcome you care about.

[IMAGE: Trial starts labeled Site goal + Target goal.]

But if trial starts happen too infrequently to give you a useful signal, you might choose a closer action like CTA clicks as the target instead, while continuing to track Trial starts.

[IMAGE: Same funnel with CTA clicks labeled Target goal and Trial starts labeled Site goal.]

Key takeaways

• Site goals define what matters to the business.
• Optimization goals measure a specific experience.
• The target goal tells Optimize which outcome matters most for that optimization.

Ready to keep going?

Now that you know how site goals and optimization goals work together, continue to the next lesson to learn how audiences help control who your optimizations reach.