Analyse Goal reports and conversion rates

Once you’ve started collecting Goals data you will want to spend some time reviewing it. You can do this by visiting the Goals section of the Matomo dashboard. This section shows a summary of all Goals data collected through the site.

Historical Goal Data

Within the first section, you will notice an Evolution over the period graph, which is useful for discovering trends in your Goal completions over time. If you use the Matomo Annotations feature, you will also see those entries plotted along the bottom of the graph, so you can see what might have caused any significant changes to your Goal conversion numbers.

By default, you will see the number of conversions plotted in the graph. For more options, you can hover over the line chart icon at the top left of the graph. This will provide more metrics to help you drill down into the relationship between the different goals, revenue statistics, and conversion rates.

The most important metric for your goals is usually the conversion rate. It allows you to compare whether the website is converting better or not. When you only look at the absolute number of conversions instead, you don’t see the full picture.

For example, if one week, your website gets double the amount of visits, this would generally be a good thing. However, if you don’t get any more conversions, your conversion rate will have dropped, which actually represents worse performance towards your goals. Instead, you would want to see the number of conversions go up in line with the number of visits, which would maintain an almost consistent conversion rate, as shown below.

Close tracking of the conversion rate can help you ensure you aren’t wasting opportunities. While more conversions are always good, tracking the conversion rate as well can help you discover if traffic to your website is reaching its full potential. You may also want to segment your users and view conversion rate for different segments.

Comparing Goal Metrics Over Time

You can enable multiple metrics at the same time by clicking on the metrics icon at the top left of the Evolution Graph. In the example graph below, you can see that the number of clicks reported for two partner websites started increasing at the same time, but one reached much higher levels.

Without knowing the full context in the example image, it is hard to say for sure why more people are clicking on Liveaboard links over Agoda links. However, it might suggest the content recommending Liveaboard is more engaging. Or, it could simply be that there are less opportunities to click Agoda links on the website. As always with analytics; the underlying data will help reveal underlying trends, but you will likely need to correlate it back to your knowledge of your website and business activities to draw meaning from the results.

You may also have noticed in the graph above there are four green icons in the bottom left of the graph, which provide further options for working with the data set. In order, these are:

• Change period (Calendar Icon ) – Select whether you would like data plotted by days, weeks, months, or years.
• Export this data in other formats (Export Icon ) – Available formats are: CSV, XML, PHP, RSS, TSV, JSON, and HTML
• Export as Image (Image Icon ) – This can be useful for sharing reports with clients or managers.
• View notes for this date range (Annotation Icon ) – This brings up relevant annotations in the selected reporting period.

Goal Summaries

Below the Evolution graph you should see a series of sparkline summary cards containing a line chart, alongside these are conversion numbers and rates for your goals. The first card provides a combined summary of your goal conversion data within the currently selected date range. These statistics are useful to get a general feel of the marketing performance of your website. Generally speaking the higher these numbers are, the better your website is doing.

Underneath the top sparkline summary card, you will find a further summary card for each of the goals on your site so you can review each individually. You can see the number of conversions and conversion rates for each goal on this page.

If you would like to review any of the goals in more detail, simply click on the goal title and it will take you to a dedicated page for that goal with more detailed graphs and data.

Goals Breakdown Reports

At the bottom of the Goals Overview page, you will see a list of goals reports alongside a table. Each of these reports summarises Goal data by various reporting criteria. These reports help you understand the conditions that lead to goal completions on your website.

Goals by Referrers

The Goals by Referrers report can help you identify the traffic sources that lead to goal completions. When your website receives traffic from a variety of sources, some traffic will inevitably be more qualified than the rest. The reports within this section break down the sources of visitors which are most beneficial to your website goals.

Channel Type Report

The channel report is useful for analysing the types of traffic, e.g. search or website referrals, that are most likely to complete a goal on your website. As an example, you might expect that traffic from Social Networks would complete a goal based on clicking social media links the most. This report can help confirm or deny your suspicions so you can adjust your marketing plans appropriately.

Search Engines Report

This report shows you which search engines send traffic that complete goals on your website. As an example, you might notice visitors from DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, rarely sign up to your newsletter. However, these same visitors often complete the goal of clicking on your blog’s RSS links. This could suggest your blog is a better medium for keeping in touch with these users instead of an email newsletter.

Keywords Report

The keywords report attempts to identify as many keywords as possible that visitors have used to reach your site and complete your goals. As an example, you might notice visitors searching for keywords including “report” are more likely to opt-in to your newsletter. This would suggest that offering reports as an incentive to opt-in is a beneficial strategy for your website.

Websites Report

This report can help you identify which third party websites bring in qualified traffic. For example, imagine you are advertising job listings on multiple sites. However, only visitors from one site complete your New Job Application goal. In this case, you may want to investigate expanding your relationship with that site over the others. Continuing this example, you might also discover another job site leads to goal completions, but you aren’t directly advertising on it. In this case, you might want to see if they offer advanced job promotion features.

Campaigns (Enabled via Matomo Campaigns Extension)

If you are using the cloud version of Matomo, or if you have the Marketing Campaigns plugin, you can also review goals by Campaign; Name, Keyword, Source, Medium and Content. These dimensions are useful if you advertise through other channels such as email newsletters, paid ads, affiliates, etc.

Goal Engagement

This section is useful for tracking how long it takes for people to complete the goals on your website. As an example, if you were running a lead generation site, the Visits to Conversion report could show people tend to sign up on their third visit. Based on this, you might experiment with adding a popup subscription form to your site that shows on peoples’ first or second visits. You can then track if this results in more goal completions with less visits.

You might also notice in the Days to Conversion report, the majority of visitors complete your goals several days after their first visit. This could suggest people are coming in through multiple channels. Knowing this could help inform your multi-channel conversion attribution strategy.

Goals by User location

The next section provides data based on where and how visitors access your website.

Country, Continent, Region and City reports

These reports break down goal completions based on a visitors location. This can be useful, for example, if your site features marketing consent popups for visitors in certain areas, such as in Europe to address GDPR. In this case, the Continent report can help you understand the impact that may be having on your goal conversions.

Alternatively, the Country report might show that lots of people complete your goals in English speaking countries, but not in others, even though you have a high number of visitors. This could suggest that it would be useful to offer translations for non-English speaking markets.

Devices: Type, Model & Brand Reports

Analysing goal completions by device can help you identify potential technical issues with your site. For example, if you were to notice that nobody was completing your newsletter subscription form from a mobile device, you might want to run further tests to confirm that your optin form is fully visible and functioning on mobile devices.

Goals by User attribute

Visits by server time can help you identify the most popular times that people complete your goals. For an internationally-focused organisation, this could help inform you on the best time to run time-bound campaigns or publish new content.