Year 1 - UE 05 - Digital Analytics

Defining goals is one of the most important thing to do when you are dealing with a digital analytics project.
To make it simple goals correspond to the reason why you built your website/app for.
So if you build up an ecommerce website, well probably your main goal is to receive orders.

Goal definition

In order to define goals, we strongly advise you to ask them directly to your end client. The thing is that you are probably not working at your client, so you have no idea what their activity is about and maybe it totally depends from what you though.
Asking it to your client will save you a lot of time.
Here we asked to our client https://www.webassoc.org/ what their goals are about.

Here is their answer:
Goal 1: measure the newsletter subscription to the non-profit organization program
The registration is done from the big button "I subscribe to the newsletter Associations to be informed of Webassoc services" on <a href="https://www.webassoc.org/associations/">https://www.webassoc.org/associations/</a>. Also on the "Join us" link that appears when you put your mouse in the navigation bar on "Associations". And on the page https://www.webassoc.org/associations/agenda/: at the end of the 1st paragraph, above the list of upcoming events, on "subscribe to our newsletter"
. And in the footer "I register as an association".
Goal 2: measure the newsletter subscription to volunteer
Registration is done from the big button "I become a Webassoc volunteer" on <a href="https://www.webassoc.org/pros-du-web/">https://www.webassoc.org/pros-du-web/</a>. On the link "Become a volunteer" that appears when you put your mouse in the navigation bar on "Web Pros". And in the footer "I register as pro of the web".
Note that most of the time, you are not that lucky and the definition of goals will be more difficult to explain to your client. Here we are close to the perfect answer. They are giving us everything in order to work properly:

• what do they want to measure.
• priority order.
• where the actions are taking place.

Just by giving this answer our end client saved us a lot of time. Let's define this in a analyst document. 

Goal definition in a document

There are at least 3 things you would like to have in a goal definition document:

• Name: explicit name of the goal, to communicate clearly within your team.
• Description: to describe in details what the goal will measure.
• Action: the actions that the visitors will do in order to execute the goal.
• Comments: trust us, nothing is going to be as the plan said, so you always need an extra column where to add things.

Name	Description	Action	Comments
Intent to subscribe to the newsletter	It measures the number of clicks received on links redirecting to the form page.	When a visitor click on a link redirecting to "https://crm.webassoc.org/rejoignez-nous/"	We don't have the possibility yet to measure what is happening on the subdomain with Matomo.
Intent to volunteer	It measures the number of clicks received on links redirecting to the form page.	When a visitor click on a link redirecting to "<a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf595vyRIHmYOsCcUTT8Gpno8Rt3ev7Jjw0OLGx2rkVom-fwA/viewform?usp=sf_link">https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf595vyRIHmYOsCcUTT8Gpno8Rt3ev7Jjw0OLGx2rkVom-fwA/viewform?usp=sf_link"</a> OR "https://webassoc.org/formulaire-devenir-benevole/"	Matomo cannot measure interactions on the Google form.

As you can see from below this document really differs from the first needs of the client, there are always surprises like this in analytics. Better inform your client about it. But here in any cases either you stop your project here until the modifications are made. Or you move forward because modifications can take ages and you would like to move forward on the project.

Goal implementation in Matomo

In Matomo, you can implement goals in many different ways. For this example, we are going to do it as a manual goal with Matomo Tag Manager.

Testing the implementation

Once implemented always check that it is tracked properly. What if you do wrong? Well you can always delete your footprints or add a note.