Digital Property Needs A Conversion Goal

This sounds very obvious but indeed not an easy task, and quite a lot of digital properties do not have a conversion goal. They only strike for traffic volume such as page views or visits for websites, or the number of downloads for mobile apps. They all sound good and reasonable, but what is the meaning after that traffic volume? If the traffic volume is high, it can be used for showing off. But if it is not, there is barely any meaning or value. Indeed, unless the digital property is associated with some other well-known entities in the digital or offline world as a means to attract traffic, the traffic volume hardly reaches a level for show-off.

All go back to the root cause of why a digital property exists in the first place. It never solely attracts traffic, there is always a higher objective and it should be related to your (organisation’s) objectives. In particular, there should be some desired behaviours which digital property owners wish users to complete, such as filling in a form, downloading a file, completing a calculation, or even spending some time reading a particular webpage.

With a conversion goal, then we know where to spend our effort, including driving more traffic, yes traffic volume has meaning now as it helps to improve the conversion goal. Of course, we could also have a lot of others, such as optimizing navigation, redesigning layout, and campaign activities.

Moreover, we can have some KPIs around the conversion goal and monitor them daily. Daily monitoring of traffic volume is only a technical health check as mentioned previously. No action is required unless something is broken. However, monitoring conversion goal KPIs gives you some actionable items to improve the productivity of your digital properties.

So what should be my conversion goal?

Indeed, only you can tell. As mentioned above, think about what the digital property wants to accomplish, think about what you want your users to do with the digital properties, and think about what counter or indicator can tell if your users performed those actions. There is no problem with having some simple or even stupid initial conversion goals, conversion goals may change as time goes and more knowledge is gathered for your users and more questions are raised.