How to use the Goals Report to Drive Feature Usage, Adoption, and Conversions

Product analytics teams constantly seek ways to understand user journeys and product performance. The Umami Goals report, one report in a suite of product analytics reports, allows product teams to track metrics by visualizing progress toward key objectives.

The Goals report allows teams to define and monitor objectives based on various metrics, including URLs, events, and custom event data properties. Combining these metrics enables product teams to create more sophisticated goals that align with complex product strategies.

When viewed with data from other Umami reports like Funnel, Retention, Journeys, UTMs, and Breakdown, data from the Goals report can provide a comprehensive view of your product's performance.

This blog post explores key features and use cases of the Umami goals report for product teams.

Goals Report Key Features

To get the maximum benefit out of the Goals report, it is recommended that you have custom events setup on your product before hand. Before we jump into the use cases, let's look at some key features of the Goals report:

1. Flexible Metric Combinations: Combine different metrics (URLs, events, and event data) to create complex, custom goals that reflect the nuances of your product.

2. Customizable Time Frames: Analyzing goal performance across various periods allows you to understand short-term and long-term trends.

3. Visual Progress Tracking: The report provides visualizations of progress over time, which is helpful for analysis and communicating insights to stakeholders.

Goals Report Use Cases

This section will cover various use cases that product analytics teams will likely find interesting. There are an infinite number of ways to use the Goals report to determine the nuances of your team and product. Hopefully, these ideas will help get you started.

Use Case: Feature Adoption Across User Segments

Product teams need to understand how different user segments interact with certain product features. Here's how you can use the Goals report for this purpose:

Setup

1. Define key user segments.
2. Create goals for feature adoption rates within each segment.
3. Based on available metrics (URL, Event, Event Data), set up goals that correlate to feature usage.

Analysis Approach

Once these goals are set, you can use the Goals report to track progress. Here are some ways you might analyze the data:

1. Compare adoption rates between segments via goal percent completion in your report to identify any disparities or to understand how quickly specific segments adopt certain features. This could tell you who is using your features more and can inform marketing, sales, and feature roadmap decisions. For example, suppose there is an “Add Teamembers” feature in your product. For the free version of your app, you can create an event for that button one way, but for the paid version of your app you can create an event for that button a different way. By adding both of these events to a single Goals report, you can determine if adding teammembers is an important feature to these two segments, which can then inform your pricing strategy.
2. Look for patterns in how quickly different user types reach key usage milestones.
3. Analyze the correlation between feature adoption and retention rates to assess the feature's stickiness. Perhaps when accounts reach a certain volume of users retention skyrockets.
4. Use the event data property to assign monetary value to specific events so you can then calculate lifetime value data to make a case for further investment in the feature or to target specific user segments for upselling.

Using the Goals report in this way can help you gain nuanced insights into feature performance across different user segments. This data can inform decisions about feature refinement, targeted marketing, or overall product strategy.

Use Case: Product-Led Growth Funnel Analysis

For those working on products with a product-led growth (PLG) strategy, the Goals report can be a powerful tool for analyzing the conversion funnel. Here's how you might approach this:

Setup

1. Map out the key stages of the PLG funnel (e.g., signup, activation, conversion to paid)
2. Create goals for how many conversions you want for each stage.
3. Add all the goals into a single Goals report to analyze the entire PLG funnel in a single view.

Example Implementation

Let's say you're analyzing the PLG funnel for a B2B SaaS company. We might set up the following Goals report:

1. Define each stage's (e.g., signup, activation, conversion to paid) conversion URL or conversion Event. For example, a URL of /signup-complete or an event named signup-complete
2. How many successful signups do you want in the given time frame? What are your goals? For example, you may want 100 signups per week, or 500 people per month moving from signup to activated.
3. Set up the additional steps in your funnel and put them into your Goals report.

Suppose your product was segmented by user persona, and you had different URLs or events for these personas. In that case,you can then duplicate the Goals report for different personas to identify which user types are most likely to convert.

Analysis Approach

With these goals in place, we can use the Goals report to:

1. Identify bottlenecks in the funnel by comparing conversion rates between stages.
2. Analyze how quickly users are reaching key activation events and how this correlates with long-term retention.
3. Compare conversion rates across different user personas to inform sales, marketing, or product efforts.
4. Track how changes to the onboarding process impact time to first value and overall conversion rates.

This analysis can provide valuable insights for optimizing our PLG funnel and improving conversion rates. Use Case: A/B Testing Product Features

For teams using A/B testing techniques, the Goals report can be valuable for tracking the impact of new product features. Here's how you can leverage it:

Setup

1. Setup each variant URL as a goal with the number of users required to reach statistical significance. In this instance, the Goals report will keep track of how many users have been exposed to each variant.
2. Create goals for each variant in an A/B test. For instance, the A version of the test can have an event named conversion-a and the B version of the test can have an event named conversion-b.
3. Use segmentation to analyze how different features affect overall product performance. For example, different marketing channels or in-app alerts can drive traffic to different variants of the A/B test.

Analysis Approach

Suppose you work at a tech company and want to understand how different segments of users react to a new product feature. You could segment your email database and send one version of an email to one segment and a different version of an email to a different segment. Each version of the email would drive to either the A or B version. You can use the Goals report to:

1. Compare events which indicate product usage and engagement across different test variants. This will give you an understanding of how different segments of users like the new feature. Consider tagging the link or button to get support as well which could indicate there is confusion on the new feature.
2. Analyze how different combinations of features impact overall user satisfaction and key business metrics.
3. Identify which user segments respond best to certain features or changes.
4. Track the long-term impact of implemented changes to ensure they continue to provide value over time.

This approach allows us to make more informed decisions about which features to roll out broadly and how to optimize them for different user segments. As we alluded to one of the use cases above, the data gathered from the Goals report isn’t just for product teams. Sales and marketing are also going to be interested in these types of reports.

The Umami Goals report can take your product analytics capabilities to the next level by allowing you to gain deeper insights into user behavior, customer journeys, and product performance and visualize the outcomes of your decisions for instant analysis.

The use cases outlined here are just some of the many ways to use the Goals report for your team. It’s flexible enough to adapt to the nuances of your product and requirements.

Combining data from the Goals report with insights from other Umami reports and your broader analytics stack, you can build a comprehensive understanding of your product's performance and make data-driven decisions.

Using Umami, particularly its Goals report, as a complementary tool alongside your existing analytics stack (if you are already running something other than Umami) can significantly enhance your data confidence and insights.

By setting up parallel tracking for key metrics and regularly comparing results between Umami and your other product analytics platform, you can validate data accuracy, identify potential blind spots in your tracking, and reinforce the validity of your findings. This approach is a valuable cross-check mechanism, often revealing discrepancies that can lead to important discoveries about your tracking implementation or user behavior.