Improve user onboarding with goals
Product teams should set and track goals to understand how users are progressing through the onboarding process and how much of the product users are adopting. By understanding what goals users are and aren’t hitting, product teams can make informed decisions on how to better onboard users and increase product adoption.
Why should you use a goal tracking tool?
Whether you're announcing a new feature or onboarding new users, the experience should always have an explicit purpose; an action for users to take. Goal tracking allows you to see how many users are reaching those milestones and better understand and quantify product adoption. A goal tracking tool will allow you to designate goals within your platform, like a user clicking a certain button or reaching a specific page, without code or involving your engineering team.
In-app experiences like product tours, announcements, and checklists drive users towards completing goals and help them realize the value of your product sooner. By designating a goal for each onboarding tour, checklist item, or new feature announcement, you can quantify how effective those experiences are at improving product adoption. A goal tracking tool will tell you what users are completing each goal and if they got there as a result of your product tour or on their own. For example, you could see how many users tried a new feature and if they found it on their own or if they discovered it through your new feature announcement. Or, in the case of user onboarding, you could see if users are reaching onboarding milestones like running an initial report, inviting team members, etc.
As users progress through the goals you’ve set for them, they’re adopting more of the product, recognizing your product’s value, and becoming power users.
How can you use Lou as a goal tracking tool?
Lou offers a goal tracking tool that makes it possible to begin tracking goals in just a few clicks and with zero code. You can use goals in any Lou experience, including announcements, product tours, and checklists.
Currently Lou offers two types of code-free goals. Both click action and page reached goals can be set up in just a few clicks and with zero code.
Click Action Goals - These are completed when a user clicks a designated website element. Website elements can be anything from a navigation item or button to a DIV or large container of many elements.
Page Reached Goals - These are completed when a user reaches a designated URL on your website. The designated URL can either be a static URL or a dynamic URL that uses a wildcard '*' in place of IDs
Lou also offers custom event goal tracking for any use case that you cannot achieve with code-free goals.
Custom Event Goals - These are completed when a user triggers a designated event tracked by your website. You can use these goals to achieve any advanced use case that is not possible with click action or page reached goals.
By assigning a goal to a Lou experience, you unlock access to advanced analytics that show how many users complete the goal, how long it takes them to complete the goal, and whether or not they viewed and completed the experience before achieving the goal.
Here's one example of the additional analytics that you'll find under your experience in the Lou Dashboard:
Completed Goal: The total number of users who completed the goal regardless of if they reached the goal on their own or if they were guided through completing the goal in a product tour.
Viewed Tour Then Completed Goal: The number of users who completed the goal after partially taking or completing the product tour that is associated with this goal.
Completed Tour Then Completed Goal: The number of users who completed the goal after taking the entire product tour that is associated with this goal. From the example above, we can see that 25/35 users who reached the goal also completed the full product tour.
Average Time From Tour To Goal: The average time it took users to complete the goal after starting the product tour.
We recommend using a goal for every experience you create to get the most out of Lou. For that reason, we've made it as simple as possible to build a goal. A goal can be defined as easily as selecting a button you want users to click or specifying a page you want them to reach. If your goal requires additional criteria, you can always create a custom event goal instead.
Goal Tracking In Action
Let's walk through an example of how we would set up goal tracking on a website you might know - Vidyard. Vidyard is an online video platform for businesses that allows you to increase leads, accelerate your pipeline and delight your customers.
The first thing we would ask ourselves is what do new users need to understand about Vidyard before realizing its value? The value of Vidyard is baked into all of the awesome video customization, delivery, and analytics offered by its various features. However, there's one common barrier that a user faces before unlocking the ability to use these features and genuinely recognize their value: They have to upload a video.
For Vidyard, uploading a video is a clear goal that can make or break a new user's onboarding experience.
Now that we've defined a goal, let's build a product tour that drives users towards it. This is what the homepage of Vidyard looks like for a new user.
Here, users can upload a video by clicking the 'New' dropdown button and selecting 'Upload.' Instead of leaving that up to the user to figure out, we've built a short tour that makes it impossible to miss.
Now that we've created a tour, let's start tracking how effective it is at getting new users to upload a video. By using Lou’s goal tracking feature, we can track if new users are uploading a video by designating the click action 'upload video' as a code-free goal. Watch me create this goal in just a few seconds:
With our goal created and attached to our onboarding tour, we will begin receiving advanced insights into how effective our tour is at driving users towards uploading a video.
A few days later, we can check back in and see how our tour has been performing. There are four key metrics to focus on in the dashboard when goal tracking is enabled:
The following metrics are for demonstrative purposes, and they do not reflect an experiment run with actual user data.
In this example data, we can see that our onboarding tour has gotten users to upload a video right away. For instance, 150 users who uploaded a video did so after viewing our tour, while only 15 got there without it. We can also see that users are going from signing up for a new account to uploading their first tour in roughly 2 minutes on average. We could compare these metrics against past data to see how our activation rate has improved since launching the onboarding tour.
Goal tracking is essential to understand how effective a user onboarding strategy is and how it can be improved.
Before investing more time into your user onboarding and product adoption strategies, be sure to set up goal tracking to make informed decisions on how to better onboard users and increase product adoption.
For better user onboarding, create a free Lou account and start tracking goals today.
Published on January 17th, 2022
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