When I talk about “Soft Goals,” I’m not talking about goals that are Downy-Soft and snuggly. I’m talking about goals that do not directly result in a sale. These goals could include visits to a landing page, maintenance of a particular bounce rate, average time on site, pages per visit, or a specific event (event being an action taken on the site).

Like a sloth bear, soft goals are less snuggly than you’d think

But if these goals don’t generate any revenue directly, why bother measuring them?

Every client should have an overall goal. It can be as simple as, “We want to drive more traffic to our site,” or “We want more leads from our (Insert Inventory Item).” Or it could be, “We want more people to know we exist.” Establishing the overall goal is important not only for the SEM company managing the account, but for the client as well.

What do soft goals do for our overall goal? Besides just having a general goal, more often than not clients want to see every metric to their site increase as a result of the campaigns you are running.

Analytics data means more with goals in place

“Soft Goals” help us determine how our campaigns are performing against Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These KPIs should be set by the client and SEM company when determining overall strategies and goals to the site.

If we’re running a service campaign for an automotive client, the overall goal might be to generate more leads for service. But do we just ignore traffic that uses the “Get Directions” button? No. We want to know who is looking for directions because that could very well be an important factor in the research stage of the funnel.

If we see there are many people getting directions, but not many people scheduling their appointment, we have important information about the Geo-Targeting Optimization that needs to be performed.

Talk to your search engine marketing company about setting some goals that are consistent month over month. From there, develop a set of “Soft Goals” that you feel are important to your website performance for each campaign.

You can’t measure ROI if you don’t have goals. If you’re feeling really analytics savvy, try finding the average value of a Goal and from that finding out the average value of a visitor to your site. Perhaps we’ll even save that for a future blog post.