How many accounts reached a specific goal?

What are goals?

Goals are those actions that reflect the fact that an account has reached certain milestones within your app. They happen only once after creating an account, whether the event takes place during the selected period or not. 

Nota bene: for the accounts created before the date when the processing of the onboarding module started, we cannot say whether they reached those goals or not. 

Examples of goals: upgraded to paid, created first 10 reports, shared report, etc. These goals can be defined as simple actions that take place in your app, or sometimes they may represent a set of actions, which are called "custom actions" in InnerTrends (for eg.: contacted 3 clients in the first week after onboarding, viewed 10 reports, contacted support and upgraded). 

We analyse the number of accounts that reach a goal in relation to the onboarding process. Those who finish the onboarding process have more chances to reach a goal. Why is that important? Because onboarding is essential to retention. People that don’t experience the promise of your business have no reason to come back to your product and use it for the long term.

Reaching a goal can happen before or after the last onboarding step, depending on the context of that particular goal. That’s why, in the summary section of this report, we have dealt with these 2 situations separately, for a better understanding of when exactly a goal is reached and which is its relationship to the onboarding process. 

Applying segments

You have the possibility to choose the segment you want to analyse in relation to a certain goal in the question section of this report. This option is very useful when you want to find out which accounts convert better. 

You have to pay attention to applying the segments that are defined the same as the goal you analyse. The most frequent example is analysing the conversion of paid accounts that reached the paid goal. In this situation the conversion would normally be 100%. There are, however, situations when you won’t get the 100% conversion rate. Why? Because the segments are defined based on the values of the account properties (values that are sent through the app’s tracking), and the payment event most often happens on a third party / external platform, and is transmitted separately to InnerTrends. If the conversion is not 100%, you can easily draw the conclusion that not all the payment events are received by InnerTrends, which requires tracking investigations (contact our support if that’s your case). 

How do we analyse goals, and how can we find the optimisation opportunities?  

There are 2 growth opportunities in this analysis.

1. The first is related to the accounts that reached the goal but did not finish the onboarding process.

These accounts have a very low retention rate, which means that they will churn in the next month or two unless you do something about it right away.

Basically, for this category, you need to drive as many accounts as possible to finish the onboarding (help them experience the promise of your business), otherwise you’ll have very few chances for them to stick to your product for the long term. 

1. The second opportunity lies in the number of accounts that finished the onboarding process but did not reach the goal.

They know your product, understand the value it brings them, but they need more incentives in order to convert. These are the only users that you should target with your campaigns designed to reach that goal. See how long it takes onboarded accounts to reach the analysed goal in order to know the right moment to target them.

To avoid

One of the biggest mistakes we see a lot of Saas businesses do is trying to convince all those new signups to reach a specific goal.

Our data shows that such campaigns can have a negative impact on the decisions of the users to finish the onboarding process, which would have given them higher chances to convert in the first place. 

In order to know what to focus on in these campaigns, Innertrends provides another report that analyses the difference in activity between onboarded users that return and those that churn.

Watch this video for a more comprehensive explanation on this topic.