The handful of website goals worth setting

Most website reports lead with visitor counts because visitor counts are easy to produce. They are also the number least connected to whether the business made any money, which is an awkward thing for a report to be built on.

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Set goals on outcomes you can act on: enquiries received, calls made, work won, and the value of that work. Traffic, rankings and impressions are useful diagnostics but poor goals, because they can all improve while revenue does not. One primary goal per site, one supporting measure per page, is usually enough.

A goal is something you would change your behaviour for

There is a simple test for whether a number deserves to be a goal. If it moved sharply, would you do anything differently? If visits doubled and enquiries stayed flat, most owners would shrug. If enquiries doubled, everybody's week would change.

That is the difference between a diagnostic and a goal. Diagnostics help you understand why something happened. Goals are what you are actually trying to achieve, and there should be very few of them.

The goals that survive that test

For nearly every small business, the useful set is short and unglamorous. It fits on one line of a notebook, which is roughly where it should live.

  • Enquiries received through the site, counted properly rather than estimated.
  • Calls that came from the site, tracked as clicks or through a separate number.
  • Bookings or orders placed, for businesses where that happens online.
  • Work won from those enquiries, and what it was worth.
  • For a shop: orders, order value, and repeat purchase.

Useful diagnostics that make bad goals

Traffic, rankings, impressions, time on page, and bounce rate all have their uses when you are trying to understand a change. As targets they mislead, because each can improve while the business gets nothing.

Rankings are the classic case. Ranking well for a term nobody searches with intent to buy is a pleasant fact and an empty one. Traffic is the same: a popular article that brings readers who will never need your service inflates the number and changes nothing.

Setting a target without inventing one

Here is where most goal-setting goes wrong. Somebody picks a number that sounds ambitious, with no basis, and everybody spends the year comparing reality against a figure that was invented in a meeting.

Start from your own history instead. Count what the site produced over the last several months. Set the next period against that, adjusted for season. If you have no history, do not set a number at all for the first months; measure honestly, then set a target once you know what normal looks like.

  • Base the target on your own recorded past, not on an industry claim.
  • Compare like periods, since most businesses have seasons.
  • Write down the date of every significant change to the site.
  • Review quarterly rather than weekly, unless enquiries arrive daily.
  • If you genuinely do not know, say so and measure first.

One goal per page, and it is not always contact

Beneath the site-level goal, each page has a job. On a service page it is an enquiry. On an early article it might be the click through to the service page. On a case study it is a contact from somebody comparing options.

Assigning these makes reports far more useful, because a page can then be judged on the job it was given rather than on whether it happened to produce a sale by itself.

What honest reporting looks like

A useful monthly note fits in a few lines: enquiries, calls, work won, what changed on the site, and anything unusual in the market. No dashboard screenshots, no percentages calculated from small numbers, no figures that cannot be traced to a source.

Where a number is not available, say so plainly rather than estimating it. An honest gap is easy to close next month. An invented figure quietly becomes the baseline that every future decision is measured against.

How Licheo reports

We track what the site produces, not only what it attracts: form submissions, calls, and the pages that led to them. The monthly report is written in plain language and names its sources.

Where a figure is not yet available, we say so rather than filling the gap with something plausible, because a number that turns out to be invented does more damage than an honest blank.

Part of a larger guide

This page is one part of Websites that make money. The other parts:

Questions people ask

What should I measure on my website?
Enquiries, calls, bookings or orders, work won, and what it was worth. Those are the outcomes you would act on. Traffic and rankings are diagnostics that help explain movements, but they make poor targets because both can rise while revenue does not.
Is traffic a bad thing to track?
Not bad, just not a goal. It is useful for understanding why enquiries moved. Treating it as the objective encourages content that brings readers who will never buy, which flatters the report and does nothing for the business.
How do I set a realistic target?
From your own recorded history, compared season to season. If you have no history yet, do not invent a number: measure for a few months first, then set a target once you know what a normal month looks like.
How often should I review the numbers?
Record monthly, conclude quarterly. Businesses with long sales cycles or strong seasons will see mostly noise week to week, and reacting to noise produces changes that make things worse.
Should every page have its own goal?
Yes, and it is not always contact. An early article's job may be to send the reader to the service page. Judging every page on sales alone makes useful pages look like failures and encourages deleting the wrong things.

Measure what actually matters

We set up tracking on enquiries and calls, then report in plain language with every figure traceable to a real source.

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