The Diagnosis:
A goal tree map breaks a single top-level goal (your BHAG) down into the business KPIs, tactical metrics, and engagement metrics that actually explain it, so every test traces back to a specific business objective instead of a vague "improve conversion rate" ask.
Without one, stakeholders fixate on top-level numbers, teams drift every time strategy shifts, and testing programs can't show which smaller metrics are actually driving the number leadership cares about.
Build it top-down (BHAG, then KPIs, then tactical and engagement metrics), then work back up by attaching research-backed strategies and prioritized tactics to each branch, using the gaps you find to catch missing tracking early.
Visualizing the metrics that matter to your business can be easily done with a goal tree map. By creating a goal tree, you are able to translate business metrics into concrete optimization goals and identify sub-goals that must be achieved first.
This article will talk about:
- Why you should build goal tree maps
- How to build a goal tree map & which metrics you should consider
- How to make the goal tree map actionable (and put together the strategy)
Chart: Concentric BHAG diagram.
Why do I need a goal tree map?
- Are you struggling with getting clarity in your company on which teams are focused on various KPIs and goals?
- Do you see constant changes in your company strategy and find it hard for teams to stick to and focus on a common goal?
- Have you seen situations where stakeholders only care about top-level business goals and disregard improvements in smaller metrics?
- Have you received requests for creating experiments or optimising the website for a specific metric, which doesn’t even have thorough tracking?
If your answer to any of the questions above is "yes", then you need a goal tree map.
Creating a goal tree map will help you facilitate internal discussions about company goals and align on which teams are contributing toward specific metrics. Once you have agreed on the company strategy and where the priorities lie, you can use this map to keep teams focused and to push back against a change of direction.
As there are numerous ways to contribute toward company growth, you also want to list out these paths (whether it's via acquisition, increasing AOV, retention, etc.) and identify the metrics that can contribute to them.
While it can be difficult to get stakeholders excited about improvements in smaller metrics, just looking at transactions and revenue is not enough. You can use the Goal Tree Map to educate others in your company and illustrate how even the smallest improvements in secondary metrics (like progression to PDP, increased engagement with filters, etc.) can contribute toward the business goals. Goal Trees essentially help us break down a large goal into smaller sub-goals that must be achieved first.
Last but not least, you won't always have tracking for all metrics and goals you want to work towards. This is a good opportunity to identify missing tracking early on, discuss this with your team, and fill those gaps.
Build Your Own Goal Tree Map
Use this interactive builder to create a goal tree map tailored to your business.
Start with Tab 1 — pick your business type (SaaS, B2B, or Ecommerce) and set your BHAG.
Then move to Tab 2 to add your KPIs and break each one down into tactical metrics and engagement metrics, building the full hierarchy.
Finally, switch to Tab 3 to map your goals to research-backed strategies and specific tactics — tagging each as an experiment, research task, or implementation. When you're done, hit "Preview Goal Tree" at the bottom to see your complete tree visualized.
Keep in mind this a beta version. We're playing and experimeting, so forgive any issues.
How to build a goal tree map
The metrics on your website either lead to "macro conversions" or "micro conversions." Macro conversions are the primary goal of your website. This can be generating more revenue, different types of conversions, or leads from the site.
In contrast, micro conversions are actions that users complete which either move them toward macro conversions or are not directly related to revenue generation.
Micro conversions are either process milestones or secondary actions. This can be the number of checkout visits, pageviews per user, cart adds, etc. But micro conversions are not KPIs.
1) Start with the BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal)
BHAG is a long term objective or challenge that everyone in the company can understand and contribute to.
We are talking about a challenge that is so audacious, out-of-the-box, and difficult that it might feel impossible to achieve. Your BHAG should be based on your company's underlying strategy. Otherwise, it just becomes an aspirational statement or something out of thin air.
The value of having a BHAG is that it frees you from thinking too small.
Your BHAG should be:
- clear and compelling
- very ambitious, but achievable
- aligned with the company strategy
- measurable and quantifiable
Some examples of a BHAG:
- 35% revenue uplift in 2022
- 40 million turnover in 2022
- 1 million paying users in 2022
2) Business metrics and KPIs
KPIs are the primary goal of your website and business.
These goals should support your BHAG and measure your progress towards it.
3) Tactical metrics (i.e. micro-conversions)
Just looking at transactions is not enough for experiment analysis. We want to look at how the test changes had an impact on various goals and user behaviour on the site. This is important for understanding the WHY behind our experiment results and without this analysis, we will not be able to learn as much about our customers.
As a next step, you want to start thinking about how each KPI breaks down into a smaller set of tactical metrics you can tackle with your experimentation or optimization efforts.
If your primary goal for an experiment is conversions (i.e. transactions), you should also look at cart additions, progression to checkout, checkout completions, etc.
These tactical metrics depend on where your experiment is and what your hypothesis is.
Example: If you run a test on the product listing pages, with the goal of pushing visitors further down the funnel, you should also look at progression to product pages, cart additions, and progression to the basket page. If your experiment focuses on generating more revenue, you should look at AOV, RPV, and UPT and list those as business metrics in your goal tree map.
Example of Business Unit Metrics & Tactical Metrics for SaaS
4) Engagement metrics
We talked about business metrics and tactical metrics, but for a thorough post-test analysis, we should also look at engagement metrics.
The most common engagement metrics are bounce rate, exit rate, pages per session, and time spent on site. However, these are not enough to allow us to maximize experiment learnings.
For example: If you are working on improving the site filters, your primary goal is to improve the product discovery, which should increase the number of users who progress to product pages and add items to the cart. To get a better idea of how the new filters impacted user behaviour, you should also track how many people use filters in their session, how many filters get added per user, etc. For the "visits to PDP" tactical metric, you can list "filter engagement" as an engagement metric underneath it.
Examples of completed goal tree maps with listed engagement metrics:
Ecomm example:
SaaS example:
B2B example:
If you are unsure where to get started and get stuck with listing your engagement metrics, list customer touchpoints throughout journeys on the website. You can simply list all pages and elements that users might engage with and the related metrics you are aiming to improve. This is the ideal task to identify any missing tracking on your website, too.
Make it actionable
Once you have completed your goal tree map, list strategies and tactics to move the needle. Create a board for each KPI you identified earlier in your goal tree map and then list out the strategies and tactics underneath.
Strategies
The strategies should come from user research after you have identified the biggest opportunities and customer problems. Ideally, you want to have a mix of both qualitative and quantitative research methods to identify the optimization opportunities. Once you have concluded your analyses, you can start mapping out all of the research insights and findings to identify the common themes from various data sources. See Speero's conversion research service.
Example: If you have identified that your customers struggle with finding a product that fits their needs or find the website overwhelming (in terms of having too many options to choose from), then you can list "product discovery" as one of your strategies and themes to focus on.
Tactics
Underneath strategies, list different ways to solve that customer problem through different tactics. These are essentially the experiment ideas or JDIs (Just-Do-Its) for website improvements.
You can now list all of the experiment ideas and JDIs underneath the strategies and put together a plan for website optimization.
Note: Make sure that all of your tactics are prioritized. Ideas that are derived from opinions have a lesser chance of success. Learn how to prioritize your test ideas.
How many goal tree maps should you have?
Clients frequently ask how many goal tree maps they should have as a team or company. Know that you can have more than one. Sometimes companies will have one per brand. Sometimes they will have one per experimentation target area/channel (e.g., website, product, app, kiosk, email, search, social, etc.). Sometimes there are aspirations that can’t make it into an “actual” version of a goal tree, and that’s okay, too. It’s even an option to have “actual” vs. “aspirational” trees (e.g., your team thinks CLV should be included as a BHAG but executive leadership doesn’t agree…make an aspirational tree for your team that includes CLV).
It all depends on your use cases, of course. Just freakin’ have one…if not more!
Haley Carpenter, Optimizely
Keeping the tree honest as evidence comes in
Building the tree is a workshop exercise. Keeping it honest is not.
Once your team has been testing against a goal tree for a couple of quarters, you'll have a stack of concluded tests and research sitting under each pillar. Some of that evidence will back up the pillar you wrote down on day one. Some of it won't. A pillar that looked obvious in the workshop can turn out to be thin once you check what's actually been proven against it.
A branch nobody flagged as a priority can turn out to be carrying most of the program's wins. This is the same gap an experimentation program maturity audit is built to catch, just applied continuously instead of once a year. It only works if the tests you're counting as evidence were actually run cleanly, not undone by the classic mistakes Evan Miller's breakdown of A/B testing pitfalls covers.
We've started building this check into a tool we call Dexter, instead of relying on someone remembering to do it by hand each quarter.
Point it at a client's completed tests and research, and it groups the evidence by theme, checks each theme against the pillars and problem statements already on the tree, and rates the support behind each one: strong, moderate, or thin, based only on tests that actually concluded, not ones still in QA or sitting in a backlog.
It won't quietly drop a pillar that comes back thin. It flags it, so you can decide whether to keep investing on faith or move the budget somewhere the evidence is stronger.
The same discipline carries into ideation. If a problem statement says users abandon a pricing page because tier differences are unclear, the next test idea for that page should trace back to that exact sentence, not to a generic "improve the pricing page" brief.
Our ideation engine, MILES, reads the confirmed pillars and problem statements before it proposes anything, cites the specific past tests behind each new concept, and flags mechanisms that have already been tried and didn't move the needle, so the same losing idea doesn't quietly resurface with new copy.
Wiring the tree into intake and reporting
A goal tree only does its job if a test can't get scoped without touching it. That's the gap in a lot of programs.
The tree exists, it hangs as a nice diagram, and the intake form three steps away doesn't reference it at all. Anyone can submit a test tied to whatever KPI sounds closest.
The fix is a gate at the point someone requests a test: before it gets built, it has to name which problem statement it serves, using the tree's actual wording, not a paraphrase, and it has to show the touchpoint can actually reach statistical power at the lift you're hoping for.
That's the intake standard we hold every test to inside a full-service experimentation program, not just the flagship tests. A test that can't statistically answer the question it's asking shouldn't get scoped in the first place, no matter how good the idea sounds.
The loop closes at reporting. Every concluded test in the quarter gets mapped back to the problem statement it actually addressed, not the one it was filed under, and each problem statement gets scored on three signals: the win rate among tests that concluded, whether the secondary metrics leading up to the KPI actually moved, and what the qualitative research says.
That produces a verdict for each branch: keep investing, keep investigating, or move on because it's solved. It's the same table structure as the goal tree you started with.
We build this into Q-BeRt, our quarterly review deck builder, so a stakeholder looking at the tree for the first time in three months can see exactly which branches earned their spot this quarter and which ones are still waiting on their first real test.
That's the difference between a goal tree that sits on a wall and one that runs like an experimentation-led operating model: pillars checked against real evidence, ideation that starts inside the tree instead of guessing at it, and a reporting cadence that closes the loop back to the same map you started with.
Summary and key takeaways
- Using Goal Trees, your team can focus on building campaigns and experiments that are relevant to your company's growth.
- Goal Trees allow you to break KPIs into a smaller set of metrics you can tackle with your experimentation or optimization efforts.
- Improvement even in the smallest metrics can contribute to your company objectives.
- Connecting your goals with the strategies (identified in research) and tactics can help you create the grounds for a successful optimization roadmap.
- This also keeps us accountable for the research we conducted and ensures that we are actually working towards solving the identified customer problems.
- More than one goal tree map is allowed.
Download the free Miro goal tree template.
Bonus:
- You should also track program metrics to ensure the success of your experimentation program. For starters, you should track experiment velocity: the number of winning tests and learnings to communicate to the wider business.
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