With ActiveCampaign, you can track the progress of your automation using either conversions or business goals within your automation settings. Doing so can help you understand questions such as “How many contacts made a purchase while in my automation?” or “How many contacts visited my website while in my automation?”

Take note

As a best practice, we recommend having a conversion or business goal selected for each automation you create. This helps you see which automations are performing well, and which ones should be improved or sunsetted.

Step 1: Create a conversion or business goal

The first step is to create a conversion or business goal. Follow the links below for step-by-step instructions:

• Learn how to create a conversion 
• Learn how to create business goals

When creating conversions, we recommend considering the types of conversion events you want your contacts to take and how each will be recorded in ActiveCampaign. 

For example, if you are an online education business and you make a sale, ask yourself: how is that sale recorded in ActiveCampaign? Is it through an ecommerce integration? Is a tag being added to the contact? The answer should inform which conversion event you should use.

You may also want to track events such as newsletter subscriptions or form submissions. These events are important milestones in your customer journey and are useful for tracking specific automation outcomes or business goals.

Step 2: Link a conversion or business goal to your automation

After you create a conversion or business goal, you can link it to your automation in its settings. To do so:

1. From the Automation Overview page, click on the automation you want to track.
2. The automation canvas will load. Click the “<<” button on the right side of the canvas to open automation settings. 
3. Click “Add tracking” for the “Track the progress of this automation” setting. 
   
   
4. Click the radio button for “Add to Business Goal” or “Add Conversion.”
5. Select the business goal or conversion you want to use. 
6. Click “Save.”

The conversion or business goal will appear under your automation’s settings, along with a contact count: 

• Conversion rate: The percentage of contacts who completed the conversion event relative to the number of contacts who entered your automation
• Contact count: The total number of contacts who completed the conversion event while in your automation

You can also use the conversion rate or business goal as a sorting category on the Automations Overview page or choose to add conversion count under the gear icon:

How automation progress tracking works with business goals

In ActiveCampaign, business goals consist of assets (email campaigns, SMS broadcasts, automations, forms) and conversion events. 

If you are using a business goal to track the progress of an automation, then any conversions it uses will also be tracked. This is helpful if you want to use multiple conversions to track your automation, rather than selecting a single one under automation settings.