Goals

A goal is an action that matters to you: a signup, a purchase link followed, a thank-you page reached. Once it is a goal, AnalyticsTrend counts how often it happens and how many visitors do it, and shows which sources, pages, countries and devices convert best.

A project can have up to 20 goals. Members with Write or Admin define them on the project's Goals page, under New goal; anyone who can read the project sees them.

The three kinds

A goal counts one of these:

Kind	Counts	Example
An event	every event with that name	newsletter_signup
An event with one property	that event, only when one property has one value	affiliate_click where store is amazon
A page, for a website	page views of that page, or of every page under it	/thank-you, or /recipes/*

Examples

A signup

Your site sends newsletter_signup when the form is submitted (see tracking events):

analytics.track("newsletter_signup", { placement: "footer" });

On Goals, fill in the New goal form:

• Name: Newsletter signup
• Counts: An event
• Event name: newsletter_signup

Leave Property and Value empty, so every signup counts, wherever the form was.

A purchase link to one store

A recipe site links to several stores and wants Amazon's alone. It sends:

analytics.track("affiliate_click", { store: "amazon" });

The goal is the event with one property:

• Name: Amazon click
• Counts: An event
• Event name: affiliate_click
• Property: store, Value: amazon

The value is matched exactly, as text, so amazon does not match Amazon, and a number sent as 7 matches the value 7.

A link to another site, without writing code

With link events turned on, every link followed to another site sends outbound_click with the site's hostname as $host. A goal can match it:

• Event name: outbound_click
• Property: $host, Value: www.amazon.ca

$host and $file, from file_download, are the only properties of AnalyticsTrend's own that a goal can match. So a download of one file is the event file_download with $file set to its name, such as price-list.pdf.

A page reached

A website's goal can be a page, counted from its page views:

• Name: Contact form sent
• Counts: A page
• Page: /thank-you

End the page with * to count every page under it: /recipes/* counts /recipes/lasagna and /recipes/soup/winter, but not /recipes itself. A * can only come last.

A page goal needs page views. The script tag sends them, and the package does with pageViews: "history"; see installing on a website.

Reading a goal

Each goal shows:

• Conversions: the visitors' days on which it happened. Someone who signs up twice in a day is one conversion; on two different days, two.
• Completions: every time it happened.
• Conversion rate: conversions over all visitors' days in the range.
• Change against the previous period of the same length.

Click a goal to see its conversions by source, or, for an extension, by place.

A goal on every breakdown

Sources, Referrals, Entry pages, Locations and Devices each have a Goal choice above the table. Choose one, and two columns join the table: its conversions, and the conversion rate of each row. That is how to answer "which campaign brought people who signed up", rather than only "which brought the most people".

When a goal changes

A new goal is counted from the last 90 days of events, the only events still kept, and the page says "Counting the last 90 days…" until that is done. From then on it is counted every hour, for as long as it exists.

Changing what a goal counts starts its history again from the last 90 days. Renaming it does not. Deleting it deletes its history too. A goal that is a step in a funnel cannot be deleted until the funnel no longer uses it.

Then put goals in order

Two to five goals in the order people reach them make a funnel: how many visitors went from one to the next.