Goals, funnels and conversions

A goal is your definition of a win - a page reached, an event fired, a page scrolled far enough. A funnel is two to eight of those goals in order, with the drop-off between each step.

Both live in the Behavior card at the bottom of the dashboard, and both are configured in site settings or through the API.

Three kinds of goal

Page goals match a path, with wildcards - /thanks, or /docs/*. Up to 2,000 characters of pattern, which is more than anyone has ever needed.

Event goals match a custom event name you send from your own code: feasible('Signup'). Up to 300 characters.

Scroll goals fire when a visit’s deepest engagement ping reaches a percentage you pick, and can be narrowed to a page pattern. That’s how you count “read the article” rather than “opened the article”.

Any goal can carry up to three property constraints, so “Signup” and “Signup where plan is scale” are two different wins.

Four goals are created with every new site, before you configure anything: 404 pages, outbound link clicks, file downloads and form submissions. The tracking script emits three of those on its own, with no flag to set - an outbound click is counted without ever calling preventDefault, so the link still behaves like a link, and a middle-click counts too. The 404 goal is the exception: it’s created for you, but the base script doesn’t detect 404s. That one comes from the WordPress plugin.

Two funnel modes

A funnel is 2 to 8 steps, each step a goal you already defined. Two ways to match them, and the difference matters more than it looks:

Sequential - the steps happen in order, and unrelated activity in between is fine. Somebody who views the pricing page, wanders off to the blog, then signs up still completed the funnel. This is what you want almost always.

Strict - the steps must be consecutive events, with nothing in between. Use it when the detour is the finding: a checkout where anyone who bounces to the help center has, for your purposes, failed.

The report is numbered horizontal bars, one per step, each showing visitors, the conversion rate to that point, and how many dropped. The header tells you which matching mode is running and what share completed the whole thing, so nobody reads a strict funnel as though it were sequential.

Page paths

A funnel tests a route you already suspect. The Explore tab does the opposite: pick any page, custom event or goal, and it shows what happened immediately before or after it across your traffic - 10 steps by default, up to 20, with explicit (entry) and (exit) rows so a journey that started or ended there is visible rather than absent.

Click a step and the journey continues from there, building a breadcrumb trail. You can group by exact path or by directory, which is the difference between seeing 400 blog posts and seeing /blog.

Goals start today

Because we’d rather have one rule that’s true than a rule that works for a third of the cases.

A page goal could be recomputed from pageviews you already stored. An event goal can’t - if your code never sent Signup, there’s nothing to find. A scroll goal can’t either, past the point where engagement pings have been folded into roll-ups. Backfilling the one kind that’s cheap would mean page goals quietly behave differently from the other two, and you’d learn that at the worst possible moment, from a number you’d already put in a deck.

So all three behave the same way, and the report says so on its face: it prints the date the goal became measurable instead of drawing a flat line back to the beginning of time and letting you draw your own wrong conclusion.

The practical consequence: set your goals when you install. It takes two minutes, and it’s the one piece of setup that can’t be done later.

Goals that carry money get their own treatment - see revenue tracking. To split a goal by something only your app knows, see custom properties. Full reference in the goals and funnels docs.