What are the four automatic goals?

Every new site gets four goals for free, created the moment you add it.

• Outbound Link: Click - somebody clicked a link to another domain. Carries the destination as a url property, so you can see where your traffic goes.
• File Download - a PDF, a zip, an installer. Recognized by extension.
• Form: Submission - any form submitted on the page.
• 404 - a page-not-found.

The first three need nothing from you. The script watches for them automatically: outbound clicks including middle-clicks, downloads by file type, and form submissions. It never cancels the click or the submit, so nothing about your site’s behavior changes.

They do send real custom events, so they count toward the monthly million like anything else you fire. On most sites that’s a rounding error. On a link directory it isn’t, so it’s worth knowing before you look at the number.

The 404 goal is the exception, and it’s worth being straight about. The base script doesn’t detect a 404 - it can’t, because a 404 page is just a page as far as the browser is concerned. The goal exists and will count, but something has to send it. The WordPress plugin does this for you. Anywhere else, fire it yourself from your error template:

feasible('404')

Because these goals are created with the site, they’ve been counting since day one - which is why they have a full history even though goals never backfill.

You can rename them, delete them, or add property constraints, same as any goal. Two small things: you can force a link to count as a download by putting download on the <a>, and you can replace the recognized extension list with data-file-types on the script tag.

Conversions show up in the Goals tab of the Behavior card. Click a row to filter the whole dashboard by it.