Goals Pro

Pageviews tell you people arrived. Goals tell you whether they did anything.

A goal names something worth counting - reaching the thank-you page, firing a signup event, reading a case study to the bottom - and optionally what one is worth. Then every report can tell you not just "500 people read the blog" but "500 people read the blog and 12 of them enquired, which was £600".

Making one

Settings → Plugins → Craft Analytics → Goals & funnels → New goal.

Field	What it's for
Name	What it's called in reports. "Enquiry form", not "goal 3".
Handle	Used in project config and Twig.
Type	See below.
Target	What has to happen. Means something different per type.
Value	What one conversion is worth. Leave at 0 if it isn't about money.
Site	All sites, or just one.

The five types

Page visit - they reached a path. * is a wildcard.

/thank-you              exactly that page
/checkout/*             anything under /checkout/
/guides/*/download      wildcards in the middle work too

Query strings are ignored, so /thank-you matches /thank-you?ref=email. That is almost always what you want: a goal that ignored query strings would miss all your campaign traffic.

Event - a named event fired, from your own JavaScript:

craftAnalytics.event('signup');
craftAnalytics.event('quote-requested', { value: 250 });

Set the target to signup. A page called /signup will not match - the kind matters, not just the name.

Entry visit - they viewed a specific entry. Target is an entry ID. Useful for "did anyone read the thing we spent three weeks on".

Session duration - they stayed at least N seconds. Target is a number of seconds. Needs hybrid or client mode; the server can't know.

Scroll depth - they read at least N% down a page. Target is 25, 50, 75 or 100. Also needs the beacon.

Goals convert once per session

Someone who reloads the thank-you page three times has converted once. Counting three would overstate it, and you would be making decisions on that number.

This is why conversion rate is conversions ÷ sessions, not ÷ pageviews. Dividing by pageviews would understate every rate on your site by however much people browse.

Two things that surprise people

Goals are not retrospective. A goal you add today starts counting today. It cannot be applied to last month, because last month's individual pageviews no longer exist: they were folded into daily totals and the visits themselves discarded. This is the same design that removes the need for a cookie banner.

If you are about to run a campaign, create the goal first.

Deleting a goal deletes its conversions, since they are only meaningful as that goal's conversions. The control panel warns you before it happens.

Goals live in project config

So they deploy like everything else: create them in your dev environment, commit config/project/craftAnalytics/goals/, and they arrive in production on your next project-config/apply. Nobody has to retype them in production.

# config/project/craftAnalytics/goals/enquiry--a1b2c3d4-….yaml
enabled: true
handle: enquiry
name: 'Enquiry form'
siteId: null
sortOrder: 1
target: /thank-you
type: url
value: 50.0

If allowAdminChanges is off in production - as it should be - the goals screen there is read-only and says so, rather than letting you save something that would be silently discarded.

Reading the report

Analytics → Goals lists every goal, including any sitting at zero. A goal at zero usually means its target is wrong, so it is shown rather than hidden.

Where a goal has a value, campaigns get credit for it under your attribution model, so Analytics → Campaigns can tell you that the newsletter drove 12.5 conversions worth £430 - the .5 because a session touched by two campaigns splits its credit rather than being counted twice.

What goals cost to store

Nothing, which is worth explaining. Page, event and entry goals are matched the moment a pageview arrives, and the session records only which goal handles matched - never the pages themselves. Session state is therefore bounded by the number of goals you have defined rather than by how much anyone browses.

Duration and scroll goals are worked out when the session ends, from two numbers already held on it.

Neither creates a per-visitor row or a stored journey.