Wat is Goal?

A goal is an action you tell your analytics tool to count as a success: reaching a confirmation page, triggering a signup event, clicking a download link. Defining goals is what turns a traffic tool into a measurement tool, because every source, page, and segment can then be judged by the conversions it produces instead of the sessions it delivers.

Goals are typically defined either as a pageview of a specific URL (the /thank-you pattern) or as a custom event. URL goals are easy but fragile: if anyone can bookmark or reload the thank-you page, you double-count, and if the flow changes URLs the goal silently breaks. Event-based goals fire on the action itself and are the sturdier choice. Keep the list short, with a few primary goals tied to revenue and a few micro conversions that signal progress, and check periodically that they still fire, since a silently broken goal is worse than none.

Once goals exist, conversion rate and funnels follow naturally from them.