Introduction to goal conversions and behavior analytics
Goals allow you to track actions that you want your visitors to take on your site. Actions such as signing up to a newsletter, clicking on a "Download" button, registering for a trial account, purchasing a product, clicking on an external link, downloading a file or completing a checkout form of an ecommerce store.
A goal can be a custom event or a pageview.
By setting up custom events or pageviews as goals, you can track the number of conversions, conversion rate, referrer sources and entry pages that are driving conversions and the top pages that people convert on. You can also follow the visitor journey using funnels.
After setting up a goal, it will show up in the "Goal Conversions" section of your dashboard as soon as we record the first conversion. Then you can click on the particular goal to filter your dashboard by it and get all the insights on the traffic that has converted on that specific goal.
There are several types of behavior analytics tools in Plausible Analytics:
| Goal | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Pageview goals | Measure how many people visit a specific page or section of your site. Use these to track the "thank you" page or the order confirmation page. Since pageviews are collected automatically, you don’t need to change your website’s code to measure pageview goals. This makes them the easiest way to start tracking conversions on your site |
| Custom event goals | Measure button clicks, purchases, subscriptions, form completions, clicks on video or audio elements and pretty much any other action that you wish (you can also send custom dimensions alongside custom events for extra insights) |
| Funnel analysis | Follow the visitor journey from a landing page to a conversion in order to uncover possible issues, optimize your site and increase the conversion rate |
| Ecommerce revenue tracking | Assign dynamic monetary values to goals and custom events to track revenue attribution |
| Custom properties | Send custom data with pageviews and custom events to create custom metrics |
| Outbound link clicks | Automatically measure clicks on external links |
| File downloads | Automatically track when a visitor clicks a link leading to a file |
| 404 error pages | Automatically measure page not found errors |
| Pretty URLs clicks | Automatically track clicks on cloaked affiliate links and other pretty URLs |