Goals and funnels

Goals count the actions that matter on your site, such as a signup, a booked demo or a purchase. Funnels show how far people get through a series of steps and where they drop out. Together they tell you which traffic turns into customers, not just how much of it there is.

Goals on the Analytics page

Any event your site sends shows up in the Goals card in the Conversions section, ranked by how many visitors completed it. CR is that number as a share of everyone who visited in the period. When a goal carries money, a Revenue column appears as well: any event that carries revenue counts as a sale, and purchase is the standard name for one (see Track revenue and costs).

• Click a goal to open its Journey: the visitors who completed it, most recent first, and how they got there.
• Click the filter icon next to a goal to narrow the whole page to visitors who completed it.
• Click Add goal to see the ways to start tracking one.

Start tracking a goal

Goals come from your site, so the first step is sending the event. Click Add goal and pick How you want to track it:

The quickest way is an attribute on the element people click:

<button data-phq-goal="cta_clicked">Start free trial</button>

Goal names use lower case letters, numbers, _, - and :, up to 64 characters. Anything else is folded into that shape, so Signed Up! and signed_up count as one goal. All the options are explained in Track events and identify visitors.

Business goals: what counts as success

Business goals tell ProjectHQ which of those events are real outcomes for your business and how to count them. They drive the analytics numbers on your project Dashboard and in the projects list.

1. Open Analytics settings → Goals.
2. Click Add goal (or Edit goals once you have some).
3. Pick the kind of outcome: Sales, Contacts, Bookings or Another goal.
4. Give it a Goal name.
5. Under Which action confirms this outcome?, choose the event. You can pick an event ProjectHQ has already received, or type a new name and connect it on your site afterwards.
6. Click Save goals.

The star marks your Main goal, which leads the report. Use Make main goal to change it. The Project defaults section sets the default currency.

Advanced settings

Open Advanced settings when a goal needs more than "count everyone who did this":

• Only include: click Add condition to count only events with a certain property, for example plan is pro.
• Count: People (each person once in the period), Every action, or Unique items (each order or contact once).
• Value: Count only, Recorded revenue, Estimated value per conversion, or Estimated value from an event field. Estimated values are shown separately from revenue.
• Pages this goal measures: credit conversions to visits of chosen pages in the same session. Pick a page, or add a path or group such as /pricing or /blog/*.
• Apply rule changes: Recalculate all recorded events, or New events only; keep earlier rules.

Check that it works

After saving, complete the action on your site yourself. Under Check your first outcome, click Check again until it reports matching conversions. Keep in mind that a test is a real recorded conversion. Connect an event takes you to the installation or revenue settings, and Help connecting a custom website event shows the line of code to add.

To choose which numbers the Dashboard shows, open Customize dashboard metrics, pick up to five, put them in order and click Save metrics. The projects list previews the first two.

Funnels

A funnel is a path you expect people to take, such as reading a blog post, visiting pricing and starting a trial. The Funnels card shows how many people reached each step, the share of everyone who started, and how many were lost between steps. The biggest drop is highlighted. Each tab is one funnel. Hover over a step to see its top sources and countries.

Build a funnel

1. Open Analytics settings → Funnels and click New funnel. (From the Analytics page, the icon in the corner of the Funnels card takes you there.)
2. Give it a Name.
3. For each step, choose Page (and whether the path is exactly, starts with or contains what you type) or Goal (and pick the goal). Add a label to show on the chart if you like.
4. Click Add step until you have the whole path. A funnel needs at least two steps.
5. Choose the Completion window: how long someone has to get from the first step to the last — 1 hour, 1 day, 3 days or 7 days.
6. Click Check steps to see how many visitors each step matches, then Save funnel.

Steps count in order: someone counts at a step only if they reached every step before it within the window. The funnel list shows each funnel's window the same way, for example "within 7 days".

In the funnel list, click the star to make a funnel your main funnel. The Visitors list on the Analytics page then shows how far each person got through it. The pencil edits a funnel, and the trash icon deletes it. Deleting a funnel doesn't delete any visits; only this way of reading them goes away.