Setting goals
Without goals, you know how many people come. With them, you know how many do what you expect of them.
In short
A goal turns a measured event into a tracked conversion. Click the star next to an event in the dashboard, and it appears among your goals from then on, with its conversion rate.
Choosing what counts
A good goal is an action that has value for you: a form submitted, a call started, an order placed, a quote requested. A page view is not one.
The most common mistake is picking an event that is too frequent, a scroll or an outbound click for instance. The counter explodes, the conversion rate loses all meaning, and the figure ends up in a client report that it makes false.
Setting a goal
- 1 Open the dashboard and scroll down to the events.
- 2 Click the star to the left of the event you want.
- 3 It appears immediately in the goals card, with its volume and its rate.
You can also manage the list from Settings, Goals, in particular to rename a goal whose technical name would be obscure in a report.
Reading a conversion rate
An overall rate says almost nothing. The same site can convert at eight per cent from organic search and at one per cent from a social network, and show three per cent on average: the average figure describes neither audience.
So always apply a channel filter before reading a rate. It is the comparison between channels that tells you where to invest.
Read next
- Reading your dashboard The dashboard reads from top to bottom: volume first, then where visitors come from, what they read, and what they do. Every row in a list is clickable and filters the whole page.
- Following a journey with a funnel A funnel counts how many visitors clear each step of a journey, and where they drop out. You define the steps by page or by event, in the order in which they must happen.
- Seeing where your visitors click A heatmap overlays your visitors' clicks and scrolling on a screenshot of the page. It is enabled page by page, on the addresses you choose.
- Excluding your own visits Add your IP addresses to the account exclusions, and your visits stop being counted on all your sites. The exclusion applies at collection, so immediately and with no effect on history.
- Why your figures differ from Google Analytics Pulsar almost always shows more visits than Google Analytics, often ten to forty per cent more. The main cause is blocking: extensions and recent browsers block Google Analytics far more often than Pulsar.
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