Pageviews tell you people showed up. They don't tell you if anyone did the thing you built the page for. That's what goals are for, and they're now in every Supapulse site, in a new Goals tab.
A goal is one of two things
- A page visit, like
/pricingor/thank-you. You can use*as a wildcard, so/blog/*matches every post. - A custom event, the name you send with
supapulse.event(), likesignup.
Automatic events count too. If you've turned on outbound clicks, downloads or form tracking, File Download or Form: Submission can be a goal without writing a line of code.
For each goal you get four numbers for the date range you're looking at:
- Visitors: how many people reached it at least once.
- Conversions: every time it happened, repeats included.
- Rate: those visitors as a share of everyone who visited.
- Revenue: what the visitors who reached it went on to pay, if you track revenue.
That last one is my favorite. "12% of visitors read the pricing page" is nice. "The visitors who read the pricing page brought in most of this month's revenue" is a lot more useful when you're deciding what to work on.
Your top 5 goals also show up on the Analytics tab, so you see them without switching tabs.
Funnels show where people stop
A goal answers "did they get there?". A funnel answers "where did they stop on the way?".
A funnel is 2 to 8 steps in order, and you can mix pages and events. Say:
/(the home page)/pricingsignup(an event)checkout_complete(an event)
For every step you see how many visitors made it, the conversion from the step before and from the first step, how many dropped off, and the revenue from the people who reached it. The step with the big drop is usually where your next week of work should go 😅
Order matters. Someone who opens /pricing and only later visits / counts for the first step, but not the second. They have to reach each step at or after the one before.
Works on data you already have
Goals and funnels read the pageviews and events Supapulse already records. Nothing to install, and nothing to tag in advance.
It also means a goal you add today counts last month's visits too. Add a funnel for a page you launched three weeks ago and you see the full three weeks right away, not an empty chart that fills up from today.
Visitors, not sessions
Funnels follow visitors, not sessions. Supapulse starts a new session on every full page load, so on a site without client-side navigation a session never spans more than one page. Following the visitor is what lets a funnel go from the home page to checkout.
A visitor here is the same salted hash we use everywhere else, with no cookies involved. If you want the details, how Supapulse counts visitors without cookies covers it, including what it gets wrong on purpose.
The small print
- 25 goals and 10 funnels per site.
- Event names are case sensitive, so
Signupandsignupare different goals. - Owners, admins and members can create and edit goals. Viewers can see them.
- Goals and funnels are in the Stats API and the MCP server too. Ask your agent "where do people drop off in the signup funnel?" and it'll go look.
The goals and funnels docs have every detail. And if you're wondering which steps to put in your funnel in the first place, that's exactly what the next feature is for. More on that in a few days 😉