How to track goals and funnels in WordPress
Traffic reports tell you what happened. Goals and funnels tell you whether it mattered. They are the difference between “four hundred people read the pricing page” and “four hundred people read the pricing page and eleven of them did the thing it exists to make them do”.
They are also where analytics tools get complicated fastest, usually because they are built for ecommerce and everything else is bolted onto that shape.
Events first, because everything rests on them
A goal is almost always a promoted event, so events come first.
An event is a thing that happened which is not a page load: a form submitted, a file downloaded, an outbound link clicked, a button pressed. The temptation is to instrument everything. Resist it. A site with forty tracked events has a reporting problem rather than a measurement advantage, and nobody will look at thirty-five of them.
Pick the handful that correspond to something you actually want to happen. For most sites that is three to five: the contact form, the newsletter signup, the important download, maybe one outbound link that matters commercially.
In Honest Analytics, events are a Pro feature and you define the ones you want rather than getting automatic collection of everything. That is deliberate: automatic everything is how you end up with a tracking surface rather than a report.
Goals turn a count into a rate
A goal is an event or a page promoted to “this is the outcome”. The point is not the label. The point is that you get a rate instead of a raw number.
“Eleven form submissions” is close to meaningless on its own. Eleven out of four hundred sessions is 2.75 per cent, and that is a number you can compare against last month, against a different page, or against what you get after a rewrite. The rate is the figure you were trying to compute in your head anyway.
Two practical notes:
Rate against what? Honest Analytics measures conversion against sessions rather than pageviews, because a session is closer to “someone had a go”. Whatever your tool does, know which, because the two produce very different-looking percentages from the same reality.
A page can be a goal. The simplest goal on most sites is a thank-you page. If reaching
/thanks means the form worked, you do not need event tracking at all.
Funnels show where people give up
A funnel is a sequence of steps, and the report is the drop-off between them. Landing page, pricing page, checkout, done. The value is not the completion rate at the end; it is which step loses the most people, because that is where to spend your effort.
The common mistake is building a funnel that is too long. A six-step funnel on a small site will have a handful of people reaching step six and the numbers will be noise. Three or four steps that lots of people enter tells you more than an elaborate one that almost nobody completes.
The honest limitation
Here is where a cookieless tool has to be straight with you.
Funnels need to recognise the same visitor at each step. Honest Analytics identifies visitors with an anonymous identifier derived from a salt that is overwritten every 24 hours, so funnels work inside the daily window. Somebody who visits the pricing page on Monday and buys on Thursday is not connected across those days.
For most funnels that is fine, because most funnels complete in one sitting. For a considered purchase with a long decision period, it is a real limitation, and anything longer-lived is opt-in and says so before you enable it, because it changes the privacy position.
A tool that offered multi-week funnels without mentioning what that requires would be selling you something you might not have agreed to.
Where to start
If you have never set any of this up, do this and nothing else:
- Pick the one thing you most want visitors to do.
- Make it a goal, using the thank-you page if there is one.
- Look at the rate once a month, not once a day.
One goal you check is worth more than a dozen you configured once. Add the second only when the first has changed a decision.
Goals, funnels and events are in Pro. Support the plugin covers what that includes and why it costs anything.