Skip to Content
TrackingGoals

Goals

Measure conversions and important user actions with Goals.

What Are Goals?

Goals let you define and track the actions that matter most to your organization. When a visitor completes a goal, it’s recorded as a conversion, allowing you to measure success and optimize your marketing efforts.

Common goals for healthcare organizations include:

  • Appointment request form submissions
  • Contact form completions
  • Phone number clicks (click-to-call)
  • Location/directions clicks
  • Patient portal sign-ups
  • Newsletter subscriptions
  • File downloads (care guides, forms, etc.)

Creating a Goal

  1. In Ghost Metrics, navigate to Goals → Manage Goals
  2. Click Add a new Goal
  3. Enter a name for your goal (e.g., “Contact Form Submission”)
  4. Choose when the goal is triggered
  5. Configure the goal settings
  6. Click Add Goal

Creating and editing goals requires write access to the site.

Goal Trigger Types

Visit a Given URL

Trigger a goal when a visitor views a specific page or group of pages.

Best for:

  • Thank you pages after form submissions
  • Confirmation pages
  • Specific content views

Configuration:

  • Enter the URL or pattern to match
  • Choose the match type: contains, is exactly, or matches the expression (regular expression)
  • Matching is case-insensitive unless you enable the case-sensitive option

Example:

  • URL contains /thank-you
  • URL is exactly https://www.example.com/appointment-confirmation

Visit a Given Page Title

Same idea, but matching on the page’s title instead of its URL — handy when URLs are dynamic but titles are stable.

Send an Event

Trigger a goal when a specific event is tracked.

Best for:

  • Button clicks
  • Form submissions (without a thank you page)
  • Video completions
  • Custom interactions

Configuration:

  • Choose which event dimension to match — Event Category, Event Action, or Event Name — and the pattern condition (contains / is exactly / matches the expression)
  • Optionally enable Use Event value as revenue to record the event’s numeric value as the conversion’s revenue

Example:

  • “where the Event Category is exactly Form”

See Event Tracking to learn how to track events.

Download a File

Trigger a goal when a visitor downloads a file.

Best for:

  • PDF downloads
  • Document downloads
  • Resource downloads

Example:

  • Filename contains patient-guide.pdf

Trigger a goal when a visitor clicks an outbound link.

Best for:

  • Referrals to partner sites
  • Portal logins (if hosted externally)
  • Third-party booking systems

Manually (via JavaScript)

Trigger the goal from your own code — see below.

Goal Options

  • Allow multiple conversions per visit — By default a goal converts at most once per visit; enable this if repeat conversions in one session should count (e.g., multiple downloads)
  • Goal revenue — Assign a fixed value per conversion (e.g., $100 per lead), or use an event’s value as dynamic revenue via the event-goal option above

Revenue data appears in your goal reports and helps calculate ROI for marketing campaigns.

Manually Triggering Goals

You can trigger goals directly from JavaScript when the built-in trigger types don’t fit:

// Trigger goal by ID
_paq.push(['trackGoal', 1]);
 
// Trigger goal with custom revenue
_paq.push(['trackGoal', 1, 150]);

Find the goal ID in Goals → Manage Goals (listed next to each goal name).

Viewing Goal Data

Goals → Overview

Summary of all goal conversions over time: total conversions per goal, conversion rates, and revenue (if configured).

Per-Goal Reports

Each goal gets its own entry in the Goals menu, with its conversion evolution plus Goals by dimension breakdowns — conversions split by referrer type, campaign, country, device, and more, along with visits-to-conversion and days-to-conversion distributions.

To compare goal performance across visitor groups, apply a segment with the segment selector at the top of any goal report.

Goal Attribution

When a goal is completed, the conversion is credited to the last non-direct referrer or campaign — the most recent traffic source that wasn’t a direct visit, remembered for up to 6 months.

Example:

  1. Visitor clicks a campaign link and lands on your site
  2. Visitor returns directly two days later
  3. Visitor submits a contact form (triggering a goal)
  4. The conversion is attributed to the campaign — not the direct visit

If you prefer crediting the first referrer instead, this can be switched in the tracking code with _paq.push(['setConversionAttributionFirstReferrer', true]);.

Goals vs Events

Events track that something happened (a button was clicked, a form was submitted).

Goals measure business outcomes (a lead was captured, a conversion occurred).

You can track many events but only create goals for the outcomes you truly care about measuring. Events become goals when they represent meaningful conversions.

Best Practices

Focus on Meaningful Conversions

Don’t create a goal for every possible action. Focus on outcomes that align with business objectives:

  • Lead generation (form submissions)
  • Patient acquisition (appointment requests)
  • Engagement (key content views)

Use Clear Naming

Name goals descriptively so anyone viewing reports understands what they represent:

  • ✅ “Contact Form Submission”
  • ✅ “Appointment Request - Primary Care”
  • ❌ “Goal 1”
  • ❌ “Form”

Test Your Goals

After creating a goal, trigger it yourself and verify it appears in the Goals report (set the date to today). It’s easier to fix configuration issues immediately than debug later.

Review and Clean Up

Periodically review your goals. Remove or update goals that are no longer relevant. Too many inactive goals clutters your reports.

Next Steps

Last updated on
EventsCampaigns (UTM)