Goals & conversions

Goals let you define the actions that matter on your site and measure how
often visitors complete them. Open from Behaviour → Goals. (This is a Pro feature.)

Headline cards

• Active Goals — how many goals you have defined.
• Total Conversions — completions across all goals in the period.
• Top Goal — your most-completed goal.

Defined Goals table

Each goal you've created shows:

• Name and Type (e.g. an Event goal).
• Match Criteria — what triggers it (a tracked event such as play,
  download, outbound, affiliate, or a page/URL pattern).
• Conversions and Unique converters.
• Conv. Rate — conversions relative to sessions.
• Status (Active / Paused) with Edit · Delete · Pause actions.

Creating a goal

Use the goal form on this screen to add one — give it a name, choose the trigger
(an event type or a page match), and save. New conversions are detected
automatically from that point.

Narrowing an event goal to one specific link

An event goal normally fires on any event of that type — every download,
every outbound click. The optional Target contains box narrows it to a
single link: it's matched against the event's target, which for a link click is
the full URL, query string included.

That makes goals the neatest way to measure a link the plugin can't recognise on
its own — the common case being an affiliate link that isn't cloaked and isn't
managed by an affiliate plugin, just an ordinary URL with your affiliate ID
appended:

https://merchant.example.com/product?a_aid=YOUR-AFFILIATE-ID

Because it points at another domain, GreenOrb Statistics records that click as an
outbound event (you'll find it under Content → Outbound links). It is not
an "affiliate" event — that label is reserved for cloaked, same-domain links, and
it's matched on the URL path only, so a ?a_aid=… query string never triggers it.

To count those clicks as conversions:

Every click on that link now counts as a conversion — and, because it's a goal,
you also get the conversion paths, so you can see which traffic sources
actually drive your affiliate clicks rather than just how many there were.

Two things worth knowing:

• The match is a substring, so if you use the same affiliate ID across
  several merchants, one goal captures them all. To separate them, match on more
  of the URL (for example merchant.example.com/product?a_aid=).
• It's precise on both axes: a download carrying the same ID won't convert, and
  neither will an outbound click with a different ID.

The same technique works for anything you can identify in a URL — a specific
outbound partner, one download among many, a particular tracked click.

Top Conversion Paths

Below the table, this shows the sequence of marketing channels visitors passed
through before converting (consecutive repeats collapsed) — the whole multi-touch
journey, not just first or last touch — with conversions and average touches per
path. There's also a Landing-page conversion view showing which entry pages
turn visits into goals.

How a path is built

• Every session knows its channel. Each session records how it arrived and is
  mapped to one channel, in priority order: utm_medium=email/newsletter →
  Email; utm_medium=cpc/ppc/paid → Paid; no referrer → Direct;
  otherwise the referrer's classified type → Organic Search / Social / AI /
  Referral. (A Google ad click tagged cpc counts as Paid, not Organic
  Search.)
• The visitor's pseudonymous signature is the thread. When a goal completes,
  every session by that same signature in the 30 days before the conversion
  is lined up in start order — that ordered list of channels is the path.
• Consecutive repeats collapse. Google, Google, Direct, Newsletter becomes
  Organic Search → Direct → Email. One path is recorded per conversion, and
  identical paths are grouped with a count.

So: someone finds you on Google on Monday, comes back by typing your address on
Wednesday, and converts from a newsletter link on Friday → one conversion lands
on Organic Search → Direct → Email, with three touches.

Reading the table

• A row containing a "→" is multi-channel by definition — an arrow can only
  appear when successive sessions arrived by different channels.
• Avg Touches counts channel steps, not visits — five Google visits before
  converting is one touch, because revisiting the same channel isn't a
  multi-channel journey.
• The summary line above the table splits conversions into single-touch vs
  multi-touch — the quickest answer to "do my visitors use multiple channels
  at all?"

Two things to know. Paths are only as good as your tagging — an untagged
newsletter link shows up as Direct or Referral rather than Email, so disciplined
UTMs make this table sharper. And for cookieless visitors the pseudonymous
signature rotates monthly, so a journey that crosses a month boundary loses its
earlier touches; consented (cookie) visitors keep the full 30-day lookback.

Tips

• For a music site, a play or download goal turns engagement into a measurable
  conversion.
• Pair Goals with Journeys to see the routes that lead to
  conversions, and with Referrers to see which channels convert
  best.

Next: Forms →