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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. Select the goal type
  5. Configure the goal settings
  6. Click Add Goal

Goal Types

Visit a Page URL

Trigger a goal when a visitor views a specific page.

Best for:

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

Configuration:

  • Enter the URL or URL pattern to match
  • Choose match type: “Contains”, “Exactly”, or “Regex”

Example:

  • URL contains /thank-you
  • URL exactly matches /appointment-confirmation

Trigger 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:

  • Specify the Event Category, Action, and/or Name to match
  • Leave fields blank to match any value

Example:

  • Category: “Form”, Action: “Submit”, Name: “Contact 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

Configuration:

  • Specify the filename or pattern to match

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

Configuration:

  • Specify the external URL or pattern

Goal Revenue

You can assign a revenue value to goals to measure their monetary impact.

How to set revenue:

  • Enter a fixed value when creating the goal (e.g., $100 per lead)
  • Or track dynamic revenue with events (for variable values)

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

Manually Triggering Goals

You can trigger goals directly from JavaScript when other goal types don’t fit your needs:

// Trigger goal by ID
_mtm.push({
  'event': 'trackGoal',
  'goalId': 1
});
 
// Trigger goal with custom revenue
_mtm.push({
  'event': 'trackGoal',
  'goalId': 1,
  'revenue': 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. See:

  • Total conversions per goal
  • Conversion rate
  • Revenue (if configured)

Goals → Goals by Page URL

Which pages drive the most conversions. Useful for identifying high-performing landing pages.

Goals → Goal Tracking by Segment

Compare goal performance across different visitor segments.

Goal Attribution

When a goal is completed, Ghost Metrics attributes it to the traffic source that brought the visitor to your site.

Example:

  1. Visitor clicks a Google ad and lands on your site
  2. Visitor browses several pages
  3. Visitor submits a contact form (triggering a goal)
  4. The conversion is attributed to the Google Ads campaign

This allows you to see which marketing channels and campaigns drive the most conversions.

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. 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
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