Goals
First of all, you need to understand the concept of a Goal. A Goal is something that you want to track that the already existing analytics are not tracking—anything from a button click, downloads, specific page view, like a thank-you page after a checkout...etc.
Pageview Goal
A Pageview Goal is easy to set up. The conversion of the Goal occurs when a visitor views the specified page.
These are userful when tracking marketing campaigns. Create a Goal for each marketing campaign and track their results separately.
Custom Goal
Custom Goals will require some extra code implemented to the tracked website, which is specified when you create a new Goal from the dashboard.
A Custom Goal is mainly used for when you want to track a specific event that happens on your website, which can't be tracked with the Pageview method.
Some examples of where Custom Goals will shine are:
- Tracking clicks on external links
- Tracking more advanced form submissions
- Tracking clicks on specific parts of your pages
Here is what a javascript snippet would look like for Goal tracking:
analytics.goal('my-goal');
When this code is triggered on the specified page, the Goal conversion is tracked.