Goals and funnels are two different lenses on conversion. Both live in the Journeys tab of your website (Pro plan and above), share the same period selector, and are calculated from the page views and events you already collect. But they answer different questions.
Goals: "did it happen?"
A goal counts the visits in which something you care about happens. Each visit counts at most once per goal. Examples:
- A visit reached
/thank-you(A page visit). - A visitor clicked a link to your booking page (A click on a link).
- Your site sent a
purchaseevent (An event from your code). - A visitor clicked the "Start free trial" button (A click on a button or element).
A goal gives you one main number: the conversion rate. Out of all visits in the selected period, how many completed it? For example, 40 of 1,000 visits is 4%.
Use goals when you want to measure whether something happened, follow it over time, and see where conversions come from (by source, device, country, page and entry page).
Funnels: "where did people drop off?"
A funnel is a sequence of 2 to 10 steps that visitors take in a set order. Each step is a page, an event or one of your existing goals.
A funnel gives you a conversion rate per step and, crucially, a drop-off number between the steps. If 100 visits reached /pricing, 60 clicked "Subscribe", but only 20 made it to /thank-you, the funnel's ribbon chart makes the drop from 60 to 20 impossible to miss. Click the chart to open the step list, then click See why between two steps to see where those visitors went instead and who stops most often.
Use funnels when you want to find the largest drop in a multi-step flow.
When to start with a goal
- You're measuring a single action (sign-up, purchase, contact form submission).
- You want to compare conversion rates across acquisition channels.
- You want to follow one number over time and share a link to it with your team.
When to upgrade to a funnel
- The goal exists already, but you want to know why people aren't completing it.
- The flow is naturally multi-step (cart, checkout, confirmation).
- You want to test a UX change at a specific step and see whether the drop-off shrinks.
How they connect
You can use a goal as a step inside a funnel. A common pattern:
- Create the goal: "User signed up" (event =
signup). - Build a funnel:
/landing→/pricing→/signup→ goal "User signed up". The quickest way is to open the goal's details and click Build a funnel to this goal. - The goal still appears on its own in the Goals sub-tab; the funnel adds the drop-off context.
A goal that is a step in a funnel cannot be deleted until you remove it from that funnel.