Site goals - Site Kit by Google

Introduction

Site Goals is a feature that adds a dedicated widget area to the main dashboard based on various site visitor actions. It provides a clear summary of how a site is achieving business objectives, such as driving online store sales or capturing leads, by automatically setting up events and directly surfacing conversion data within the Site Kit dashboard. Depending on the detected events and supported plugins, the feature utilizes specialized widgets divided into key action, visitor engagement, and goal driver sections to help users better understand their performance.

Note that plugin conversion tracking must be enabled in order to use site goals, as it extends the capabilities of integration with supported third party plugins. This is typically enabled by default.

Setup

The Site goals section will appear on the dashboard after the following conditions are met:

Google Analytics is connected within Site Kit
One or more of the supported plugins for plugin conversion tracking is enabled and an add_to_cart, purchase, submit_lead_form, contact or generate_lead event is detected
Plugin conversion tracking is enabled within Site Kit, or events are configured elsewhere for one of the supported plugins

A prompt will appear to let you know the feature is active. Click Show me from the prompt to open a feature walkthrough. The Maybe later option will dismiss the prompt.

The site goals section

The Site goals area of the Site Kit dashboard is broken down into two widgets.

Online store performance

This widget helps you understand how your ecommerce store is performing across various metrics and easy to understand conversions. It reports on any purchase and add_to_cart events. This will appear if you’re using WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads, with a tab appearing for each if both plugins are activated and advanced data breakdown is enabled. Otherwise, the widget will aggregate all purchase and add_to_cart events that are collected by your analytics property before the breakdown is enabled.

The Online store performance section can also appear if you’re using another plugin which uses the same purchase and add_to_cart events. Conversion data for other plugins are aggregated into an Other sources tab.

Key action

The Key action section provides a clear summary of your primary conversion metric, tracking how effectively your site is driving sales. It displays the primary conversion rate as a percentage of your total sessions, along with the total count of those conversions.

Depending on the events detected on your site, the metrics are labeled as follows:

When purchase is detected: The widget shows your Sales Rate and Total Sales.
When purchase is not detected (and add_to_cart is): The widget shows your Add to Cart Rate and Products added to cart.

Sales Rate

This metric provides a holistic view of your store’s performance by:

Reflecting Conversion Efficiency: Unlike raw transaction counts, which can fluctuate based on overall traffic volume, the Sales Rate offers a normalized percentage. This allows you to understand the conversion efficiency of your store regardless of whether traffic is high or low.
Providing Contextual Benchmarking: By expressing sales as a percentage of total sessions, it helps you identify if a dip in sales is due to a drop in total traffic or a fundamental issue with how your site is converting visitors.
Aiding in Optimization: A stable or increasing Sales Rate suggests that your current site content, product pricing, and checkout flow are successfully resonating with your audience. Conversely, a declining rate may indicate friction points in the user journey, such as checkout issues, product misalignment, or changes in traffic quality.

Total Sales

The Total Sales metric provides the aggregate count of successfully completed purchase transactions on your site. This serves as the primary quantitative indicator of your store’s transaction volume, offering a clear view of how many customers are completing the checkout process. By viewing this metric alongside the Sales Rate, you can effectively distinguish between the volume of successful transactions and the conversion efficiency of your traffic.

Add to Cart Rate

The Add to Cart Rate measures the percentage of your total site sessions where visitors interact with your store by adding at least one item to their cart. This metric acts as a valuable indicator of purchase intent, helping you identify visitor interest in your products even before a final transaction is completed.

How are your visitors engaging

The How are your visitors engaging? section provides insights into general visitor behavior and tracks secondary conversion activity. It is structured as follows:

Engagement Rate

This metric is always present, displaying the engagement rate as a percentage of total sessions, accompanied by a trend indicator.

Learn more about the Engagement rate tile for Lead generation performance.

Products added to cart

When both purchase and add_to_cart events are detected, an additional tile for Products added to cart appears in this section. This can be disabled by deselecting this option when selecting metrics.

What’s helping you reach your goals

The What’s helping you reach your goals? section provides critical context for your ecommerce conversion data, identifying the specific factors and other indicators that drive your business outcomes. The metric tiles that appear displayed can be changed. To do so, click Select metrics.

Other sources

If you’re using other ecommerce related plugins that are not officially supported for site goals, the total number of purchases and / or add_to_cart events that are detected for those plugins will be collected and displayed within the Other sources tab. The total purchases capture the total for the selected reporting period, and could include completions from supported plugins before advanced data breakdown was enabled.

Lead generation performance

This widget helps you understand how your site is performing across various metrics and easy-to-understand lead conversions. This will appear if you’re using one or more of the supported plugins. The conversions displayed within this widget relate to lead generation events such as submit_lead_form, contact, and generate_lead.

Key action

The Key action section provides a clear summary of your primary conversion metric, tracking how effectively your site is capturing leads. It displays the Form completion rate as a percentage of your total sessions, along with the total count of those form completions.

How are your visitors engaging

The How are your visitors engaging? section provides insights into general visitor behavior. It is structured as follows:

Engagement Rate

This metric is always present, displaying the engagement rate as a percentage of total sessions. It serves as a primary indicator of visitor quality by measuring the percentage of total sessions where users actively interact with your content. By tracking this alongside your total form completions, you can effectively assess the relationship between general site engagement and actual lead capture; for instance, a high engagement rate paired with low completion rates may signal a need for form optimization. As a dedicated metric, it provides a clear, streamlined view of your site’s overall vitality and the effectiveness of your traffic without the complexity of secondary conversion tiles.

Learn more about the Engagement rate tile for Online store performance.

Unlike the Online store performance widget, the Lead generation performance widget does not feature a secondary conversion metric tile.

What’s helping you reach your goals

The What’s helping you reach your goals? section provides critical context for your conversion data, identifying the specific factors and other indicators that drive your lead generation results. The metric tiles that appear displayed can be changed. To do so, click Select metrics.

Other form completions

If you’re using other form plugins that are not officially supported for site goals, the total number of submissions that are detected for these forms will be collected and displayed within an Other form completions tab. The total completions capture the total for the selected reporting period, and could include completions from supported plugins before advanced data breakdown was enabled.

Select your metrics

You can customize the metrics that are displayed to suit your reporting needs. To do so, click on the Select metrics link, indicated by a pencil icon for either the Online store performance or Lead generation performance widgets. You can have up to 6 active metric tiles visible at one time. The options available are listed below.

Goal	Goal Driver	Panel Description
Online Store	Top traffic channels driving sales	Where do most of your buyers come from?
	Top traffic channels by sales rate	Which channels have the highest percentage of buyers?
	Sales by visitor type	Which types of visitors are most likely to buy?
	Top pages driving sales	Which pages bring in the most sales?
	Sales by cities	Which cities bring in the most buyers?
	Sales by countries	Which countries bring in the most buyers?
	Top authors driving sales	Whose content is best at converting buyers?
	Sales by device type	Are people buying more on mobile or desktop?
Lead Generation	Top traffic channels by total form completions	Where do most of your leads come from?
	Top traffic channels by form completion rate	Which channels are most efficient at capturing leads?
	Leads by visitor type	Which types of visitors are most likely to reach out?
	Top pages driving leads	Which pages get people to take action?
	Leads by cities	Which cities are people reaching out from?
	Leads by countries	Which countries are people reaching out from?
	Top authors driving leads	Whose content is best at converting readers?
	Leads by device type	What devices do people use when they take action?

For the Online store performance widget, the Products added to cart metric can be activated or deactivated anytime, and this appears by default within the How are your visitors engaging? section, without counting towards your 6 metrics limit.

Advanced data breakdown

If using more than one supported online store performance plugin, or more than one supported lead generation performance plugin, you can gain granular visibility into your site’s performance by isolating exactly what is driving your business outcomes. By enabling this setting, your dashboard will organize data into a detailed tabbed view, sorting data by plugin, allowing you to compare how different plugins contribute to your goals. This allows you to easily identify your top-performing tools and forms so you can optimize your strategy with precision.

This feature requires the googlesitekit_event_provider and the googlesitekit_form_id custom dimensions. Site Kit creates these for you when enabled.

Enable advanced data breakdown

To enable a breakdown when Site Kit detects that you’re using a more than one supported plugin for either the Online store performance section or the Lead generation performance widget areas, navigate to Site Kit > Settings > Connected Services > Analytics > Edit and enable the Advanced data breakdowns option.

Once enabled, data collection for your plugin sources and form names begins. Historical data for these granular breakdowns is not available, so it may take some time for these reports to populate as new data is gathered.

Gathering breakdown data

Once advanced data breakdown is enabled, it needs a little time to collect new traffic and conversion data to fill in those specific categories (like which plugin or form caused the event). During this waiting period, you’ll continue to see your normal, overall performance totals without a breakdown.

Data breakdown errors

Analytics update failed

This can appear if Site Kit is unable to create any of the required custom dimensions (googlesitekit_post_date, googlesitekit_post_author,googlesitekit_post_categories, googlesitekit_post_type, googlesitekit_event_provider or googlesitekit_form_id ) for a number of reasons.

Event breakdown setup failed

This can appear if Site Kit is unable to create the required googlesitekit_event_provider custom dimension for Advanced data breakdown. You can ask any administrator who may have the required role in Analytics to enable this feature, they can add the required googlesitekit_event_provider to the connected Analytics property manually, or they can change your role in Analytics to an Editor or Administrator so you can add custom dimensions. If your Analytics role was changed, you can click on the Retry option to try once more.

Individual form tracking setup failed

This can appear if Site Kit is unable to create the required custom dimension for Advanced data breakdown. To resolve this, you can ask any editor or administrator of the connected Analytics property to add the required googlesitekit_form_id to the connected Analytics property manually, or they can change your role in Analytics to an Editor or Administrator so you can add custom dimensions. Once your Analytics role is changed, you can click on the Retry option.

Sales plugin breakdown setup failed

Supported plugins

The current list of supported third party plugins for site goals tracking with Site Kit are:

Category	Plugin
Online store performance	Easy Digital Downloads WooCommerce
Lead generation performance	Contact Form 7 MailChimp Ninja Forms OptinMonster Popup Maker WPForms

Support for other plugins may come for future releases.