How to set goals for a website: one action, three measures, a monthly check
Decide the one thing you most want a visitor to do (call, book, enquire, buy, sign up), then pick two or three numbers that show whether it's happening, and look at them on the same day each month. A short list you check beats a dashboard you never open. Everything else on the site should support that one action.
Start with the business goal, not the website
"Get more traffic" isn't a goal; it's a means. Begin with what the business needs in the next six to twelve months: more bookings on weekday mornings, fewer phone calls asking the same questions, a waiting list for a product launch, enquiries from larger clients. The website goal is the part of that the site can deliver.
Pick one primary action
Every site can do many things, but one should come first, because it decides what goes at the top of the home page, which button gets the action colour and what the navigation leads to.
| Site | Primary action | Supporting actions |
|---|---|---|
| Salon, clinic, studio | Book an appointment | Read prices, check opening hours |
| Trades and services | Send an enquiry or call | See past work, read reviews |
| Shop or maker | Buy through the checkout link | Join the newsletter |
| Launch or waitlist | Sign up | Share the page |
| Café or restaurant | Visit, using the address and hours | Read the menu |
| Freelancer or consultant | Book a call | Look at case studies |
Choose two or three measures
A measure is only useful if you can see it without effort and it would change what you do. For a small site, the useful ones are usually counts you already have:
- Completed actions: enquiries, bookings, sign-ups or sales per month. This is the main measure.
- Visits by source: how many people arrived from search, social, AI assistants, other sites or directly. It tells you where attention comes from.
- Conversion, roughly: completed actions divided by visits. Treat it as a direction, not a precise figure.
- One quality check: how many enquiries were the right kind of customer, from your own notes.
Page views on their own are a weak goal: a page can get plenty of visits and no enquiries. Use them to explain changes in the main measure, not as the measure.
Set it up in five steps
- Write the goal as one sentence: "Twelve weekday-morning bookings a month from the website by March." Use your own past numbers to pick a figure you could plausibly reach.
- Make the primary action unmissable: one main button, worded as the action, repeated at the end of long pages. See how to write a call to action.
- Make sure each completed action is recorded somewhere you'll see it: form submissions in one place, bookings in one place, sales at the payment provider.
- Pick a fixed day each month and write the three numbers in a sheet. Two minutes, no more.
- After three months, change one thing on the site based on the pattern, such as the headline, the prices or the form, and see whether the main measure moves.
Measuring with Anticode
Each published Anticode site counts page views per day, by source, in the dashboard, without cookies. Sources include referrals from AI assistants, and AI and search crawlers are counted separately so they don't inflate your visitor numbers. Form submissions (contact, booking and newsletter) are saved in the project and can be emailed to you, so the completed-actions count is in one place. Sales through a payment link are counted at your payment provider.
The Intelligence page shows visits since publish and answers questions only from cited metrics; it makes forecasts only after 14 days of data. That's enough for a monthly check without adding a separate analytics tool. Tracking website traffic without cookies explains how that kind of counting works.
Mistakes to avoid
- Too many goals. Five equal priorities produce a home page with five equal buttons.
- Measures you can't see. If a number needs an export and a formula, you won't check it.
- Judging after a week. Small sites have small numbers; month-to-month changes are often noise. Look for patterns over a quarter.
- Changing everything at once. If the headline, prices and layout all change in one go, you won't know which helped.
Questions people ask
How many goals should a website have?
One primary action and, at most, one or two supporting ones. More than that and the pages stop pointing anywhere in particular.
What is a good conversion rate for a small business site?
It varies too much by trade, price and traffic source to give one figure. Compare your site with its own past months instead.
How do I know if my website is working?
If the main measure, such as enquiries or bookings, is steady or rising and they're the right kind of customer, it's working. Visits alone can't tell you.