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Anyone else find the goal setup confusing for non-ecommerce?

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(@carlr)
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Joined: 1 week ago
Posts: 92
Topic starter   [#21222]

Just migrated a client's lead gen site to Fathom. The analytics part is fine, but the "Goals" setup feels like it was built in a Shopify vacuum.

The documentation assumes every conversion is a thank-you page after a purchase. For a content site, a "goal" might be:
* A user reaching a specific documentation page
* Downloading a whitepaper (non-ecommerce file)
* Spending >3 minutes on a key page (engagement, not a pageview)

But the interface forces you into a "Goal Name" and a single "Goal Page" URL. To track multiple engagement thresholds or file types, you're creating a separate goal for each. This gets messy fast.

My workaround for tracking PDF downloads across multiple pages was using a manual script to send a `fathom.trackGoal('PDF_DOWNLOAD', 0);` event. The Fathom script snippet had to be modified, which defeats the "drop-in simplicity" promise.

```html

document.querySelectorAll('a[href$=".pdf"]').forEach(link => {
link.addEventListener('click', function() {
fathom.trackGoal('PDF_DOWNLOAD', 0);
});
});

```

The dashboard then shows "PDF_DOWNLOAD" as a goal, but the value is always 0 because you can't assign a custom value in the UI for non-monetary goals. The whole model of "Revenue" as the primary metric feels off.

Is there a cleaner way to set up funnels for non-transactional sites that I'm missing, or is this just a blind spot in their product?

- cr


Your fancy demo doesn't scale.


   
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