My conversion numbers looked extraordinary for the first quarter I ran my online workshop series. Registrations appeared to be coming in at nearly double what I expected. I told a few colleagues. I felt pleased with myself.
Then one of the participants mentioned she had reloaded the confirmation page three times because she was not sure her registration had gone through. That comment sat with me for a day before I went back and looked more carefully at the data.
What the goal setup was actually counting
In Google Analytics, I had set the goal to trigger on any visit to the thank-you page URL. No session limit. No deduplication. Every page refresh counted as a fresh conversion.
So a single person who refreshed that page four times appeared in my reports as four registrations. My actual registration count was closer to 40 percent of what I had been celebrating.
The fix was straightforward, the embarrassment was not
Switching to a session-scoped goal rather than a hit-scoped one corrected the problem immediately. I also added a redirect after the confirmation page so refreshing it no longer reloaded the same URL.
What I could not fix was the three months of decisions I had already made based on inflated numbers. I had allocated more budget to the channels that appeared to be driving the most registrations, and those allocations were based on fiction.
Auditing your goal configuration is not a one-time setup task. I now check mine at the start of each new campaign period, before I look at any performance numbers. Reading the results before verifying the measurement is a habit worth breaking early.