Visitor counts tell you traffic is happening. They don't tell you whether it's working. Goals and funnels are the two pieces that turn raw traffic into an answer to "are people actually doing the thing I want them to do, and if not, where do they stop".
Goals: turning a page visit into a conversion
A goal is a simple rule: if a visitor reaches a specific path, like /thank-you or /checkout/success, that counts as a conversion. You can match the path exactly, or by "contains", "starts with" or "ends with", which covers most real-world URL structures without needing a developer to add tracking code. Give a goal an optional fixed value, and you get an estimated revenue or conversion value alongside a plain conversion count, useful even before you connect real payment data.
This is deliberately simple. No event taxonomy to design upfront, no SDK to configure, if the page loaded, it counted.
Funnels: the steps before the goal
A goal tells you that someone converted. A funnel tells you what happened on the way there. Define an ordered sequence of pages, for example /cart → /checkout → /thank-you, and see what percentage of visitors who hit the first step made it to each following one. The chart tapers as visitors drop off at each stage, and the biggest single drop-off gets called out directly, so you know exactly which step to look at first instead of guessing.
A concrete example
Say 1,000 visitors land on a pricing page. 400 start checkout, but only 120 complete the purchase. Without a funnel, all you'd see is "120 conversions this month". With one, you can see that the biggest leak is between "started checkout" and "completed purchase", not between "visited pricing" and "started checkout", which changes where you'd actually spend time fixing things.
Setting it up
Both are configured from Settings, no code changes needed since page views are already tracked automatically. The full walkthroughs: Goals guide and Funnels guide.