Vercel Analytics conversions from custom events

Conversions start as a custom event

Vercel Web Analytics counts visitors and page views on its own. A conversion, such as a sign-up, a purchase or a demo request, is something your code reports: a custom event, sent with the track function from @vercel/analytics at the moment it happens:

import { track } from '@vercel/analytics';

track('signup');

Vercel then counts each event by name, and its project dashboard lists them. Custom events aren’t available on every Vercel plan; if yours doesn’t include them, there’s nothing to count yet.

From an event to a conversion rate

A count on its own is hard to judge: 40 sign-ups is good on a quiet week and poor after a launch. Divide it by the visitors in the same period and you get a conversion rate you can compare across weeks and across sites. 21 sign-ups from 700 visitors is 3.0%; if the week before was 15 from 600, that’s 2.5%, so the rate rose by half a point while the count rose 40%.

Vercel’s dashboard shows each event’s count per project. Working out the rate, the change on the previous period, and doing it for every site you run, is left to you.

Goals in Lookout

Lookout reads the same custom events and lets you pick one per site as its goal:

1. Open a site from your board. Its Goal card lists the site’s custom events, most fired first (up to 20).
2. Choose Set as goal on the event that means a conversion. Workspace owners set and clear goals.
3. The card shows the funnel, visitors to converted, with the conversion rate, its change in points on the previous period, and a sparkline.

The board then shows each site’s conversions on its card, and the KPI strip adds them up: total conversions, the rate across the sites with a goal, and how many of the board’s sites have one. The CSV export gets a conversions column, and a shared client link shows the goal’s numbers (only the goal’s event, never the site’s other events).

Picking a good goal

• Use the event that marks the outcome, not a step before it: signup rather than signup_form_opened.
• Keep the name the same across sites where you can, so a board of client sites reads consistently.
• Fire it once per conversion, after it succeeds, so retries and errors don’t inflate the rate.
• A site with no custom events yet shows how to send one; its card fills in after the first events arrive.

See it with sample data in the live demo, where some of the 12 sample sites have goals. For the rest of what Lookout reads from Vercel, see Lookout vs. Vercel’s built-in Web Analytics.