Use goals and benchmarks in MailerPress automations to react to a contact’s activity or measure a milestone in their journey. A goal can wait for an event before the contact moves on. It can also record whether the event happened while the contact continues through the automation.
Goal steps require MailerPress Pro. In the automation editor, both uses start from the same Goals & benchmarks category; there is no separate benchmark step to choose.
Add a goal to an automation
Open Automations > All automations and edit the automation. Add a step where you want to check for a milestone, then open Goals & benchmarks in the step picker. Choose the event you want to track, such as Link clicked, Email opened, or Tag applied.
Select the new step on the canvas to open its settings. Give it a clear Goal name so you can recognize the milestone inside the automation.
Choose the event conditions
Set the event filters in the goal settings. The available filters depend on the event, and an unfiltered condition defaults to Any.
For Link clicked, you can filter by Campaign and Link URL contains. The Campaign picker shows only Send email steps in the current automation. Use Link URL contains when you need to match a particular destination or part of its URL.
Decide whether the contact waits
Under Goal type, choose how the milestone affects the contact’s path:
- Essential — wait until achieved is the default. The contact waits at this step for the selected event.
- Optional — keep going, only measure lets the contact continue while the goal records conversion. Choose this when you want a benchmark without holding up the journey.
For an Essential goal, Give up after controls the wait. Leave the field blank (it shows Never) to wait indefinitely; the goal then has one output. Set a duration in minutes, hours, days, or weeks to create separate Achieved and Timed out paths. Add the next step after an Essential goal before activating the automation. If a timed out path has no following step, the contact’s run ends on that path.
Allow contacts to enter at the goal
Allow contact entry is off by default. Turn it on if a contact should be able to enter the automation at this goal, or if an existing run should be able to jump forward to it when the event occurs. When this setting is on, Ignore “run once per subscriber” becomes available. Review that option if the automation’s run-once setting affects how you want contacts to enter.
Save, activate, and review results
Save your changes, then use Activate when the automation is ready. For an active automation, open its Goals statistics to review overall and per-goal conversion, along with achieved, waiting, and timed out counts. Median time appears when data is available. The canvas also shows each goal’s achieved count, total count, and percentage.
The displayed conversion rate is the number of achieved goal records divided by the total number of goal records. Use the counts and rate together when comparing milestones in an automation.