Count clicks on outbound links, file downloads, form submissions and custom events like signups, with a cookieless script and no extra tag manager.
Page views tell you what people read. The questions that matter more are usually about what they did: did they click through to a partner, download the PDF, submit the form, sign up? Those are events, and you can measure them without cookies and without a tag manager.
This guide shows the three ways to do it, using Tidemark’s script as the example. The same pattern works with Plausible and other tools that follow its conventions.
The simplest route is to ask the script to watch for common actions automatically. The tracking script comes in variants selected by its file name:
script.outbound-links.js counts clicks on links that leave your site.script.file-downloads.js counts clicks on links to files such as PDFs, archives and installers.script.form-submissions.js counts submitted forms.You can combine them in one file name:
<script defer data-domain="yourdomain.com"
src="https://app.tidemarkanalytics.com/js/script.outbound-links.file-downloads.form-submissions.js"></script>
In Tidemark you do not have to edit the file name by hand: in a site’s settings, under the tracking extras, switch on outbound link clicks, file downloads and form submissions, and the snippet it shows you updates. Each one also creates a matching goal so the events show up in your dashboard.
Outbound clicks appear as an event named Outbound Link: Click, with the destination address stored with it, so you can see which links people actually follow. Downloads appear as File Download (with the file’s address) and form submissions as Form: Submission (with the page the form was on).
For anything specific to your product, send an event yourself with one line of JavaScript:
window.plausible('Signup')
Call it where the action happens: after a successful signup, when someone adds an item to a cart, when a calculator is used. You can attach properties so one event can be broken down later:
window.plausible('Download', { props: { file: 'whitepaper.pdf' } })
Properties let you ask questions like “which file gets downloaded most?” without creating a separate event for each.
If the action ends on its own page, you do not need code at all. Create a goal for that page, such as /thank-you or /order-complete, and every visit to it counts as a conversion. Page goals support wildcards, so /blog/* covers every post.
Events show up in the dashboard’s goals section once a goal with the same name exists. In Tidemark, open the site’s settings, choose Goals, and add either a custom event (type the exact event name, such as Signup) or a page goal (type the path).
Open the Goals report to see unique conversions, total conversions and the conversion rate. Click a goal to switch the whole dashboard into conversion mode: every report then shows which sources, pages, countries and devices produced the conversions, so you can see not just that people signed up but where they came from.
No. The events use the same cookieless, daily-rotating visitor id as page views, so a “unique conversion” means one visitor completing the action in the period. Nothing is stored on the visitor’s device. If you care about what is collected, read our notes on how cookieless analytics works.
Signup and signup are different events.The tracking docs go into more detail on custom events, and the script variants guide lists every option.