
December 8, 2022
How to Track Conversions with Google Analytics 4 (previously known as Goals)
Updated: December 8th, 2022
In my previous Google Analytics 4 tutorials, I have shared how to install GA4 (or how to upgrade to it), then how to track events with Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager. Now, the time has come to configure conversions.
In other words, we’ll tell Google Analytics that some events are more important to us.
Today, I will show you how to track conversions with Google Analytics 4. And there are several options/gotchas you need to know. Also, I’ll take a quick look at a thing called Google Analytics goals (the definition of conversion in older GA versions).
Table of Contents
+ Show table of contents +
- Video tutorial
- How to track events with Google Analytics 4
- What is a conversion in general?
- Goodbye, Goals. Hello, Conversions!
- Predefined Conversions
- Toggle Conversions (or Enter Event Name Manually)
- Create events and mark them as Conversions
- Try planning your event naming convention better
- Check the data in Google Analytics 4 DebugView
- Where can I see the conversion data in Google Analytics 4 reports?
- Useful resources
- Final words
Video tutorial on how to track conversions with Google Analytics 4
If you prefer video content, I have recorded a tutorial on my Youtube channel. And as always, I recommend that you do both: read this blog post and watch my video (because they complement each other).
How to track events with Google Analytics 4
If you are new to Google Analytics 4 (but have worked with its previous versions (e.g. Classic or Universal analytics), you need to understand this. GA4 is an event-based analytics tool.
Everything is an event now. Purchases, page views, etc.
So if you want to configure conversions, you first must configure event tracking in Google Analytics. Then you will need to instruct GA4 that some events are more important than others.
So if you are completely new to event tracking in Google Analytics 4, read this blog post and watch this video tutorial first.
What is a conversion in general?
I realize that some of my readers who land on this page might be completely new to web analytics and the concept of conversions. If you are one of them, here’s a quick introduction. And if you already know what conversions are, feel free to skip to the next chapter of this blog post.
A conversion is an important interaction you want your visitors/users to complete. Conversions can be split into micro and macro conversions. An example of a micro-conversion can be a newsletter subscription, a download of a whitepaper, etc.
Micro conversions are usually described as conversions that put your visitors/users one step closer to the main (macro) conversion.
Macro-conversions are the most important interactions, such as a purchase.
By tracking conversions, you can better understand what is working for your business and what isn’t. For example, you can create a segment of your users who have made a purchase and then try to understand what they are doing, what their behavior is, etc. Also, conversions are used to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and then redistribute your advertising budget.
Hopefully, this super-brief introduction gave you a better understanding of this concept.
Now, let’s learn how to track conversions with Google Analytics 4.
Goodbye, goals. Hello, conversions!
Those who have worked with the previous versions of Google Analytics, for example, Universal Analytics, are familiar with the term “Google Analytics Goal”. Basically, that’s how GA was calling conversions in the past.
If you want to treat a page view of the order confirmation page as a conversion, you could create a destination goal. Speaking of other types of Google Analytics goals, you could create goals that:
- Were based on events and their parameters
- Or were based on the duration of the session (if a visitor spends more than X minutes on your website)
- Or were based on the number of page/screen views per session
Also, it’s worth mentioning that you could create up to 20 goals per GA view. In GA 4, that limit is 30 conversions per property.
With the rise of GA4, the concept of Google Analytics 4 goals is gone. Now, the most important interactions are called conversions (this term has been adopted by the industry and other marketing/analytics tools for many years, and even GA users often referred to goals as “conversions”).
So, in reality, it’s a welcome cosmetic change that’s been long overdue. However, the name is not the only thing that has changed. Many things are now different in Google Analytics 4 when it comes to conversions:
- The way we have to configure them is different
- The types of conversions are different (no more out-of-the-box destination, session duration, or number-of-pageviews goals)
It’s all about the event now. It’s your job to send them and mark the most important ones as conversions.
Speaking of how to configure conversions in Google Analytics 4, there are two options (that you can control) and one that’s predefined. Let’s start with the latter.
Predefined Conversions
There is a bunch of predefined conversions that you cannot disable:
- first_open (applies to mobile applications)
- app_store_subscription_convert (applies to mobile applications)
- app_store_subscription_renew (applies to mobile applications)
- in_app_purchase (applies to mobile applications)
- purchase (applies to websites and mobile applications)
Speaking of purchase, here is a guide by Simo Ahava that explains the entire implementation process in great detail.
If you go to your Google Analytics 4 property, then go to Admin > Conversions, you will see the list of those predefined conversions (they will be displayed here if you have received at least one event of that particular name).
If you have only the Web data stream connected to the property, your only default conversion will be purchase (and it that cannot be disabled).
If you have connected any of the app data streams, then you’ll most likely see the rest of the aforementioned conversions too. But since there isn’t much, we can configure, that’s all I can say in this chapter.
Now, let’s move to the next group of conversions.
Conversions that can be turned on (or you can enter the event name manually)
If you want to mark an event as a conversion, you have to go to the list of Admin > All Events (on the left sidebar) and then switch the toggle next to the event that’s important for your business.
So, for example, if you have an event called ebook_downloaded, then you can flip the switch and turn it into a conversion (note: this will apply only to the new data. The events that were collected in the past will not be turned into conversions retroactively).
Alternatively, you can go to Admin > Conversions, then press New conversion event and enter the name of the event, for example, ebook_downloaded. There is no difference between entering the name of the event manually and flipping the toggle button in the Admin > Events list. If you decide to flip the switch, you will first need to wait until that event appears in the list.
Once you do that, wait for up to 24 hours, and you will start seeing conversion data in the list of all Conversions.
If you want to find out about other places where the conversion data is available in the Google Analytics 4 interface, jump to this chapter of the blog post.
Create events and mark them as conversions
I bet that some of my readers have one question now. What if you don’t want to mark ALL events (of a certain event name) as conversions?
Example: you have a “Thank you” page to which users are redirected when they subscribe to a newsletter. Let’s say that the URL is https://www.mywebsite.com/thank-you/. If I mark the page_view event as a conversion, ANY pageview will become a conversion. How can I separate only those pageviews that happened on the /thank-you/ page?
You can either send a dedicated event (with a different name) from Google Tag Manager/Gtag.js, or you can use the Create Event feature in the GA4 interface.
This feature allows you to create a new event based on other incoming events. On the Admin > Events page, click Create Event and then click Create.
Then you will need to enter the name of the custom event. Once again, you can name it whatever you want. Just make sure that the name clearly communicates what it means. thankyou_page_visit might be a good option.
Then let’s move on to the Matching Conditions section. Here we must tell GA4 what kind of event we are looking for. When that particular event will be spotted, then our thankyou_page_visit should be created as well.
In my case, I need to enter the following conditions:
- event_name equals page_view
- page_location contains /thank-you/
If you want to copy all the parameters from the page_view event to the new event, keep the checkbox Copy parameters from the source event enabled.
If some of the parameter’s name is incorrect and you want to fix it as well, you can Add Modification in the Parameter Configuration section. For example, if an event contains the parameter pricingPlan but you want it to be pricing_plan, you can introduce a new field (and reuse its value) while removing the incorrect parameter (by leaving the New Value empty).
Take a closer look at [[pricingPlan]] in the screenshot above. Double square brackets mean that GA4 will reuse the value of the parameter pricingPlan in that event.
Once you save the changes, you can view them in the Real-time reports and the DebugView of GA4.
Also, when you create that new event in GA4 (and you want that to become a conversion), don’t forget to mark that event as a conversion in the Admin > Events page.
If you don’t like to wait for up to 24 hours (because that thankyou_page_visit will not appear in the list of all your events immediately), you can create a new conversion immediately. Go to the Admin section on the left sidebar of your GA4 interface. Then go to Conversions.
Then click New conversion event and enter the name of the event that you have just created. Click Save.
That way, you will mark the newly created thankyou_page_visit event as a conversion (without the need to wait for 24 hours until it appears on the Admin > Events page.
If Debugview is not working for you, please take a look at this guide.
Or try planning your event naming convention better
I’m just continuing the previous chapter of this blog post here.
If we are talking about events that you are sending from the website’s code or Google Tag Manager to GA4, you could just plan your event naming convention better and create more distinct events.
Imagine that you track various form submissions with the event name form_submission, but you want to treat only certain types of forms as conversions. Let’s say that you track contact form submissions, search form submissions, and registration form submission events, but you only want to treat the registration form submission as a conversion.
In that case, you could track 3 separate events:
- contact_form_submission
- search_form_submission
- sign_up
And then mark only the sign_up event as a conversion. This, of course, requires more thorough planning upfront but every solid setup starts with one.
Check the data in Google Analytics 4 DebugView
Once you configure your events, it’s time to test them. The primary feature built for debugging GA 4 data is the DebugView section. You can find it by going to Admin > DebugView on the left side of the GA4 interface. Click it.
That’s the place where your debugging should take place. Do not mix this with the GTM Preview and Debug mode. They are two different beasts.
To enable the debug mode in GA4, it’s enough to have the GTM Preview mode enabled. Then all events sent to Google Analytics 4 will have a debug_mode parameter attached to them. As a result, this data will be visible in the GA4 DebugView.
There is also another option to enable the debug_mode in Google Analytics 4. Install the Google Analytics Debugger Chrome extension here, and then click its icon (so that you can see the ON ribbon). From this moment, you will start seeing your events coming into DebugView.
When the data starts coming into your DebugView, you can click on every individual event, and then a list of parameters will be displayed.
Click on that parameter to see the value that was received by GA4.
Also, make sure that you have selected the correct Debug device in the top left corner.
If multiple visitors have enabled the debug view (e.g. they all have enabled the Chrome extension), you will see multiple devices there, and it might require some time to find yourself.
Anyway, once you start seeing data in DebugView, things will look like this.
Events are marked with blue icons, and conversions with green. Please ignore the fact that I treat menu_click events as conversions. This is just for demonstration purposes 🙂
If you click the event, you will see the parameters that were sent together with an event. Click on the parameter to see its value.
Once you made sure that the data is coming in and is displayed properly, you should submit your GA4 changes in the GTM container and publish it.
Where can I see the conversion data in Google Analytics 4 reports?
The conversion data is available in various places of the Google Analytics 4 interface. To name a few (but this list is definitely not complete):
- Admin > Conversions section in the left sidebar menu. This place is like an overview of all events that you have marked as conversions.
- Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition, and then there is a column Conversions in the table
- If you have implemented Ecommerce tracking, the data will appear in the Monetization reports
- Explore. For example, you can include the metric Conversions in the Exploration report.
Useful Resources
Here are some additional useful resources related to conversions and events:
Final words on how to track conversions in Google Analytics 4
The word “GA4 goals” is gone from Google Analytics 4 vocabulary. From now on, they will be called “Conversions” (and this should have happened a long time ago). But this is not the only change introduced in the new version of Google Analytics.
The entire process of conversion configuration has changed in GA4. You can quickly turn any event into conversion by clicking a toggle button next to it (in the All Event list).
If you want to be more specific and treat only events with certain parameters as conversions, you can:
- either use the Create event feature in the GA4 interface
- or plan your event names upfront more carefully (and use distinct event names for interactions that are the most important for a business).
Got more questions about how to track conversions with Google Analytics 4? Let me know in the comments.
32 COMMENTS
Unbelievable clear explanations and instructions. I am not an IT guy, but completed everything in GTM, GA and Ads for my business. Super!
Hi,
The options Mark as Conversion is greyed out for me including all the options such as Modify Event and Create Event.
I created the events in GTM about 18-19 hrs ago so they are populating the list already but those options are still greyed out.
And i've checked if they are firing correctly in preview mode.
Any idea what im missing?
Maybe you don't have enough permissions in GA?
Hey Julius. Thank you for sharing the valuable information. I have a question. How can we track the purchase value for private user (not created the account) vs login user (who already have an account and made a purchase by logging in their email id and password)?
Greetings! THX for the video and this blog post. Both helped me understand how to create conversions.
Unfortunately, in my haste to create my first conversion, I also created one via GA4, so now I have two similar events being tracked.
How do I get rid of the GA4 event - through "modification" or through this article - https://www.kristaseiden.com/new-data-deletion-feature-in-google-analytics-4/
THX in advance.
You can try to use the Modify events feature
Hey Julius,
For the parameter matching condition, can we add parameters from GTM like Click Classes, Click Text, etc.
Thank you!
Pablo
Hi, no.
Hi,
Really great article and defo some of the most in-depth coverage on GA4, thanks.
I'm wondering, with regards to conversion events based on page views, is it possible to only record a page view as a conversion if that page was loaded after a specific page.
For example you have an opt-in page and a thank you page. In this scenario you'd only want the conversion to fire after they opted in on the previous page.
Thanks
Dan
Have you actually read the entire blog post? :) because it is explained here
Hey thanks Julius,
I did read the whole article, but I'm not sure if I explained my self clearly.
In universal analytics you could set a funnel that would trigger the goal where they had to visit a specific page before the event page in order for it to be classed as a conversion.
It doesn't seem possible in GA4?
You need to use Audience triggers for that. Create a sequence in the audience where two specific pageviews are made in the same session. Then create an audience trigger for that. Somewhat related example: https://www.analyticsmania.com/post/track-conversions-once-per-session-in-google-analytics-4/
Hi,
Thank you for the article. My events were fired and tracked successfully, however, I failed to track them as conversion events. I have added conversions with the exact same event names, however, in the Debugview, those events were still not marked as green conversion events. I have published and waited for two days, but the conversion is still 0.
BTW I did the same with Universal Analytics, and I could see conversion tracked successfully in Goals. So, I am a bit lost why conversion events are not tracked in GA4?
Thank you!
Kelly
Did you solve this Kelly? I set Google optimize to choose my winning page based on several events as conversions, yet when I check GA4 the events are being counted, they are marked as conversions, yet the conversions count is zero.
Kelly, I had the same issues with GA4 but if you’ve marked them as events as the tag type and trigged all the custom variables. It should pull the event in debug mode.
Take a look at your tag, variables and trigger.
Hi, Julius!
This article has been very helpful. Thank you for sharing this.
I have a question, I hope you can help. Previously, I am able to add hour and minute as secondary dimensions. I can't seem to find these two in GA 4.
Do you know how I can do this?
you can't do that in GA4 interface
Hi Julius
Great article that helped me a lot. Although there is still one issue left that I hoped you can help. Our client had set up events as followed: event_name is page_view & page_location is /subscription_course_XY/thank_you.php?sent=true
The event doesn't fire and isn't recognized as conversion in the debug menu (set up as you described).
You need to use "page_location contains"
Hi Julius,
how can i create a goal in GA4 with all the previous pages? Just like it was in Google Analytics
Greetings
Bernd
What do you mean "With all the previous pages"?
thanks for the article Julien, always a pleasure to read your posts.
My question: I send events from a server-side GTM and even after marking them as a conversion in the GA4 interface, they still appear only as events.
To me it seems like the flagging of an event is actually happening in the visitor’s client, not in the GA4 system itself.
So do you know of a way to send custom conversions from a server-side GTM?
Thanks for your support,
Frank
Hi Julius,
In the YouTube video attached to this blogpost you mentioned GA4 treats conversions differently as in GA. F.e. when the click on a button is configured as a conversion and someone clicks 3 buttons this would be treated as 3 separate conversions instead of one.
In my case we have a website with multiple affiliate links on a page. We want to track which pages encourage clicks on this buttons more than others. Now we wonder if the Conversion Rate (per session) metric in the analytics report is actually a correct number? If the same person clicks on 3 different affiliate links, will this not raise the conversion rate of this page falsely?
Or is this conversion rate based on 1 conversion within that session?
Do you know this?
Thanks!
Hi Julius! Great article! If i want to track a single conversion, but it's made up of different events, should i track the events and give them the same event name? Will it combine those events together for a single conversion figure?
Cheers
Hi,
thanks a lot for this article. However, how to do if we have more than 30 conversions?
With UA, wewere creating new views, so how about GA4?
Hi Julius and thanks as always! I'm afraid I already know the answer to this question.. but is there a way to find on a report (or exploration) which organic keywords bring conversions?
no
Hi Julius, Thanks for this post!
I have one concern about this new event conversions.
Usually, you want to see conversion rates per a cateogory, form, poduct category or even a specific product.
GA4 has user conversion rate & session conversion rate as a metric, this metric is not very developed as I see it in GA4, it's limited how you can use different dimensions for this metrics.
What I'm looking for is to somehow see a graph(timeline) with conversion rates more granularly, in the GA4 UI. eg. we have "Purchase" as an conversion. BUT, If I want to see this timeline with conversion rate for specific product or prodcutcategory eg "shoes" (which then are described as a parameter in the Purchase event). It's no way I've found to do that in the GA4 Reports.
Do you know if that's possbile without BigQuery in the UI or Explore of GA4?
It would feel weird and not scalable to put purchase events with specific parameters as conversions since we're limited to 30 conversions.
How has Googled planned the we should handled this? More people than me must miss to see conversion rate more granularly for specific parameters in the reporting? :)
Thanks in advance
Hello Julius, really thank you for all your post and work. I followed you since a lot of time.
One question. I got the conversion set up with thank you page and contact form redirect into that. But I recently discover that in making conversion “noisy” by visiting the thank you directly and I detect that thank you page is making conversion themselves.
How to avoid this? May I switch from tracking with thank you pages??
Thank you in advance
Hi! Myself and my colleague have been trying to figure out something in GA4 for reporting purposes and for the life of me, I cannot figure it out. I don't think it's mentioned here though.
I make a report on assisted conversions and last click/direct conversions currently. However, in GA4, this doesn't seem to be possible? I've read what feels like hundreds of articles and watched many videos and no one seems to have an answer.
Thanks in advance!
GA4 does not show assisted conversions, unfortunately
Hi Julius,
Thank you for this great article. It was a great help implementing conversions/goals and to get reports on those per Channel.
I also would like to report conversions/goals per landing page (or group of landing pages), and there I fail. When I do that then GA4 assigns all conversions to Landing Page (not set).
Is there a way to correct this? Please let me know. Thanks in advance.
Best regards,
Jaap