This article will talk about setting up Google Analytics 4 Conversion Tracking.
What are Conversions in Google Analytics 4?
A GA4 conversion (also known as a GA4 goal) on a website or app can be any crucial activity important to your business.
For example, submitting a form, signing up for an email newsletter, or purchasing a product (transaction).
In the earlier legacy version of Google Analytics, called universal analytics, conversions were marked when the goal was completed. You could set up to 20 goals per property.
To track more than 20 goals, you needed to create an additional view for that property or edit an existing goal.
However, the concept of goals is not available in GA4. You can define the conversion for the website directly in the GA 4 reporting interface based on the captured events.
You can set up as many conversions as you want, and there is no limit to marking any event as conversion.
You can modify any event or create a new event based on the occurrence of other events and parameters and then mark it as a conversion.
You can access the conversion reporting by clicking the ‘Conversion’ tab available in the ‘Reporting’ menu.
How to set up Google Analytics 4 Conversion Tracking for already tracked events?
Google Analytics 4 gives you the option to mark any event as a conversion. This is the simplest way to set up conversions for already available tracked events.
You can see in the below image I already have multiple events tracked on my website.
GA4 automatically tracks some, and some are custom events tracked using Google Tag Manager. I can mark any of these events as a conversion.
To set conversions for already tracked events, follow the below steps.
Step-1: Go to your Analytics 4 property and click on ‘Configure’.
Step-2: Now Click on ‘Events’.
Step-3: You will see the events tab console like below. If you want a particular event (i.e. one of the most important ones) to be marked as a conversion, click on the toggle switch available in front of the event to ‘On’.
In our case, ‘file_download’, ‘new_mobile_user’ and ‘video_complete’ are important events and can be marked as conversions.
Step-4: Now click on the ‘Conversion’ tab available in the ‘Reporting’ menu. You will see your important events are now available as conversions.
Congratulations!! You have successfully set up conversion tracking for your events.
How to set up Google Analytics 4 Conversion Tracking by creating a new event?
You can also set up a new conversion event from the ‘Conversions’ tab. Follow the steps below to set up a new GA4 conversion event.
Step-1: Click on the ‘Configure’ tab.
Step-2: Now click on the ‘Conversion’.
Step-3: Now click on the “New Conversion Event”.
Step-4: An overlay will appear as below, prompting you to provide a new event name. Give your new conversion event a descriptive name.
For example, we will track the ‘thank-you’ page view as a conversion event when a user submits a form. We are going to name this conversion event ‘Lead_genrated’. Now click on ‘Save’.
Step-5: You can now see our newly created event ‘Lead_genrated’ in the’ Conversions’ tab, as below.
The count of our event is zero (0). This is because we have just created the event in the GA4 reporting interface. Now we need to pass this event when it happens on the website to our GA4 property. There are two ways to do it.
Pass a custom event using Google Tag Manager
OR
Use create event functionality in GA4 (by using automatically tracked events and their parameters)
How to pass a custom event using Google Tag Manager?
First, let’s see the steps required when using Google Tag Manager
Step-1: Log in to your Google Tag Manager console and click on ‘Tags’ in the left-hand side menu.
Step-2: Click on the ‘New’ button.
Step-3: Give a proper name to your tag and click on ‘Tag Configuration’.
Step-4: An overlay will appear on the right-hand side with a list of tag templates. Select ‘Google Analytics: GA4 Event’.
Step-5: The ‘Tag Configuration’ window will open like below. Click on the ‘Select Configuration Tag’.
Step-6: A drop-down menu will appear. Select ‘None- Manually Set ID’ from the drop-down.
Step-7: The next step is to enter the GA measurement ID in the input box.
You can find your measurement ID in the ‘Admin’ section under ‘Data Streams’.
Step-8: Specify the name of the event. The event name you provide here will appear in your GA4 analytics reporting. In our case, I am giving the name ‘Lead_genrated’.
Note: This is the same event name we created in the ‘Conversions’ tab.
Step-9: Now, let’s create a trigger condition that causes this event to fire with the following conditions
Trigger type: Page View
This trigger fires on: Some Page Views
Condition: Page URL contains ‘thank-you’
Then click on ‘Save’.
Step-10: Now, You can do a quick preview and check if the tag is firing correctly.
I am skipping the further steps in GTM since we do not want to divert our focus from the conversion set up in the GA4 property.
Let’s navigate to our GA4 property and click on ‘Realtime’. You should see your conversion happening in real-time when you visit the thank-you page, as below.
Once the debugging process is completed, you can publish the GTM container.
Now, if you go to your ‘Conversions’ tab in the GA4 reporting menu, the ‘Lead_genrated’ conversion is tracked.
Congratulations!! You have successfully set up conversion tracking by creating a new conversion event using Google Tag Manager.
Now let’s see how can you set up conversion tracking by using the create event functionality in GA4.
How to create a new event in GA4 via the ‘create event’ functionality?
Google Analytics 4 also provides the option to modify and create events in the analytics console only. Note that you can create or modify events based on the occurrence of other events and parameters.
We already have a page view event firing on our thank-you page, and we can use the basic parameters of the page view event to set up our conversion event.
Follow the below steps to create a new event with these conditions.
Step-1: Go to your Google Analytics 4 property and click on ‘Configure’.
Step-2: Click on ‘Events’.
Step-3: Click on ‘Create Event’.
Step-4: An overlay will appear like below. Click on ‘Create’.
Step-5: The ‘Configuration’ window will open like below. Enter a custom event name as ‘Lead_genrated’.
Note: The event name used here must be the same as the event we created earlier in the new conversion event.
Step-6: Now, let’s add the matching conditions. Click on ‘Add Condition’.
Step-7: Click on ‘Parameter’ to define your condition. It will pop up a drop-down list with available parameters that can be modified. In our case, we will select the ‘page_location’ parameter.
Step-8: Now click on ‘Operator’ where you will get another drop-down menu with different conditional operators. We will select ‘Contains’, and in the ‘Value’ input box, type ‘thank-you’.
Step-9: Now click on ‘Create’.
Congratulations!!
You have successfully created a new event.
You can go to the ‘Events’ tab and check that the ‘Lead_genrated’ event appears in the ‘Events’ tab.
Note: Whenever the user visits the ‘thank-you’ page, Google Analytics 4 will fire a page view and then it will also mark it as a conversion event. You can also check this in your ‘Conversions’ tab of the ‘Reporting’ menu.
That is how you can set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4.
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