Conversion tracking is one of the biggest updates Google Analytics 4 properties have compared to the Universal Analytics model. Gone are the days of thinking about destination URLs and defining the event category, event action, and event labels. Now we have a brand new model that incorporates automatic conversion tracking, reusable slots, and a new server-side event system for ad-hoc conversions.

Setting Up Conversions in GA4

There are three primary ways conversion are enabled in GA4:

1. Predefined
2. Toggling events as conversions
3. Creating custom events from an existing event

I’ll walk you through each option and show you how each works. If you prefer video guides, I recorded one as well.

1. Predefined Conversions

GA4 properties create a set of predefined conversions automatically. These ensure that every user of Google Analytics always has a set of conversions enabled, solving the long-running issue where GA users would forget to set up conversions. Now, GA4 creates this list of conversions automatically:

• first_open (App streams)
• session_start (Web streams)
• app_store_subscription_convert (App streams)
• app_store_subscription_renew (App streams)
• in_app_purchase (App streams)
• purchase (Web/app streams, requires implementation)

This set of conversions can’t be disabled and are mostly safety nets to ensure everyone has basic conversion tracking enabled. Options 2 and 3 exist to allow you to further define the conversions that matter most.

2. Toggling Events as Conversions

Google Analytics 4 introduced the new event-driven data model, which means we now track everything with events and no longer need to talk about hits. If you head to your events reports you will see you have a new option to easily mark any event name in that report as a conversion.

In the example below, you can see we have an event for file_download, which is one of the new automatic events. If we want to enable file_download as a conversion, we just toggle it on.

Note that this only works if we wanted ALL downloads to be conversions, not a certain download like case study downloads. Additionally, this feature does not allow you to mark visits to a certain page or group of pages as an event. This is why our third option exists!

3. Creating Custom Events from Existing Events

There are many scenarios where you will not want want to use the toggle in option 2. As an example, you may want a conversion for a thank you page, when someone reads your blog pages, or perhaps when someone scrolls halfway through a page. For these, Google has released a brand new feature called “Create Event.”

This create event feature works by using an existing event to create a brand new event that you then mark as a conversion. We need to use this feature because conversions can only be enabled based on event names and not further scoped on their parameters.

Let’s say we wanted to track any visit to our blog as a conversion. GA4 doesn’t have a blog event, but it does have a page_view event that captures the URL of every page using the page_location parameter.

Here is how we would set up a conversion for users who view our blog:

1. Start by clicking “create event” from the “All events” report.

2. Click “create”

3. Next, decide what your new event name will be and configure the conditions for when to fire this new event. Here we create a new event “blog_view” that is triggered anytime an event with adswerve.com/blog is sent to GA4.

4. To complete the set up, go to the conversions report and click “New conversion event.” You will use the new event name from the previous step and click save.

Success! Now we can create specific conversions from any event parameters we need. I love how real-time everything is, meaning you will start seeing your new events and conversion in the DebugView and Realtime reports as soon as you hit save.