Google Analytics Conversion Tracking: Step-by-Step Guide With Examples

If Google Analytics gives you a headache, you’re not alone. 

A lot of site admins are eager to monitor events like newsletter signups, form submissions, and product purchases. But they assume they lack the technical skills. 

Fortunately, conversion tracking is one of the easier things to set up in GA4. 

Key Takeaways

• “Conversions” are now “key events” in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). 
• Tracking URL-specific page views (especially on thank you pages) is a straightforward way of gathering conversion data. 
• For more granular conversions, you should use Google Tag Manager. 
• Google has extensive built-in functionality for tracking ecommerce purchases and conversions. 

What Is Google Analytics Conversion Tracking?

Conversion tracking measures what Google calls “key events.” These are important user actions on your website. The word “conversion” isn’t used in Google Analytics anymore. 

Examples of key events include:

• Newsletter signups
• Form completions 
• Product purchases
• Banner ad clicks
• Landing page visits
• Landing page CTA clicks

There are three types of events in Google Analytics:

• Automatically collected events: These events are automatically collected. They include page_view, file_download, and ad_click. You don’t need to set these up. 
• Recommended events: These are events that Google recommends, like generate_lead and refund.
• Custom events: These are the most complex category of conversions, and you’ll usually need to use Google Tag Manager to set them up. 

1. Take Care of the Prerequisites

For key event tracking to work, check the following:

1. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is set up on your site and working properly. 
2. You have either Editor or Administrator permissions. 
3. Google Tag Manager is installed on your site (if you’re planning on creating events using tags). 

2. Pick Your Conversion End Page

For this tutorial, we’re going to track newsletter signups on a key landing page. 

To do this, we’ll capture the page views on the thank you page (that subscribers land on after they’ve provided their email address). 

Here’s my newsletter landing page: 

Here’s the “thanks for opting in” page: 

You can use any “end page” on your website to track conversions, and it works for various key events like newsletter signups, form completions, landing page clicks, and product purchases.

Make sure you have a dedicated page for every specific type of conversion you want to track. If you’re not bothered about granular key events—for example, if you wanted to track newsletter signups across your whole site—one thank you page will suffice. 

3. Set Up a Key Event in Google Analytics

Open up your Analytics dashboard and head over to Admin > Data Display > Events.

Click on Create event (if you don’t have the appropriate permissions, you won’t see this button) and Create at the top right of the window. 

Name your event. You can use whatever descriptive name you wish, but it’s important to follow naming conventions. For all intents and purposes, this means using only lowercase letters and underscore characters (“_”). 

For the sake of ease, I’m going to use Google’s recommended generate_lead name. If you don’t envision yourself tracking multiple events, Google’s recommended names are fine.

In this example, we want the event to trigger when somebody lands on my thank you page. So I’ll set two Matching conditions as follows:

• Parameter: event_name, Opener: equals, Value: page_view
• Parameter: page_location, Opener: equals, Value: https://neilpatel.com/thanks-for-opting-in/

Leave “Copy parameters from source event.” This maintains other parameters—or pieces of information—associated with the source event (in this case, a page view) and makes that data available to you. It won’t affect your tracking. 

Hit Create again when you’re ready. You should now see your new custom event in the Create events window along with its conditions. 

You’re now ready to set the generic event as a key event. You won’t see the event in the normal Events tab until somebody triggers it, so you need to set it as a key event manually. 

Go to Key events and select New key event.

 Enter the name exactly as you did in the previous section and hit Save.

You’ll now see it listed in the Key events display. 

That’s it! You’ve set up a new conversion event, and you can now track the results in your normal reports, although it can take 24 to 48 hours for data to start populating.

Let’s look at how to do this. 

4. Load the Key Events Report

There used to be a dedicated report called “Key events” under the Engagement tab, but this has been retired. If you’re reading old tutorials and can’t find it, that’s why. 

But don’t worry, you can now find the functionality in the normal Events tab.

Go to Reports > Life cycle > Engagement > Events. Click the Add filter button in the top right corner.

When the Build filter window opens, select is key event, exactly matches, and true from the Dimension, Match Type, and Value dropdowns, then click Apply.

Back in the reports display, scroll down and check the tickbox next to your key event and click Plot rows. You should now be able to see your data in the table and on the graph. 

5. Attach a Value to the Conversions

Tracking the number of conversions is one thing. But what about the value of those conversions? Google makes it easy to attach a dollar—or dinar—value to key events. 

Navigate back to Data display > Key Events and select Set default key event value from the menu on your key event row. 

Set a value for your event. For this example, let’s put a value of $100 and hit Save. 

You can then track the total value associated with a conversion event by navigating to Reports > Life cycle > Engagement > Events.

Select Customize report in the top right corner. Go to Metric > Add Metric, search for Event value and hit Apply.

As new data comes in, you’ll see the value of each conversion. Google doesn’t retroactively apply default values to past data, so you won’t see any figures straight away. 

6. Track Conversion Rates

You’ll notice that this method collects the conversion count but not the conversion rate.

What if you want to see the percentage of landing page visitors that signed up for your newsletter?

First, let’s look at how to measure the event conversions of all website traffic. That’s the percentage of all website visitors that triggered your key event. 

Head over to Reports > Acquisition > User acquisition and set your preferred time period. 

From the User key event rate column, select your key event. In this example, it’s generate_lead. In the screenshot below, you can see that 0.12% of all users triggered a conversion. 

Many admins also find the channel-specific data useful for identifying their highest-value traffic sources. 

You can also use the landing pages report to see which landing pages (pages that begin a user session) are responsible for driving conversions. 

Go to Reports > Engagement > Landing page and set the Session key event rate to your key event. This will give you a percentage of all sessions that began with the page that drove a conversion. 

If you are looking for the specific conversion rate of a single page, you can use the Session key event rate metric in the Pages and screens tab, but you will need to track button clicks, which requires Google Tag Manager. Keep reading to learn how to do that. 

Tracking Conversions With Google Tag Manager

To create events using data that Google Analytics doesn’t automatically collect (like button clicks), you’ll need to use Google Tag Manager. 

Google Tag Manager tracks small snippets of code on your site, called tags, to gather data about user interactions. After configuring your website, you can specify these tags in Google Tag Manager and send event data to Google Analytics. 

For example, here’s a screenshot of my consulting page: 

I can use Google Tag Manager to trigger an event whenever somebody clicks the main CTA on that page, thereby measuring conversions. 

To do this, open Tag Manager and navigate to Triggers > New > All Elements and set the relevant conditions. 

I can specify that I want Tags Manager to send an event to Google every time somebody clicks my landing page button, for example. 

Once you’ve done this, go to Tags > New > Tag Configuration and input the required information. You can then attach the trigger you created. Select the Preview mode (top right corner) to check that your trigger is firing to GA4. 

Google Tag Manager is a little trickier than working directly in GA4 but it works very smoothly once it’s up and running. It offers an additional layer of conversion tracking functionality. 

Here’s Google’s Matt Landers explaining how to set up a GA4 event using Tag Manager:

What About Paid and Ecommerce Products?

Tweaking the “thank you page method” with a post-purchase page works well if you only sell a small number of products, like digital courses or consulting calls. 

For ecommerce products, Google has a suite of native merchant tracking features. You’ll need to set up ecommerce events in Google Tag Manager to measure these events effectively across your website, but there’s a lot of built-in functionality out of the box. 

I’ve written a complete guide to setting up ecommerce tracking in GA4. It’s easy to implement and will implement all Monetization tracking features for your site. 

Conversion Tracking Is a Vital Skill

It’s hard to overstate the importance of conversion tracking. 

It provides a basis for A/B and multivariate testing, lets you see if you’re matching industry benchmarks, identifies weak areas of your site, improves UX, and more. 

Google offers a full, tailored set of conversion tracking tools. It doesn’t matter whether you’re running a small niche site or a multinational ecommerce store. 

In all cases, learning how to track conversion will pay big dividends. 

It’s without a doubt one of the most useful skills you can master.