UA Goals vs GA4 Conversions

2025-01-16 | Article | Insights

UA → GA4 Goals and Conversions

In Universal Analytics (UA), you were able to measure your conversions by setting up goals and ecommerce transactions. In Google Analytics 4 (GA4) this changes as we do not have a distinction between goals and ecommerce, all conversions are based on GA4 events. Before having a look at GA4 conversions let’s wrap up what we know about UA goals.

Goals in Universal Analytics

Goals measure how well your site or app fulfils your target objectives. A goal is seen as a completed activity that contributes to the success of your business. Common examples of goals include making a purchase or submitting a contact information form.

How do goals work?

Goals are configured at the view level of a UA property. Every goal can have a monetary value, so you can see how much that conversion is worth to your business. When a visitor on your website or a user of your app completes an action set as a goal, Analytics logs this as a conversion. The data from these conversions is subsequently accessible through a variety of specialised reports. Please remember: Within one session a goal is only counted once. Even if a user completes several different conversions in one session, only one is counted.

In UA five different type of goals were available:

  • Destination: A specific location loads.
  • Duration: Sessions that last a specific amount of time or longer.
  • Pages/Screens per session: A user views a specific number of pages or screens.
  • Event: An action defined as an Event is triggered.
  • Smart Goal: Measure the most engaged visits to your website and automatically turn those visits into Goals. Then use those Goals to improve your Google Ads bidding.

Conversions in Google Analytics 4

A conversion is any user action that's valuable to your business for example, a user purchasing from your store or subscribing to your newsletter are examples of common conversions.

How do conversions work?

The primary way to measure a conversion is to create an event that measures the important user interaction and then mark the event as a conversion in the GA4 interface.

Go to the Admin section in GA4:

Now you can use the toggle to mark your desired events as conversions:

How are conversions counted?

In GA4 you can decide which counting method you want to use - once per event vs. once per session.

  • Once per event: This is the recommended method by Google and means that the event is counted as a conversion every time it occurs.
  • Once per session: This is the legacy counting variant (similar to UA) and the event is counted only once it occurs within a particular session.

If you do not make a choice GA4 will automatically use the default counting method which depends on how a conversion event was created:

  • Once per session: This is the default counting method for all conversions created from UA goals (due to an automatically created GA4 property or when the goals migration tool was used).
  • Once per event: This is the default counting method for all other conversions.

Key differences between Goals and Conversions

  • In GA4, only events can be marked as conversions; destination, duration, and page per session are no longer available.
  • In UA, you were limited to 20 goals per reporting view; GA4 allows 30 conversion events (50 for GA4 360).
  • In GA4, you can decide on the counting method: either once per session or once per event.
  • In GA4, there are several predefined conversions you cannot disable (e.g., purchase, app_store_subscription_convert, app_store_subscription_renew, in_app_purchase, first_open).

Do you need more Info?

Contact