2025-01-16 | Article | Insights
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 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.
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:
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.
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:
In GA4 you can decide which counting method you want to use - once per event vs. once per 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: