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). Annika Piehl

Senior Consultant Digital Analytics