Conversion tracking connects marketing activity to outcomes. You choose the actions that matter, send an event when each one happens, and then see which pages, campaigns and sources they came from. Without it, traffic reports show activity but not whether any of it made money.
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What to track first
- Completed signups or trial starts
- Demo or contact requests
- Activation, the first meaningful use of the product
- Paid conversion, passed from billing back to analytics where you can
Making the data trustworthy
Test each event end to end, keep names consistent and write them in a tracking plan. Make sure consent settings are respected, since blocked tags will undercount. Treat numbers from different tools as estimates that will not match exactly.
Common mistakes
Counting every click as a conversion
Only events that represent real business value should be conversions.
Setting it up once and never checking
Site changes quietly break tags. Review them regularly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most teams start with GA4 events marked as key events, plus the ad platform's own tracking if they run ads.
Keep reading
- Key event: A key event is a GA4 event you flag as important to your business, such as a demo request. Google renamed GA4 conversions to key events in 2024.
- Tracking plan: A tracking plan is a document listing every event and property you collect, why, and how it is named.
- Google Tag Manager: Google Tag Manager is a free tool for deploying and managing analytics and marketing tags on a site without editing code for every change.
- Conversion Tracking for Ads: Ad conversion tracking records which ad clicks and views led to a valuable action, so platforms can report results and optimize bidding toward them.
- Active user: An active user is a person GA4 counts as having engaged with your site or app in a period. It is the default user metric in most GA4 reports.
- Analytics event: An analytics event is a recorded interaction, such as a page view, click, sign-up or download. In GA4 every interaction is stored as an event with parameters.
- Annotation: An annotation is a dated note on an analytics chart that records an event, such as a release, tracking change or algorithm update, so trends are read correctly.
- Average engagement time: Average engagement time is how long a page or app was in the foreground for users, on average. GA4 reports it per active user and per session.
