Need help with your analytics setup?
Watch the full video above, and read through the transcript below.
Hi everybody, this is Jaclyn Hawtin from Digital Dames. Today, I’m going to walk through how to set up conversions in the new Google Analytics 4 interface.
I’m starting here in the administrative section, reason being I wanted just to point out how previously when you were in the old universal Analytics account there were three sections here. You also had the view category, which is now no more. You’ll also notice that when we look at these options in the property section there’s no goals section.
The way that you view your data and do your recording is going to be a little bit different in this new version of Google Analytics. So when you go over here to your dashboard options, you’ll see that we have a section called events and conversions and events.
In order to create conversions here, that you have two options, you can either click this button here, new conversion event, and you can type it in. This is actually how I created this event originally, before it had actually been tracked into the system, it hadn’t been cataloged yet.
If you type in the event, name exactly as it’s coming through your website or web application, then it will automatically start tracking as a conversion when it hits the Google Analytics 4 system. But if that’s too much work for you, you can just wait until the event actually comes through.
And then it’s really simple here, you can just toggle it on and off to track as a conversion. And then you can either filter this into obviously any other third party system to do visual dashboards like Google Data Studio, or what have you, but it’s a little bit more straightforward, I think than the previous Google universal Analytics where you had to go to the admin area to set up your goal conversions.
And here it’s just in like the primary dashboard section. And when you’re setting up, if you’re using Google Tag Manager and you’re coding your old tags to come through here with the new Google Analytics 4 integration, which I reported a previous video on, then you just have to make sure that in the event section of that tag that you type in what you want the event name to be, and that’s what will come through here, and then you can track it as a conversion, so it’s a lot easier.
And a little bit of background on like best practices. Google does have some documentation out for naming conventions around best practices for event names. It’s a good idea to utilize those when it’s possible, it depends on what kind of events you’re tracking, but it just makes it easier for systems to talk to other systems if you do any future integrations.
If it’s a very unique event that’s like unique to your specific app, then that’s not necessarily applicable, but just something to keep in mind when you’re going through this process, it’s good to have kind of a long-term strategy and a consistent strategy around your naming conventions within your organization. And so that they work across all of the different integrations that you might have to work with in the future. I hope that helps. Thanks so much, have a great day.
