We recently wrote about the upcoming changes to Google Analytics and why you need to take action now. Once the new version is receiving data, the next step is to set up events and conversions to track the website activity that’s important to your business.
As a reminder, UA is Universal Analytics (the one you likely use now and they’re binning from summer next year) and GA4 is Google Analytics 4 (the new version that has already been introduced and needs a little setup).
Google is not retaining UA data forever, so you need to move now to retain as much data in the new system as possible. Comparing year-on-year data will be impossible once it scraps UA if you haven’t already got this ticking away in the background – even if you’re not using it yet.
GA4 events and conversions
If you’ve already set up your GA4 account, brilliant! Google Analytics will now be tracking lots of data for you just as UA does, and even if you don’t touch it again until UA is sunsetted in July 2023, you’ll have your 2022 data from whenever you started.
However, events and conversions are different in the newer version, so this is your next stop. Again, the sooner you do this, the more comparative data you’ll have when Google drops UA.
GA4 tracks events differently to UA – it has a whole list of events that are pre-programmed, such as link clicks, file downloads, searching, engaging with video and more. These are already tracking if you have set GA4 up.
However, if you track custom events like form completions, page visits and particular clicks (such as email or call clicks), these will need to be set up again in Tag Manager.
Your next steps
The events area in Analytics now looks very busy as it’s tracking a lot of events without you telling it to. This is fine though, because conversions are the ones that really matter to your business.
Your next task is to identify which events are meaningful to you as conversions. Conversions are usually points of lead generation or contact on your website, or they can be actions that users take that demonstrate that they’re very interested in your services, like downloads.
Go to Configure. Events that are automatically tracked can be marked as conversions with a simple click.
Events that it’s not yet tracking are a little bit harder work. You need to set these custom events up in Tag Manager just like with UA, test them, wait a few days for GA4 to realise, and then go back into Analytics and mark these as conversions as we did above.
If you haven’t set up custom events or conversion tracking in GA4, your custom events will not be tracking yet, making year-on-year conversion comparisons impossible until you do. Future you will thank you for doing it now!