Ch-ch-ch-changes! You think you’re starting to really master GA4, right? 

Wait for it - Google is changing GA4 again. Now “Conversions” will be “Key Events”. 

All ASC vendors will continue to send your dealership events (forms, phone calls, chats) into GA4 or you can continue

to set up custom events as you would in the past to track key

user activity on your website. That will not change.

What will change is this: previously, you would go into the admin panel, and select the events you wanted to be tracked as “conversions”.

In UA, these were known as “goals” -- although goals were calculated slightly differently, generally the concept is the same. You could then view the conversions and conversion rate in your GA4 property for sessions and users.

Going forward, you will continue to mark those events but they will now be called “Key Events”. Similarly instead of conversion rate, it will be “key event rate”. 

Why in the world is Google making this change? Well, lots of people were confused about why the “conversions” in Google Adwords were different than the “conversions” in GA4. Conversions will continue to be conversions in Google Adwords, and in GA4 when you are looking at the Google Ads section. (Read more about the re-introduction of Google Advertising on our last post here.) Here’s Google’s synopsis:

“...if you have a Google Ads account linked to Analytics you will now see consistent conversions in the Advertising Workspace for campaign performance reporting, and you will be able to use them to inform ongoing optimization for better results.”

At the end of the day, understanding what type of attribution you are using, and monitoring your customer “key events” is most important, regardless of what they are called. Make sure your marketing partner is linking Google Ads to your GA4 property so you can full insights on your campaigns.

You can read the full announcement on Google’s Blog Post here.