How to Create Conversions in Google Analytics

Your website is getting traffic, but that doesn't say much on its own. The real question is: is that traffic doing anything valuable for your business? This is where conversion tracking comes in. This guide will walk you through exactly how to set up conversions in Google Analytics 4, transforming your reporting from a simple traffic counter into a tool that measures real business impact.

What Exactly Is a Conversion in Google Analytics 4?

In the new world of Google Analytics 4, a conversion is any user action that is valuable to your business. It is a specific 'event' that you have decided to label as important.

If you're familiar with the older Universal Analytics, you might remember setting up "Goals." Conversions in GA4 have replaced Goals, but the core concept is the same: counting the important stuff. The key difference is that in GA4, everything is an event - a page view is an event, a scroll is an event, a click is an event. A conversion is simply you telling GA4, "Hey, this specific event is especially important to me."

What makes an action "valuable"? It depends entirely on your business. Here are a few common examples:

An ecommerce store would define a purchase as its most critical conversion.
A B2B SaaS company would consider a demo request or a free trial signup a conversion.
A service business or agency would track contact form submissions as a primary conversion.
A blogger or content creator might count an email newsletter signup as a conversion.

Setting up conversions allows you to finally answer the question, "Which marketing channels are actually driving results?" without swimming in pages of meaningless traffic data.

How to Define and Create Conversions in GA4

There are two primary ways to set up a conversion in Google Analytics 4. The method you choose depends on whether GA4 is already tracking the action you care about as a standard event.

Method 1: Marking an Existing Event as a Conversion. This is the easiest way. If GA4 already automatically collects an event that represents your conversion (like a purchase), all you have to do is flip a switch to tell GA4 to count it as such.
Method 2: Creating a Custom Event and Marking It as a Conversion. This is for more specific actions unique to your site, like a particular button click or a visit to a "thank you" page after a form submission. You'll first create the custom event, and then mark that newly created event as a conversion.

Let's walk through both methods step-by-step.

Method 1: Marking an Existing Event as a Conversion (The Easy Way)

GA4 automatically tracks many standard events out of the box through its Enhanced Measurement feature and recommended events. You just need to tell it which ones matter to you.

When to Use This Method

This is the perfect approach if your goal aligns with an event that GA4 already understands. Common examples include:

purchase: For ecommerce sales.
sign_up: When a user creates an account.
generate_lead: When a user submits a form or requests info.
login: When a user logs into their account.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Setting this up takes less than a minute. Here’s how:

Log in to your Google Analytics 4 property.
Click the Admin gear icon in the bottom-left corner.
In the Property column, click on Events under the Data stream.
You'll see a list of all events that GA4 has collected from your site in the selected time frame. Look for the event name you want to track as a conversion (e.g., generate_lead or purchase).
On the far right of that event's row, you'll see a toggle switch under the "Mark as conversion" column. Simply click this toggle to turn it on.

That's it. Seriously. From this point forward, anytime GA4 records that event, it will also count it as a conversion in your reports.

Method 2: Creating a Custom Conversion from a New Event

What if the action you want to track isn't a standard event? For this, you need to create your own custom event and then mark it as a conversion. The most common and reliable way to do this is by tracking visits to a dedicated confirmation or "thank-you" page.

When to Use This Method

Use this method when you want to track an action unique to your website, such as:

A user submitting your "Contact Us" form and landing on /thank-you.
A user signing up for an ebook and being redirected to /download-confirmed.
A visitor completing a quiz and seeing a /results page.

Step 1: Create a Custom Event Based on a Page View

First, we need to teach GA4 to recognize a visit to your thank-you page as a special new event.

Navigate to Admin, and under the Property column, go to Events.
Click the blue Create event button. Then on the next screen, click Create again.
You are now in the custom event builder. You need to configure two main things:
- Custom event name: Give your new event a clear, descriptive name. Use snake_case (all lowercase with underscores instead of spaces). For our example, we'll use contact_form_submission.
- Matching conditions: This is where you tell GA4 what has to happen for this event to be triggered. We're going to create a rule based on the page URL.
Configure the matching conditions as follows:
- Parameter: event_name | Operator: equals | Value: page_view
- Click Add condition.
- Parameter: page_location | Operator: contains | Value: /thank-you
Note: Just use the part of the URL that comes after your domain, like /thank-you or /contact-us/success. Using contains is often safer than equals in case extra characters like a trailing / are added to the URL.
Leave the "Copy parameters from the source event" box checked. This is good practice.
Click Create in the top-right corner.

You have now successfully created a custom event! But we're not quite done. GA4 knows about the contact_form_submission event, but it doesn't know it's a conversion yet.

Step 2: Register the New Custom Event as a Conversion

Now, we just need to complete the final step and tell GA4 to treat our new event as a conversion.

Your new custom event won't appear as an option to mark as a conversion until GA4 has received it at least once. The easiest way to trigger it is to go to your website yourself and complete the action (e.g., fill out your contact form to land on the /thank-you page). You may need to wait several hours, sometimes up to 24, for GA4 to process it.

Once you are sure the event has been triggered:

Navigate to Admin, and under the Property column, go to Conversions under Data stream.
Click the blue New conversion event button.
In the text box that pops up, type the exact name of the custom event you created in Step 1. In our case, that is contact_form_submission. The name must be identical.
Click Save.

Your new custom event will now appear in your list of conversion events and will be counted across all of your GA4 reports going forward.

Finding and Analyzing Your Conversion Data

Setting up conversions is pointless if you don't know where to find the data. Here are the key places within GA4 to see how your marketing efforts are performing.

Acquisition Reports: Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. This is one of the most powerful reports. You can scroll the table to the right to see the Conversions column. This shows you exactly how many conversions each marketing channel (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, etc.) is responsible for.
Dedicated Conversions Report: Go to Reports > Engagement > Conversions. This report gives you a summary of all your configured conversion events, showing you the total number of conversions for each and who is completing them.
Advertising Workspace: For more advanced analysis, check out the Advertising tab. The reports here, especially under Attribution, help you understand the full customer journey and how different channels contribute to a final conversion, not just the last click.

Final Thoughts

Setting up conversion tracking is the single most important step you can take to make Google Analytics useful. It helps you move past vanity metrics like sessions and page views and focus on the actions that truly grow your business. By defining what matters, you can make smarter decisions about your marketing, allocate budgets more effectively, and optimize your website for real results.

Of course, getting your conversion data right in Google Analytics is often just the beginning. The real challenge comes when you need to see how those GA conversions connect to your ad spend from Google Ads, your sales data from Shopify, or your lead info in a CRM. Instead of spending hours exporting data into spreadsheets, we built Graphed to do the heavy lifting for you. By connecting all your platforms in one place, you can ask plain-English questions like "Show me a comparison of revenue from Google versus Facebook Ads last month" and instantly get a live dashboard with the answer.