How to Track SaaS in Google Analytics

Tracking a SaaS product in Google Analytics feels different than tracking an e-commerce store, and for good reason - the customer journey is far more complex. Instead of a straightforward path from ad to purchase, you have free trials, complicated onboarding flows, feature adoption curves, and long-term user retention to worry about. This guide will walk you through the essential conversions and events you need to track in Google Analytics 4, connecting your marketing efforts directly to in-app user activity for a complete picture of your growth.

Why SaaS Analytics is a Unique Challenge

In e-commerce, the funnel is clean and simple: Someone sees a product, adds it to their cart, and buys it. For a SaaS business, the journey is longer and filled with crucial milestones that predict long-term success. Your user's path likely looks more like this:

• Visits your marketing website from an ad or organic search.
• Reads the blog and explores the pricing page.
• Signs up for a 14-day free trial.
• Completes (or abandons) your onboarding tutorial.
• Adopts key features that deliver the "aha!" moment.
• Invites a team member.
• Upgrades to a paid plan.
• ...and hopefully sticks around for months or years.

Metrics like Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), and Churn are the lifeblood of a SaaS company. While Google Analytics isn't a billing system, setting up the right tracking allows you to see the leading indicators for these metrics. You can answer critical questions like, "Which marketing channels bring in users who are most likely to complete onboarding?" or "Does using Feature X lead to a higher upgrade rate?"

The core challenge, and the one we'll focus on solving, is stitching together the behavior of an anonymous website visitor with the actions of a known, logged-in user inside your application.

Setting Up Your GA4 Foundation for SaaS

Before you start tracking events, make sure your reporting foundation is solid. The most common mistake SaaS companies make is creating two separate Google Analytics properties: one for their marketing site (e.g., my-saas-company.com) and another for their web app (e.g., app.my-saas-company.com).

Use a single GA4 property for both your marketing site and your app.

This is non-negotiable. Using one property allows GA4 to track a user's entire journey across different subdomains seamlessly. A visitor can land on a blog post, click over to the pricing page, and then sign up on your app subdomain, all within a single user session. This unified view is the key to connecting acquisition efforts with product engagement.

To make this work, the secret ingredient is the User ID feature.

Bridging the Gap with User ID Tracking

The User ID is what lets you connect anonymous pre-signup behavior with known post-signup activity. It’s a unique, non-personally identifiable string (like 'user-12345') that you generate from your own user database when a user signs up or logs into your app.

Here’s how it works:

1. An anonymous user browses your marketing site. GA4 assigns them a random Client ID.
2. They decide to sign up for a trial. Once they create an account, your application's database assigns them a permanent User ID.
3. From that point forward, you pass this User ID to Google Analytics every time they are logged in.

GA4 is smart enough to then connect the dots, linking their pre-signup session history (what pages they viewed, which ad campaign they came from) with all their future in-app actions. This is incredibly powerful.

How to Implement User ID

Your developer will need to implement this. Whenever a user is logged in, you need to include their User ID in your Google Tag configuration. Here’s a basic example of what the code looks like using gtag.js:

// Get the unique user ID from your application's backend
const userId = getLoggedInUserId(), 

// Set the user_id in your Google Analytics configuration
gtag('config', 'G-XXXXXXXXXX', {
  'user_id': userId
}),

Getting this single feature right solves the biggest SaaS tracking problem and makes all your subsequent analysis more meaningful.

Tracking the Full SaaS Funnel: Key Events you Need

With your foundation in place, you can now start tracking the specific events that define the SaaS customer lifecycle. We'll break these down into three stages: pre-signup, in-app product usage, and monetization.

1. Marketing & Acquisition Events (Pre-Signup)

These events happen on your public-facing marketing website and help you understand how users get to the point of signing up.

• sign_up: This is your most important marketing conversion. Fire this event when a user successfully creates a free trial or freemium account. This marks a successful handoff from marketing to product.
• generate_lead: If you have a separate B2B funnel, use this for actions like "Request a Demo," "Contact Sales," or downloading a whitepaper.
• view_pricing_page: This is a strong signal of user intent. Tracking this helps you build audiences of high-intent visitors you can retarget.

2. Product Engagement Events (Post-Signup)

These events happen inside your app and measure whether users are getting value from your product. This is crucial for predicting retention and identifying power users. Don't go overboard, focus on the primary "jobs to be done" in your app.

User Onboarding

• tutorial_begin and tutorial_complete: If you have a guided setup or onboarding flow, track its start and finish. A huge drop-off here is a major red flag that you need to fix your activation sequence.

Core Feature Adoption

• feature_used: This is a flexible and powerful event. Use a parameter to specify which feature was used. For example:

gtag('event', 'feature_used', { 'feature_name': 'create_invoice' }),
gtag('event', 'feature_used', { 'feature_name': 'export_report' }),

• Core Value Actions: Track events tied to the user receiving value. For an analytics product, this might be dashboard_created. For a project management tool, it could be task_assigned. These are your "aha!" moments.
• login: A simple event, but tracking it consistently helps you measure usage frequency and user stickiness.

3. Monetization & Revenue Events

Finally, track the events that directly tie to revenue. This allows you to measure the ROI of your marketing spend and understand which user behaviors lead to paying customers.

• upgrade_to_paid: The moment a free user becomes a paying customer. This is another crucial macro-conversion for your business.
• purchase: Use the standard GA4 purchase event when an upgrade happens. Crucially, include value and currency parameters so you can attribute real revenue back to your acquisition channels.

gtag('event', 'purchase', {
    transaction_id: 'T_12345',
    value: 29.99,
    currency: 'USD'
}),

• plan_change: If a user upgrades or downgrades their plan, track it. You can use parameters to capture more detail, like previous_plan and new_plan.

Building Actionable Reports in GA4

Just tracking events isn't enough, you need to turn that data into insights. With the event structure above, you can now build powerful reports inside Google Analytics.

Map the User Journey with a Funnel Exploration Report

The Funnel Exploration report is perfect for visualizing your entire customer lifecycle. You can build a funnel that mirrors the user journey across your site and app:

1. Step 1: Session Start (from a specific campaign like 'Google Ads')
2. Step 2: view_pricing_page
3. Step 3: sign_up
4. Step 4: tutorial_complete
5. Step 5: purchase (or upgrade_to_paid)

This report will immediately show you exactly where users are dropping off, so you know whether to focus your optimization efforts on your landing pages, signup flow, or product onboarding.

Identify Valuable Behaviors with Segment Comparisons

Segments allow you to isolate groups of users based on their actions and compare them. Ask strategic questions and use segments to find the answers:

• "Do users who use the 'Report Export' feature have a higher conversion rate to a paid plan?" Create a segment of users who triggered the feature_used event with a feature_name of 'export_report.' Compare their purchase rate against all other users.
• "How does engagement differ between users from our SEO efforts versus our paid ads?" Create two segments based on the 'First user session acquisition channel' (Organic Search vs. Paid Search). Compare their average engagement time, core feature adoption, and lifetime value.

Final Thoughts

Properly tracking a SaaS product in Google Analytics boils down to a simple framework: use a single property, bridge the pre- and post-signup journey with User ID, and track a focused set of events that reflects your customer's path to value. This transforms GA4 from a simple website traffic tool into a powerful product analytics platform that can guide your growth strategy.

Of course, building these funnels and getting clear answers can still be a challenging and manual process inside GA4’s interface. At Graphed, we’ve connected directly to data sources like Google Analytics to remove that friction. Instead of wrestling with report builders, you can simply ask questions in plain English, like "Show me how many users from Facebook ads completed the tutorial this month" or "Create a dashboard showing signups vs. upgrades by marketing channel." We instantly translate your questions into live, interactive dashboards, so you can spend less time building reports and more time acting on insights. You can start having conversations with your data today at Graphed.