If you don’t already have goals in your UA Analytics when you migrate to the new GA4 analytics you will need to set up some GA4 Goals.
Goals (now events and conversions) are a valuable measure of activity on your site. They can track visits to specific pages of your site such as your contact page, or monitor how many visitors completed an enquiry form. These conversions also help you to focus your Google Ads campaigns. If you don’t have any now is the time to set them up.
Here is a step-by-step guide to creating Goals (now called events) in GA4 Google Analytics.
Log into your GA4 analytics property and go to the Configure tab. This will load the events page
Click CREATE EVENT
This will take you to the customised events page
Click CREATE
At this point you will need to give the event some information as to what you are wanting to track. In this case we will be tracking visits to a key page on our site, the contact page
For this we give the event the following information
- Custom event name. Call it something relevant such as Views_Contact_page
- Parameter. There are many you can select from but in this case the parameter is Page_Location
- Operator select the relevant operator. In this case it is contains
- Value. Give it a value in this case contact from the URL
- E.g www.petitedigital.co.uk/contact
Click Create
You will now see the event that you have created. Repeat this for all the new page view events you wish to create.
The next part is a waiting game. Unlike when using the GA4 set up assistant, you will need to wait for the events you have created manually to be triggered before you can mark these as a conversion.
Let’s take a look at that a triggered event looks like
In this instance the event has been triggered by a view of the contact page.
Once all your events have been triggered you can mark them all as conversions and then import them into your google ads account.