How to See Conversions in Google Analytics 4

Finding your conversion data in Google Analytics 4 is a common point of confusion, especially if you’re used to Universal Analytics. The new event-based model changes how conversions are defined and where you look for them. This article will guide you through exactly how to set up, find, and analyze your conversion data in GA4 so you can clearly see what’s working.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

What Counts as a Conversion in GA4?

The most significant change in GA4 is the shift from "Goals" to "Events." In Universal Analytics, you set up specific Goals (like a destination URL visit or a session duration) to track conversions. In GA4, any event can be designated as a conversion.

This means you don't configure "Goals" anymore. Instead, you track an important user action as an event, and then you simply flip a switch to tell GA4 that this specific event should be counted as a conversion.

This approach is far more flexible. You can track things like video views, file downloads, or specific button clicks as conversions without complex setups. First, you need an event. GA4 events fall into four categories:

• Automatically collected events: These are events GA4 gathers by default when you install the tracking code, such as session_start, first_visit, and page_view.
• Enhanced measurement events: These are also automatic (if you enable them) and track more specific interactions like scroll (when a user scrolls 90% of the page), file_download, and form_start.
• Recommended events: These are events Google suggests for common business types, like add_to_cart for e-commerce or generate_lead for B2B. They have predefined names and parameters.
• Custom events: These are events you define and name yourself to track actions unique to your website, like clicked_demo_button or completed_quiz.

Any event from these categories can be marked as a conversion. For example, a purchase event is an obvious conversion for an e-commerce store, while a generate_lead or a custom form_submission event would be conversions for a service-based business.

How to Designate an Event as a Conversion

Once you have an event that you want to count as a conversion, you must explicitly tell GA4 to treat it that way. The process is straightforward.

Let's say you've created a custom event called contact_form_success that fires every time someone submits your contact form. To mark it as a conversion:

1. In your GA4 property, navigate to the Admin section (the gear icon in the bottom-left).
2. Under the Data display column, click on Events.
3. You'll see a list of all events your site has tracked. Find your contact_form_success event in the list.
4. On the right side of that row, you'll see a toggle switch under the "Mark as conversion" column. Simply click this toggle to turn it on.

That's it. From this point forward, Google Analytics will track every instance of the contact_form_success event as a conversion. Keep in mind that it can take 24-48 hours for new conversion data to appear in your reports.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Creating a Conversion from a Page Visit

A common conversion action is when a user lands on a "thank you" or confirmation page. While there is no "Destination Goal" feature like in Universal Analytics, creating this is simple using GA4's event creation tool.

Suppose your thank-you page URL is https://www.yourwebsite.com/thank-you. Here’s how you’d create a new conversion event for it:

1. Go to Admin > Events.
2. Click the Create event button.
3. Click Create again on the next screen. A configuration panel will open.
4. In the Custom event name field, enter a name for your new event, like "thank_you_page_visit". Note: Use underscores instead of spaces.
5. Under Matching Conditions, set up the following rule:
6. Click Add condition and add a second rule:
7. Click Create in the top-right corner.

Now, you have a new custom event called 'thank_you_page_visit' that will fire every time a 'page_view' happens on a URL containing '/thank-you'. You just need to wait for it to show up in your Events list and then mark it as a conversion using the toggle switch as described above.

Where to See Your Conversion Data in GA4

After you’ve set up your conversions and allowed some time for data collection, you can find the information in a few different reports.

The Main Conversions Report

This is the most direct place to see a summary of all your conversion activities:

• From the left-hand navigation, go to Reports.
• Click on Engagement > Conversions.

The report displayed is a simple table listing every event you've marked as a conversion. The columns you'll see are:

• Event name: The name of the conversion event itself (e.g., purchase, generate_lead).
• Conversions: The total number of times each conversion event occurred.
• Total users: The number of unique users who triggered that conversion event.
• Event revenue: The total revenue associated with the conversion. This is populated automatically for 'purchase' events if you have e-commerce tracking enabled, or you can pass a value and currency parameter with other conversion events.

This report is great for a high-level overview, but its real value is limited. To gain actionable insights, you need to see your conversion data in the context of other dimensions, like traffic source or landing page.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Seeing Conversions in Acquisition Reports

To understand which marketing channels are driving results, you should review your Traffic acquisition report.

1. Navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
2. Scroll the table to the right. The last column is titled Conversions.

This view shows you a familiar table of traffic sources grouped by 'Session default channel grouping' (e.g., Organic Search, Direct, Paid Social). The conversions column displays the total number of conversions attributed to each channel. If you want to analyze completions for a specific conversion event, you can use the dropdown menu at the top of the column to select just one, such as generate_lead.

This report helps you answer critical questions like:

• Which marketing channel drives the most form submissions?
• Is our paid search budget leading to actual sales?
• Does traffic from social media ever convert?

Using Explorations for Deeper Analysis

The standard reports are useful, but for custom analysis, GA4's 'Explore' section is the most powerful tool. Here, you can build custom reports from scratch. The Funnel exploration is particularly valuable for visualizing the user journey toward a conversion.

For example, let's build a simple funnel to see how many users visit the contact page and then successfully submit the form.

1. In the left Navigation menu, click Explore.
2. Select Funnel exploration from the template gallery.
3. In the 'Tab Settings' column on the left, under Steps, you'll configure the user's path. Let’s create two steps:

The report will instantly generate a funnel visualization showing how many users started at Step 1, how many proceeded to Step 2, and the abandonment rate between them. Now you can not only count the number of conversions, but you can see how efficiently you're guiding a user to that conversion point. This helps you identify points of friction on your website and find opportunities for improvement that the standard reports won't show you.

Common GA4 Conversion Questions & Troubleshooting

Why are my conversions not showing up?

This is a common issue with a few possible causes:

• It's too soon: Conversion data can take 24-48 hours to fully process and appear in your reports.
• Event setup is incorrect: Double-check that the event you marked as a conversion is firing correctly. You can use GA4's DebugView to test this in real-time.
• Filters are active: Ensure you don't have a report filter applied that could be excluding your conversion data.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

What's the difference between "Conversions" and "Event count"?

An 'event count' is the total number of times an event was triggered. 'Conversions count' refers to the event counts that you've marked as conversions. A key difference from Universal Analytics is that GA4, by default, counts every instance of a conversion event. In Universal Analytics, a Goal would only be counted once per session. If a user submits a form three times in one session in GA4, that will count as three conversions.

How can I see conversions from a specific campaign?

In the Traffic acquisition report, you can change the primary dimension from 'Session default channel grouping' to 'Session campaign'. This will break down your conversions by the specific campaign names you've tagged in your URLs (using UTM parameters), giving you a direct look at the ROI of each campaign.

Final Thoughts

Viewing conversion data in Google Analytics 4 requires a slightly different mindset than Universal Analytics, shifting your focus to event-based tracking. Once you define your key user actions as events and mark them as conversions, you'll unlock a more flexible and powerful system for analysis. Use the Conversions and Traffic Acquisition reports for daily monitoring and dive into Explorations for deeper insights into user journeys to your key destinations.

We know that managing GA4 analytics along with data from Shopify, Facebook Ads, and other CRM systems can be a daunting task. That's why we created Graphed. We believe getting quick answers shouldn't be hard. Our integrated technology allows you to connect to various data sources and use our unique natural language feature to ask simple questions like, "Which ad campaigns drove the highest ROI during our last sale?" Our technology instantly produces interactive dashboards so you can quickly access up-to-date answers. This enables you to spend more time acting on insights rather than gathering data.