To create a simpler and more intuitive experience in the way conversions are measured and reported across Google Ads and Analytics, Google has unified how conversions are defined. This has resulted in a notable change in terminology which is being rolled out across GA4 accounts.
Previously, important events that were marked as conversions in Analytics were measured differently from how Google Ads conversions are measured, leading to discrepancies between Google Ads and Analytics. From now on, events that measure actions that are important to the success of your business are now called ‘key events.’ Behavioral data from the key events can be used to improve the user experience across your websites and apps.
A ‘conversion’ now refers to an important action that you want to use to measure the performance of your ad campaigns and optimise your bidding strategy.
With an aligned definition of ‘conversion’ across Google Ads and Analytics, it’s now possible, for the first time, to view consistent conversion-based performance metrics in both Google Ads and Analytics reports.
To measure a key event in Analytics, create or identify an action that’s particularly important to the success of your business then create that as an event and mark it as a key event.
Google Ads uses imported Analytics key events to create conversions that provide a consistent way of measuring important actions in both Google Analytics and Google Ads. This helps to improve marketing strategies by providing consistent conversion counts across platforms to understand and optimise ad campaigns. Unlike key events, conversions are eligible for bidding and reporting in Google Ads.
Google Ads conversions created from Analytics key events also appear as conversions in the Advertising section in Google Analytics. In this section it’s possible to use the Pathing and Attribution reports to attribute credit to different touchpoints along a user’s path to triggering key events and see how different attribution models distribute credit differently to those touchpoints.
You can read more about key events and the differences between conversions and key events.
If you want to know more about how the correct use of key events in Analytics and conversions in Google Ads could help your business, please get in touch.