Key Events and Conversions in Google Analytics: What's new
In this video, we'll cover an update to conversions in Google Analytics, including some background context and a description of what's changing. For more details, check the linked Help Center article.
So what is happening? Previously in Google Analytics, you could choose events that were important to your business and mark them as conversions. The word conversions is also used by Google Ads to describe conversion data that is processed and measured differently than Analytics conversions.
To clear up the confusion and create more consistency for your reports, we're unifying measurement across products. The word conversion will now refer to the same thing everywhere it appears in reports across Google Analytics and in Google Ads.
Going forward, your important Analytics events will be called key events in Google Analytics and can be used to create conversions that are shared with Google Ads for bidding.
So in Google Analytics, you could now have events, key events and conversions. An event is used to measure a specific interaction or occurrence on your website or app, no change here. A key event is an Analytics event you mark as important to your business, such as a product purchase or newsletter subscription. Previously called conversions, key events can continue to help you understand how users engage with your website or app. Key event metrics are aggregated in Analytics reports and are not directly eligible for bidding.
Now, a conversion is an important event that you not only wanna count, but also want to use with your ad campaigns. Conversions let you measure the performance of your ads and optimize campaigns using events from Google Analytics.
Conversions are available for reporting and campaign optimization in Google Ads, and can also be viewed in the Advertising section in Google Analytics.
So how are these related?
In Google Analytics, you can mark any event as a key event. You can create custom events and mark those as key events too. Events and key events are both concepts created and reported in Google Analytics.
You can also use any event or key event to create a conversion, which is shared with Google Ads. Once you use an event to create a conversion, it also automatically becomes a key event too.
So on the surface, and if you don't use Google Ads at all, the biggest difference is a name change in Google Analytics from conversions to key events.
If you do have a Google Ads account linked to your Google Analytics property, you'll also see new conversion reporting in Analytics, which reports consistent numbers across Analytics and Google Ads.
There are also new reports in the Google Analytics Advertising section for you and new workflows for creating conversions. More details on these are outlined below in the video's description on YouTube.
So what do you need to know?
You don’t need to take any action.
Legacy conversions and Google Analytics will automatically be renamed key events, allowing you to continue highlighting those events that are important to your business in the report section.
So in reports, you'll start seeing key events where you previously saw conversions, and when you wanna mark a special event as important, you'll now see that you can mark it as a key event.
If you were previously exporting Analytics conversions to Google ads for bidding, then your existing conversions exported to ads will not need to be changed, and you don't need to make any updates to your ads bidding setup.
To create new conversions going forward, you'll be able to create conversions based on Analytics key events directly from the Google Ads UI and soon also from the Google Analytics UI.
To see more conversion performance reporting, go to the Advertising section in Google Analytics.
Now that you know what's new, you can check out the changes in your own Analytics property.
We'll add more detail and answer some frequently asked questions in the article linked in this video's description.
Thanks for watching and happy measuring.
For more information about this change, see Conversion vs. key events.