How to Set up Goals in Google Analytics

If you came here looking to “set up goals in Google Analytics,” there’s one thing you need to know first: Goals don’t exist in GA4 anymore. Universal Analytics stopped processing data on July 1, 2023, and the old Goals system retired with it. In Google Analytics 4 you track success a different way — by marking key events.

The good news: the idea is the same, and the setup is faster than it used to be. This guide gives you the plain-English translation from “Goals” to GA4, a step-by-step setup for key events and conversions, and — the part most tutorials skip — how to decide what’s actually worth tracking. It’s written for marketers, e-commerce owners, and analysts who need this configured correctly, not just clicked through.

In GA4, the entire “Goals” concept was replaced by an event-based model where any tracked action can be marked as a key event. Universal Analytics asked you to pick from four rigid goal types. GA4 flips that: everything a user does is an event, and you simply flag the events that matter to your business.

There’s a second twist that trips up a lot of people. In March 2024, Google renamed GA4 “conversions” to “key events,” with the rollout finishing by the end of Q2 2024. The word “conversion” didn’t disappear — it now belongs to Google Ads. So when you read “conversion” in a 2022 tutorial, today that usually means “key event.”

Here’s the quick mapping from the world you remember to the one you’re working in now.

If GA4’s layout still feels unfamiliar, it’s worth doing a quick lap of the interface first — our walkthrough on how to navigate Google Analytics 4 covers where everything moved.

GA4 works in three layers — Event → Key Event → Conversion — and understanding them removes 90% of the confusion. Every interaction is an event. The events you decide are important become key events. And the key events you push to Google Ads for bidding become conversions there.

Google’s own example makes it concrete. Say you want to know when someone scrolls 90% of a lead-generation page — enough to have seen your sign-up form. You find the scroll event and mark it as a key event. If that action later matters for optimizing ad campaigns, you create a conversion from it on the Google Ads side. Same action, three different jobs.

Once configured, key events appear in three places: the Reports section (Engagement → Key events), Explore (as a metric you can drag into any analysis), and the Advertising section (for anything tied to Google Ads). The “Key event rate” metric — the GA4 cousin of the old conversion rate — lives in your acquisition reports.

Before you mark anything, it helps to know which events GA4 already gives you and which ones you have to build. This is the modern version of the old “four goal types” — except instead of picking a goal category, you’re picking from four sources of events.

One shortcut worth knowing: the purchase event is marked as a key event automatically. For almost everything else, you do it yourself — which is exactly what the next section covers.

Setting up a key event takes one of two paths, depending on whether GA4 is already collecting the action you care about. If the event already exists in your reports, it’s a 30-second toggle. If it doesn’t, you create the event first, then mark it.

This is the route for anything in your automatically collected or enhanced measurement events — page views, scrolls, file downloads, site searches.

That’s it. If the event isn’t in the list yet but you know its exact name, open Key events instead, click New key event, and type the name. Watch the spelling — event names are case-sensitive, so Generate_Lead and generate_lead are treated as two completely different things.

Some of the most valuable actions aren’t tracked by default — for example, “the user reached the thank-you page after submitting a form.” You need to create that event before you can mark it.

You have two options. Inside GA4, use Admin → Events → Create event to build a new event from an existing one — say, fire reached_thankyou whenever page_location contains /thank-you/. Or, for anything more complex, use Google Tag Manager: create a GA4 Event tag, attach a trigger, and publish. Either way, once the new event starts showing up in your reports, go back and mark it as a key event using Method 1.

A practical note: new events aren’t retroactive, and GA4 can take up to 48 hours to process data. Confirm the event is firing in the Events report (or in DebugView for live testing) before you assume something’s broken.

A key event you can’t put a number against is just a counter — three settings turn it into something you can actually make budget decisions from. This is where the real work lives, and where most setups stop too early.

This is the direct heir to UA’s “Goal Value.” Giving a key event a monetary value lets GA4 attach a dollar figure to actions that aren’t purchases — leads, sign-ups, downloads — so you can compare channels on revenue, not just volume.

The math doesn’t need to be perfect to be useful. If 10% of your leads convert and your average order is $25, a single lead is worth roughly $2.50. Set that as the default value, and suddenly your acquisition reports show estimated value per channel instead of an abstract count. That’s a number a CMO can act on.

GA4 offers two ways to count a key event, and the wrong one will quietly distort your data.

My recommendation: leave purchases on “once per event” and switch lead-gen forms to “once per session.”

GA4 defaults to a data-driven attribution model — a real upgrade from UA’s last-click. In Admin → Attribution settings you can also set the lookback window and decide which channels can receive credit (paid and organic, or Google Ads only). These choices change how your key events are credited across reports, so set them deliberately rather than leaving the defaults unexamined.

A “conversion” in today’s GA4 is a key event that you’ve connected to Google Ads for bidding and measurement — and you only need it if you’re running ads. If you’re not advertising, key events alone are all you need.

Here’s the catch that costs people weeks: marking an event as a key event in GA4 does not automatically feed Google Ads. You need a linked Ads account, and you create the conversion as a separate step. Once linked, your GA4 key events can be created as conversions and shared between both platforms.

The exact linking process is its own job — we walk through it in our guide to linking Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts. And if your two dashboards show different numbers afterward, that’s expected, not a bug; the reasons are explained in our breakdown of why conversion counts differ between Google Ads and Analytics.

Tracking key events is pointless if you never look at them in a way that drives action. Start simple. In Reports → Engagement → Key events you’ll see counts per event. In the acquisition reports, add Sessions and Key events side by side to see which channels actually produce valuable actions — not just traffic.

You don’t need a 20-widget dashboard. You need a one-page view that answers a single question: is my marketing producing the actions I marked as important? If you want a clear method for building that, our guide on preparing a basic GA4 report lays it out, and the deeper overview of standard GA4 reports covers the rest.

A handful of GA4 quirks cause most of the “my conversions disappeared” panic — knowing them upfront saves you the headache.

The hardest part of setting up goals in GA4 isn’t the clicking — it’s deciding what deserves a slot. You have 30. Spend them well.

No. GA4 replaced Goals with key events when Universal Analytics stopped processing data on July 1, 2023. Instead of choosing from fixed goal types, you mark any tracked event as important to your business.

Key events replaced goals. The hierarchy is Event → Key Event → Conversion: every action is an event, the important ones become key events, and those tied to Google Ads become conversions.

A key event measures an action important to your business inside GA4. A conversion is that same key event connected to Google Ads for bidding and campaign measurement. Since March 2024, “conversion” is reserved for the Google Ads context.

Standard GA4 properties allow up to 30 key events each — up from the 20 goals per view in Universal Analytics. Once you hit the limit, additional toggles fail silently, so audit your list before adding more.

No. UA goals are not migrated automatically and must be rebuilt as key events in GA4. The 2024 rename only auto-converted existing GA4 conversions into key events.

Go to Admin → Events, find the event, and switch on “Mark as key event.” If GA4 isn’t tracking the action yet, create a custom event first (in GA4 or via Google Tag Manager), then mark it.

Yes. GA4’s default key event value is the equivalent of UA’s Goal Value. Setting it lets you compare channels by estimated revenue rather than raw counts.

“Once per event” counts every occurrence (best for purchases). “Once per session” counts a maximum of one per session (best for lead forms, and closer to how UA goals behaved).

Because the two platforms use different attribution models, counting methods, and processing windows. Some discrepancy is normal — see our guide on the differences in conversion counts between Google Ads and Analytics for the full explanation.