Question 1

What's the difference between an event and a conversion in GA4?

Accepted Answer

In GA4, everything is an event — pageviews, scrolls, clicks, custom actions are all recorded as events. A conversion is simply an event you've told GA4 to treat as a primary goal. Marking an event as a conversion allows it to appear in conversion reports, be used as a goal in attribution analysis, and be tracked in the summary metrics at the top of the Property dashboard. The practical difference: events tell you what happened; conversions tell you what mattered.

Question 2

How do I assign a monetary value to a lead?

Accepted Answer

In GA4, you can assign a value parameter to a conversion event — for example, if your average deal size is £5,000 and your lead-to-close rate is 20%, each lead is worth approximately £1,000. Pass this as the value parameter on the conversion event (in GTM: add a variable for the lead value in the event parameters). This allows GA4 to calculate "Conversion Value" by channel — giving you a revenue proxy for organic without waiting for CRM data to feed back in. Note: this is an estimated value, not actual revenue, and should be reviewed whenever lead quality or close rates change.

Question 3

How long does it take for conversion events to appear in GA4?

Accepted Answer

Once configured, conversion events typically appear in GA4 reports within 24–48 hours of the first qualifying event firing. Historically collected data (before the event was set up or marked as a conversion) is not retroactively attributed — you can only see conversions from the date the event was first recorded. This is why it's worth setting up conversion tracking early: the historical data you don't have from the first six months of a site is data you can never recover.

Question 4

What's the right attribution model for organic conversions?

Accepted Answer

GA4's default is data-driven attribution (DDA) when there's sufficient conversion volume — it distributes credit across the touchpoints that contributed to the conversion. For organic SEO purposes, last-click attribution is often more actionable: it shows which landing page the visitor was on when they converted, which maps directly to content decisions. Use both: DDA for the overall channel-level view (how much does organic contribute vs. paid vs. direct), and last-click or landing-page-based views for page-level optimisation decisions.

Question 5

Can I have more than one primary conversion?

Accepted Answer

Yes, if your business genuinely has multiple distinct paths to revenue — for example, a form submission and a phone call both leading to the same sales process. Mark both as conversions, but keep the count small and each one genuinely revenue-relevant. The failure mode to avoid is marking five or six events as conversions because each one is "sort of" meaningful; that's how conversion rate stops being a reliable comparison metric. If in doubt, ask whether a sales or account manager would recognise this specific event as "we got a real lead" — if not, it's a micro-conversion, not a primary one.

Question 6

Should conversion events be connected back to the CRM?

Accepted Answer

Eventually, yes — GA4 conversion events tell you that a lead came in and from which landing page, but not whether that lead actually closed. Connecting a CRM identifier (passed via a hidden form field or a client ID parameter) lets you trace a GA4 conversion through to a closed-won deal in the CRM, which is the only way to calculate true revenue-per-channel rather than an estimated lead value. This is more setup work than the conversion event itself, but it's the difference between "we generate leads" and "we generate revenue," which is the question that ultimately matters for budget decisions.

conversion tracking

Setting Up Conversion Events That Map to Revenue

Server-Side Tracking for GA4: Why It Matters and How to Set It Up