Remember goals in Universal Analytics?
You can still see them if you want to reminisce.
One thing that was cool and actually pretty straightforward about goals was the funnel.
You could just check a box and tell analytics that this goal was only completed if people trundled in from another page.
That meant there was less chance of your goal misfiring because, for example, someone refreshed the page or clicked the back button.
But with conversions in GA4 it’s a bit different. There’s no button to click to make it a funnel.
I found this annoying so I went looking for a solution.
And I think I found one.
What you need
Just a heads up, you’ll need to use Tag Manager to follow this tutorial and you’ll need to have added Google Analytics to your Tag Manager account.
What are triggers and tags?
In Tag Manager Triggers fire when something you define happens on your website. That could be clicking a button, filling out a form, visiting a page and more.
Tags connect that trigger to your analytics, they tell it, hey this thing happened that you’ll want to know about.
Creating the trigger
Let’s start with the trigger, because this is where the magic happens.
Click on triggers on the left-hand side of your tag manager dashboard
Click ‘new’
Under trigger configuration select ‘page view’
Select ‘some page views’
In this first section we want to add the first page in your funnel.
So in my case it’s this page, the page that has my form on it for signing up to analytics day.
And I just want the end of the URL from this. The bit after spiderworking.com/ so I’m going to copy that.
Now choose ‘referrer’ from the drop-down in this first box.
Leave contains as is
And in that last box paste in that link you just copied.
Now click the + button to add a second condition
Here we’re going to add the thank you page.
Just like we did last time copy the last piece of the URL, in my case it’s this section after spiderworking.com/
And paste that into the box.
Give your trigger a name and save.
Now you need to connect that trigger to Google Analytics so it can see it.
And you do that with a tag.
Creating the tag
Click on ‘tags’ on the left-hand side
Then new
And click on tag configuration
from the Google Analytics menu select Google Analytics: GA4 Event
In select configuration tag select your GA4 tag from the menu. If you don’t have one you need to add GA4 to your tag manager account.
Give your event a name. If you want to separate words here use an underscore.
keep a record of that name, you’ll need it later.
In triggering select the trigger you just created.
Give the tag a name and save.
Before you upload this to your website you should preview it to make sure it’s firing correctly.
Click ‘Preview’ at the top of your tag manager. This opened a tag assist window.
Start by adding the full URL of your thank you page and click ‘connect’.
You’ll see it opens this in a new tab or window. The tag assist tag is still open and you’ll see it flashing blue
When you click into it you can see the tags that have fired. Your new tag shouldn’t have fired because we’ve only visited the thank you page, not the referral page.
Now let’s try the same thing but from the referral page.
This time add the page with the form on.
Check the new tag hasn’t fired already. (Same way as above)
Now fill in the form just like a customer would to get to the thank you page
Wait for the thank you page to load and then go back to the tag assist window.
Has the tag fired?
If everything worked as it should you can now click ‘submit’ to publish that tag live to your website.
Adding the conversion event to GA4
Now you have a more accurate conversion set up you need to tell Google Analtyics it’s a conversion.
Go to your GA4 dashboard
Go to the admin section by clicking the wheel at the bottom left of your page
Click into conversions
Click ‘new conversion event’
And just add in the name of the event you created in your tag. This just tells analytics that as soon as it finds an event with that name. it’s a conversion.
Now you have your funnel conversion set up you can measure the effectiveness of your website and the channels you use to drive traffic there.
