Every website has goal conversion events—think purchases, adds-to-cart, sign-ups—that can be set up and monitored from inside Google Analytics. But do you know how many people are completing your goals, and how many are not—and more importantly, why?

Let’s take a look at how to track your goal conversion rate (now ‘session key event rate’), what you need to look out for in GA4, and how you can get closer to answering the question ‘why’.

What is a goal conversion in Google Analytics?

Key events (formerly ‘goals’ in Universal Analytics) help you keep track of the actions your website visitors did or didn't take. A goal conversion (or goal completion) takes place when your visitors complete a specific key event you’re tracking—for example, making a purchase, adding a product to cart, or signing up for a newsletter.

You can access key event data in many Google Analytics reports by viewing and filtering the ‘Key events’ column. Then, set up an exploration to track specific goal conversions through relevant data like session key event rate.

How is the goal conversion rate calculated?

In Google Analytics, the session key event rate, or goal conversion rate, is calculated as the number of key event sessions divided by the total number of sessions, times 100.

For example: if your ecommerce key event is ‘Purchase completed’, every time a purchase is completed, it’ll count as a completed event or goal conversion. If you have 200 sessions and 5 successful purchases, the session key event rate, aka conversion rate, is (5/200)*100 = 2.5%.

Why is it important to track your goal conversion rate?

Tracking the conversion rate of your key events can tell you how well your website is doing in specific areas you’re interested in. A low conversion rate means not many people are doing what you want them to, while a high one conversely shows you what’s going well. 

For any ecommerce website, an obvious key event to track is ‘purchases completed’, and knowing the session key event rate can help you look at conversion trends and fluctuations, spot opportunities, and intervene if there are sudden drops. 

There are plenty of other key events you can create and modify to paint a more complete picture of your visitors’ journey across the website, including  

• Add to cart

• Register an account

• Enter checkout

• Sign up for a newsletter

Applying ecommerce event tracking to each of these helps you get a better sense of what’s working, and isn’t, on your website.

How to use reports to analyze goal conversion event data

Once you’ve set up your key event goal conversions, you can review them alongside other metrics in various detail reports, for example, by accessing the User acquisition report and seeing how different traffic sources compare:

Similarly, you can go into the Landing pages report and compare performance by looking at differences in behavior dependent on where people entered your website from.

The point is: there are many different ways to slice and dice available data around key event goal conversions. Google Analytics data is fairly accurate, but averages can lie—which is where drilling down into different reports and/or looking at specific dimensions (source, medium, device, etc.) can help you get a better sense of what’s going on.

Apply different dimensions to your reports and compare key event rates across types of traffic—for example, you could investigate the ‘Purchase completed’ event across desktop and mobile users and see if you can spot any obvious or revealing differences.

A quirk of key event counts

When you navigate to the Key events column of a report, the default view is ‘All events’—and the key event count you see is a sum of all your key events. 

This means that if you’ve set up 5 key events that all happen to convert at 25% each, your session key event rate (or goal conversion rate) will be 25 + 25 + 25 + 25 + 25 = 125%. Which is clearly a useless data point.

And even if you didn’t experience this edge case, looking at this overview can be quite deceiving—you might have an overperformer that skews all other numbers, and think you’re better/worse off than you actually are. Reminder: always use the drop-down menu in the ‘All events’ column to investigate the individual key event you’re interested in. Then, build an exploration to track metrics like session key event rate (i.e. goal conversion rate) and supplement the numbers with qualitative data like user feedback.

Clicking the All Users default setting at the top will open a menu where you can select multiple segments:

There is no good, perfect, or ideal goal conversion rate. Conversion rates are always going to vary by so many things: your website type, the industry you're in, what your unique value proposition is, how much seasonality the website has, and even things that you as a marketer or optimizer cannot really affect, like the actual price of a product. There is only so much you can do by focusing on industry benchmarks or competitors. I’d say it’s more important to always focus on beating your current goal conversion rate, and not compare it to stats out there that you may have overheard, or been told about, or read on articles. Rich Page, Website Optimizer

How to investigate and improve your goal conversion event rate

The data you’ve collected in Google Analytics so far gives you a solid understanding about the performance of your key conversion event(s)—but when it comes to actually improving key conversion event rates, more digging is required. You need to get to the bottom of your visitors’ motivation and research what, if anything, is stopping them from completing the key events you’re tracking.

To get started, run a 3-step investigation to discover: 

• The drivers (things, desires, motivations) that attract people to your site 

• The barriers that cause them to leave 

• The hooks that persuade a visitor to act (and complete a key event)

Step 1: understand what brings people to your site (drivers)

The first thing you want to discover is why people come to your site, and how their motivation aligns with your goal(s). You can’t get that from Google Analytics alone—but GA4 is a good starting point nonetheless.

Head to the Landing pages report and use the Key events column to filter the results for your particular conversion goal.

Find the pages with the highest sessions, and set up an on-site survey in Contentsquare on those specific URLs. Ask your visitors why they’re visiting with a question such as “What was the main reason for your visit today?” and judge whether their intentions are similar to your conversion goal.

See Contentsquare’s 40+ survey templates in action

For example: say your goal is a purchase. By placing a survey on the first URLs a person tends to visit, you might find that they don’t actually intend to purchase until they see a customer testimonial—and that it makes sense to make customer testimonials more prominent on the landing page.

💡 Pro tip: remember how you can use reports in GA to find whether your averages are skewed? Adding a secondary dimension (such as device category) to your Landing pages report also helps you get more granular with your survey targeting. For example, if it turns out that mobile visitors land primarily on a different page than desktop ones, you can set your survey to appear on those specific URLs and only show to relevant device users.

Step 2: understand what stops people along the conversion path (barriers)

You can dig deeper into why people abandoned your site (and conversion goal) by reviewing how website visitors engage with important pages before they leave with funnels.

To do this, head to Exploration > Start a new exploration > Funnel exploration in GA4, and break down your data into individual conversion goals by adding event and dimension conditions. The funnel report shows you the paths your visitors take before reaching a conversion goal (completing a key event) and visualizes the volume of exits or drop-offs for each step.

Clicking on each step opens a second graph, where you can make a note of the pre-conversion pages with the highest drop-off rates. Once you have a list of pages that you want to investigate, use Contentsquare Session Replay on those URLs to see if you can spot any reasons why people exit your site without completing the goal.

Let’s see what that might look like if your goal is a purchase. Say you discover in GA4 that your /cart/ page has a 70% drop-off rate. You then use Contentsquare’s filters to view site exit replays of the visitors who left your site on the /cart/ page:

You’ll have a list of recordings of people who visited your pre-conversion page but didn’t convert. Spend a few hours digging through these recordings. Can you spot any areas of the page that people seemed confused about? This could look like

• Hovering over a specific element for a long time

• Viewing a specific area of the page immediately before exiting

• Scrolling up and down on the page repeatedly

If you spot anything that’s obviously broken, go right ahead and fix it; if not, use the data to develop hypotheses about design or content changes you can test. Monitor how your goal conversion rate (or session key event rate in GA4) moves afterward—it should improve since you’re addressing the things people stumble on pre-conversion.

Step 3: find what convinces people to convert (hooks)

The ‘hook’ is what causes visitors to complete your conversion goal or key event. Once again, you’ll want to hear directly from users themselves—but instead of asking just any site visitor to give you their feedback, you can target people who’ve already converted, and send them a simple email survey to ask why they completed the goal. Example questions include

• What are the top three things that made you [complete goal]?

• What was your biggest concern before [completing goal]?

• What, if anything, almost stopped you from [completing goal]?

Let’s put that into practice and say your Google Analytics goal conversion is a ‘complete a purchase’ key event. If you received your customers’ consent to use their email address, you can build a Contentsquare post-purchase survey with the three questions above and email it to them.

You might get feedback like

• “I saw the company had a 5-star rating”

• “I almost didn’t [complete goal] because I couldn’t see any reviews from the sales page. I had to visit TrustPilot”

• “I converted because an influencer I follow had [product] on their Twitter profile”

Only the people who’ve already converted know what nudged them and eventually won them over—these things are bound to have a similar impact on other visitors, and boost your goal’s conversion rate in return.

If you’re looking for a more in-depth conversion rate optimization (CRO) action plan, we developed a CRO quick start guide to help you get to work.

FAQs about goal conversion rate in Google Analytics

Editor's note: Google launched Google Analytics 4 in 2020, which ultimately replaced the previous Universal Analytics product in 2023. This article contains both legacy and up-to-date terminology used for tracking goal conversion rates, now session key event rates, in GA. This content was originally created with the help of web analytics and CRO expert Rich Page, who was interviewed by our team and talked to us about all things GA in August 2019.