Measuring Custom Conversions in GA4: Strategies and Best Practices

The Problem: Why Measuring Conversions Is No Longer Obvious

In today’s digital landscape, analyzing user behavior on your website or app is fundamental for growth and achieving business goals. But how effective are our marketing actions, really?
The answer lies in being able to correctly measure conversions—those strategic actions (form submissions, purchases, button clicks, document downloads, etc.) that bring value to your company.

With the move to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), this task has become both more challenging and more powerful. GA4 offers advanced tracking tools but introduces a new paradigm, creating plenty of difficulties for marketers, analysts, and developers:

• The “goals” of Universal Analytics have become “events” and “conversions” in GA4
• The configuration flow has been revolutionized, requiring new technical skills
• Increasing restrictions due to GDPR and cookie consent requirements make it essential to properly manage consent collection before sending any data to GA4

Without correct configuration of consent collection and conversions, you risk making decisions based on partial or incorrect data, negatively impacting ad campaigns, budgets, and growth strategies.

GA4: A New Generation of Conversion Analytics

What’s Different from Before?

In Universal Analytics (UA), you were used to creating goals based on predefined models (page views, session duration, URL-based triggers).
With GA4, the logic changes:

• Everything is event-based: every user interaction (click, scroll, form submission, etc.) is tracked as an “event”
• Conversions are events marked as “conversion”: you can turn any event into a conversion, giving you total tracking flexibility

Proper measurement today must always start with privacy consent collection, especially for all data sent to third-party services like Google Analytics.

What Are Custom Conversions?

A custom conversion is a specific, tailored event for your website/app that represents a particular value action.

You can create custom conversions in several ways:

• Using existing event parameters in GA4
• With a Tag Manager to track specific interactions
• By customizing GA4 implementation via code

Practical example:
If you want to know how many people click the “Request Demo” button, you can easily configure the tracking. Remember: make sure the event is sent to GA4 only after the user has given valid consent using a compliant tool like My Agile Privacy.

How to Set Up Custom Conversion Tracking in GA4

1. Define What “Conversion” Means for Your Business

Pause for a moment and analyze which actions are truly key to your success, such as:

• Completing a purchase
• Sending a contact or booking form
• Signing up for a newsletter
• Downloading a PDF catalog
• Clicking a quote request button

Tip:
Choose conversions that have a real business impact and ensure their tracking is dependent on user consent (according to GDPR rules).

2. Create or Identify Events in GA4

You can choose between:

• Automatically collected events: such as page view, first visit, scroll, etc.
• Recommended events by Google: like ‘sign_up’ for registrations, ‘purchase’ for purchases, ‘login’, etc.
• Custom events: created ad hoc with Tag Manager or via code

Table – Event Types in GA4

3. Mark the Event as a Conversion

From the GA4 admin panel:

• Go to “Configure > Events”
• Find the desired event
• Activate the “Mark as conversion” toggle

Important: make sure the event is triggered in GDPR-compliant ways—only after the user’s explicit consent, using tools like My Agile Privacy.

4. Monitor and Verify

To avoid errors or missing data:

• Use GA4’s Debug mode or Google Tag Assistant to check that events fire at the right times
• Regularly check conversion reports to spot calculation anomalies

Best Practices for Tracking Custom Conversions

Here’s a practical list of key tips:

• Integrate a consent management tool that is certified and GDPR-compliant, like My Agile Privacy
  Only then can you legally track conversions and ensure data accuracy, avoiding risks of penalties or ad platform bans.
• Standardize event naming to make reports readable and shareable among teams.
• Track only what’s truly useful: clear conversions = more useful reports.
• Use event parameters to segment data.
  Example: add a “button_label” parameter to distinguish between clicked buttons.
• Periodically test your setup: site/app changes could break your tracking!
• Document your rules and configurations to make maintenance and business continuity easier.
• Keep GA4 and Tag Manager up to date to take advantage of new features and bug fixes.

Always respect privacy: any tag, conversion, or tracking implementation involving personal data must be preceded by valid consent collection.
For example, My Agile Privacy, with easy-to-enable Consent Mode v2 and documented preemptive blocking, provides a reliable and always-compliant platform for WordPress sites.

Configuration Example: Tracking “Click on Request Quote”

1. 1. Identify the button on your site (e.g., id “#btn-preventivo”)
   2. Configure tag in Google Tag Manager:
      • Trigger: click on “#btn-preventivo”
      • Event name: click_request_quote
   3. Link the activation of the GA4 tag to consent collected with My Agile Privacy
   4. GA4 – Mark event as conversion