Has Conversion Tracking Changed?
I’ve always used Google Tag Manager + Google Analytics for conversion tracking. The flow was simple:
- Add the event via GTM
- Mark it as a Key Event in GA4
- Done – conversions tracked cleanly.
Now, I’m seeing no more Key Events tab – just “Events,” and adding new conversions feels less intuitive.
Also, the old view that let you easily see conversion counts over time for key events seems gone or buried.
Has anyone figured out the updated process for conversion tracking in GA4? Is there a current step-by-step guide out there that reflects these changes?
The short answer is:
The core concept of conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4 has been renamed from “Conversions” to “Key events,” which is the source of the interface change and confusion you are experiencing.
The fundamental process of tagging remains the same: use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to push your custom events to your GA4 property.
The missing “Key Events” tab has been replaced by the “Events” section under Admin > Data Display (or sometimes Configure), where you will now see a simple toggle to “Mark as key event” for any received event.
For a more robust and permanent solution to historical reporting, you should integrate the BigQuery API to export your raw GA4 event data, allowing you to use SQL for custom, consistent time-series analysis in tools like Looker Studio, circumventing any future UI changes in the standard GA4 interface and ensuring you always have access to clean, unsampled conversion data.
The long answer is:
The shift you are observing is a product change by Google to align terminology, renaming the metric previously called “Conversions” in the Google Analytics 4 UI to “Key events.”
This change is designed to clarify the distinction between a vital action tracked within Google Analytics – a Key Event – and the actions sent to Google Ads for bidding optimization, which are still universally referred to as “Conversions.” Your existing Google Tag Manager configuration for event tracking is still valid; the event data is still being collected by the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol (when using server-side tagging) or the standard GA4 tag in GTM (client-side).
The key difference is the final step in the GA4 interface.
Instead of looking for a “Conversions” or “Key Events” tab in the main navigation, you must now go to Admin, find the Data Display section, and select Events.
In this report, any event that has been collected in the last 30 minutes will appear, and you can simply toggle the “Mark as key event” switch to designate it as your primary conversion metric.
This is the updated, simpler step-by-step process.
For your concern about easily seeing conversion counts over time, this is where a pure API integration delivers superior, cost-effective data governance.
While the standard GA4 reports are often sufficient, they can sometimes make historical or multi-dimensional reporting complex due to the event-based data model.
The definitive solution is to leverage the free integration between GA4 and BigQuery, coupled with the BigQuery API.
This allows you to export the raw, unaggregated event data into a secure cloud data warehouse on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Once this data is in BigQuery, you can use the BigQuery API to query your conversion data using standard SQL, building permanent, customized, time-series reports that are impervious to changes in the GA4 interface.
This is a highly cost-effective and scalable approach, as the initial setup is straightforward, and the pricing for BigQuery storage and querying remains very competitive, transforming your analytics from a reliance on the ever-changing GA4 standard reports to a powerful, fully customizable business intelligence pipeline.
You can then use the Looker Studio API to automatically connect your custom BigQuery SQL queries to build your historical conversion dashboards, ensuring your key performance indicator visibility is never compromised by a user interface update again.
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