Google Analytics has always supported conversions that are easily defined when a user views a certain page (www.charlesfarina.com/thank-you) or triggers a specific event (event action = video_play).
What if you wanted more complex conversions such as:
- Content Examples
- Users who viewed your blog post AND watched over 5 minutes of the video within that post
- Users who converted AFTER viewing your blog
- E-Commerce Examples
- Users who purchased more than $45 dollars in their CURRENT session
- Users who purchased a banana AND a carrot, but ONLY those who came from your monthly newsletter
Google Analytics 4 now allows you to create all sorts of complex conversions! We do this with the new audience triggers feature. An audience trigger will create and send an event when a user is added to your audience. That event can then be used to create conversions! Remember, we can also create AND modify events from events as well!
How to Use Audience Triggers & Conversions
- Go to your audiences report (alternatively you can also create audience from Analysis)
2. Use a template as a quick start or create your audience from scratch (I always start from scratch)
3. Next, create your audience conditions. You have so many powerful options. You can use sequences to enforce order, change the scopes, add include/exclude options, and even scope conditions around the amount of time required (one of my favorite features in GA4)
4. Make sure to name your audience (it will save as untitled audience otherwise). Click into the audience trigger option
5. Specify what event you want to fire each time a user enters your audience. I recommend prefixing them with audience_, so they are easy to find and work with later.
You can also decide whether you want the event to fire each time the user matches your conditions after their initial inclusion. Each audience has a membership duration, which you defined in the last step. If a user in GA4 enters an audience today and then triggers the same conditions again in 2 weeks, the duration is refreshed/extended. The checkbox in this step allows you to decide whether you want to fire an additional event so you track the number of times users entered your audience or how many users (regardless of how many times)
6. Save your audience
7. Wait about an hour or so and then you will see your new audience and event show up in Google Analytics real-time reports
8. You will now see your audience event in your events report and can enable it as a conversion.
There you have it! GA4 offers you the new ability to create conversions from audiences themselves. This allows you to configure all sorts of very advanced conversion logic that was not possible previously. You can even build audiences from multiple audience events!