Introduction
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has replaced Universal Analytics, which stopped processing data on 1 July 2023, so GA4 is now the version of Google Analytics to set up on a Webflow site.
You can still use GA4 to track the actions that matter to your business. Just keep in mind that Google replaced the old “goals” with “conversions”, and later renamed conversions in GA4 to “key events” (Google Ads still calls them conversions). They serve the same purpose, but setting them up is a different process than it was in Universal Analytics.
First of all, let’s quickly cover what a conversion is.
What is a website conversion?
A website conversion is when a user of our website has taken a certain action that we have predetermined ourselves as a desired action.
For example, if a user moves to the pricing page, that’s an action, but it doesn’t mean that much to us because they are just moving around our website. But as soon as they take a desired action such as signing up to a newsletter or buying a product, then we have a conversion that makes sense to track.
Some other examples of website conversions include:
- Filling out a form
- Signing up for an email newsletter
- Clicking a specific button
- Making a sale
- Using a Burger King drive-thru
- Downloading a resource
What website conversions can we track in Webflow with GA4?
The easiest conversions to track in Webflow using Google Analytics 4 are file downloads and page visits. GA4 can’t see a Webflow form submission on its own, but there is a simple workaround: send users to a thank-you page after they submit a form, and track visits to that page. That’s what we are going to focus on.
There is a lot more that can be tracked if you’re willing to add Google Tag Manager to your website, but with the added complexity that this adds, it might be worth sticking to just using Google Analytics.
When setting up website tools, make sure they are simple enough that you’re happy to keep coming back to them to check-up on. There’s no point in setting up a complex tool that you immediately abandon.
Preparing website conversions in Webflow
We’re going to track a simple conversion of a user submitting a form by sending that user to a confirmation page.
To do this, we’re first going to add a simple page in Webflow for the confirmation.
Create a new page and give it a simple name like “thank you” or “confirmation”.
Add some simple page content such as the website navigation, footer, and a section letting customers know that the submission has been confirmed.
It might look a little something like this:
Now that we have the confirmation page set-up, we want to go to the forms around our website and redirect them to this page. Let’s do this to the email form on the homepage.
In the form’s settings, I’ve added a redirect url of /thank-you, which is going to take users to the newly created thank-you page once they have added their email.
We will want to do this for every form submission we want to track. So you’ll want to go around your website and add the new redirect URL to all forms.
If you have multiple types of forms, you’ll want to add different confirmation pages to track the forms separately. So you might have a second confirmation page for users who fill out your contact form opposed to your newsletter form.
Tip: keep your thank-you pages out of search results by turning on “Exclude this page from search results” in the page’s SEO settings, so people can’t land on them without submitting the form.
