Introduction
It’s official, Google is getting rid of Universal Analytics and replacing it with GA4. Since they are sunsetting Universal Analytics mid-2023, it makes sense to set-up GA4 soon and get familiar with it.
Luckily, just like with UA, you can still use GA4 to track conversions. You’ll want to keep in mind that Google replaced site “goals” with “conversions”, and even though they have the same function, setting them up is a slightly different process than before.
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. We can’t track form-submissions using just GA4 alone, but there is a simple workaround. The way we can still track this is by sending users to a thank-you page after they have submitted their info to a form, which is 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.
On the top right in the settings for the form, 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 and 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.
