Understanding where your bookings are coming from can offer valuable insights into your marketing effectiveness. Setting up Google Analytics goals (now called Events in GA4) allows you to track user interactions, such as reaching a booking confirmation page.
This article covers:
Setting up Events and Conversions
In GA4, Events replace Goals, and tracking conversions has changed slightly from the previous version of Google Analytics. Here’s how to set up a conversion for your booking confirmation page.
Step 1: Create a New Event
Go to GA4 Admin:
Select the Admin gear icon ⚙️ at the bottom left of the Google Analytics dashboard.
Under the Property column, select Events.
Create Event:
Select Create Event (top-right corner) under the Events screen.
Name the event something meaningful, like “Booking Confirmed.”
Set Up Event Parameters:
In the Matching Conditions section, add the conditions based on the URL of your booking confirmation page.
Select the condition:
page_locationcontains/summary(this works with regular expressions to match any URL that includes "/summary").
Step 2: Mark Your Event as a Conversion
Navigate to Conversions:
In GA4, conversions are tracked by marking specific events as conversions.
In the left-hand menu, select Configure, then Conversions.
Turn Your Event into a Conversion:
Find your new event in the list (e.g., “Booking Confirmed”).
Toggle the switch to mark it as a conversion.
Step 3: Verify Your Event and Conversion
GA4 doesn’t have the same goal verification as Universal Analytics. Instead, after you’ve set up the event and marked it as a conversion, monitor the Realtime tab to verify if the event triggers during the booking process.
It may take a few days for data to populate depending on traffic to your booking page.
Analysing Your Conversions
Once your events and conversions are set up and tracked, you can start analysing where your bookings are coming from.
Go to Reports:
In GA4, navigate to the Reports section, then select Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
View Source/Medium:
This report will display the source and medium (e.g., Google/organic, Direct/none) of your website visitors. You’ll be able to see how many visitors triggered the “Booking Confirmed” conversion.
You can also customise your reports to filter for specific conversion events.
💡 Important note: GA4 and iFrames on Bookwhen
If your booking page is embedded in an iframe, keep in mind that GA4 may not track events correctly due to issues with cookie consent and third-party cookies within iframes. This can result in incomplete tracking of conversions or multiple consent prompts to users.
Because of these limitations, we (Bookwhen) don't include Google Analytics in iframes, and conversions may not be tracked accurately.
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