You will be able to turn the success actions from your measurement plan into key events in GA4.
Priya's GA4 property now records page views, scrolls and file downloads. What she actually wants to know is how many parents asked about a trial class this week and where they came from. GA4 records hundreds of events, and none of them is marked as more important than another until you tell it which ones count.
This lesson is about telling it. You take the success actions from your measurement plan in lesson 1.3 and turn each one into an event GA4 treats as a result.
In GA4, an event you mark as important is a key event. Until 2024 GA4 called these conversions. Google renamed them to key events that year, partly to separate them from conversions in Google Ads, which are counted differently and used for bidding.
So you will see both words. In GA4, the toggle and the reports say key events. In Google Ads, the word is still conversion, and you can import selected GA4 key events into Google Ads, where they then appear as conversions. Older guides, videos and agency reports from before the change say conversions where GA4 now says key events, and you can read the two as the same thing.
Once an event is a key event, GA4 treats it differently in reports. It shows up in the key events columns of the acquisition reports, so you can see which channels and campaigns produced it, and it counts towards engagement, as lesson 4.2 explains.
Any event can be marked as a key event with one switch in the admin settings. That ease is the trap. If the event fires at the wrong time, GA4 will happily count it as a result, and every report built on it will be wrong.
Take the form interaction events that Enhanced measurement can record. A form submit event may fire when someone presses the button, even if the form showed an error and nothing was actually sent. Mark that as a key event and failed attempts count as enquiries. The same goes for a button click event that fires when someone taps "Book a trial" but then closes the booking window.
So before you flip the switch, ask whether each real enquiry, booking or purchase makes the event fire exactly once. If the honest answer is no, or you do not know, fix the event first. Lesson 3.4 shows how to check.
For a business that runs on enquiries, there are two common methods.
The first is a thank-you page. After the form is sent, the site sends the visitor to a page such as /thank-you that nobody reaches any other way. In GA4's admin settings you can create a new event based on page views of that address, call it generate_lead, and mark it as a key event. It is simple and works on almost any website builder. The weakness is that a visitor who reloads or bookmarks the thank-you page counts again, and a page that people can reach by other routes ruins the count.
The second is a form submission event that fires when the form is actually sent. Many form tools and website builders send this event to GA4 themselves, or you set it up in Google Tag Manager to fire on the form's success message. It is more precise, but takes more setup and depends on how your form tool works.
Priya's builder already sends visitors to a thank-you page after the enquiry form, so enquiries use the first method, but the WhatsApp button needs a click event, whatsapp_click, set up in Tag Manager to fire when someone clicks a link that opens a chat. Trial bookings run through an online booking tool with its own confirmation page, which she tracks the same way as the thank-you page.
A key event can carry a value parameter, with a currency. For a shop, the purchase event usually carries the order value automatically through the shop platform's integration. For a service business, there is no order value, so you estimate one.
Priya does it like this, with example figures. About 60 percent of enquiries book a trial, about half of trials enrol, so roughly 30 percent of enquiries become students. If a new student brings her about S$1,920 of gross margin in the first year (lesson 8.2 shows how to work this out), an enquiry is worth about 0.3 times S$1,920, which is S$576. She rounds it to S$550 and sends that as the value of generate_lead, in SGD.
The figure will be wrong in its details, and that is fine. What it allows is comparison. With values attached, GA4 can show which channels produced the most value rather than just the most events, and a channel that brings fewer but better enquiries stops looking like a loser. Write down how you got the number, so you can update it when you have better data.
A WhatsApp click is further from a real enquiry, since some people tap it and never send a message. Priya gives it a lower value or none at all, and notes why.
For every success action in your plan, decide three things before touching the settings: the event name, what exactly triggers it, and whether it carries a value and how much. Use Google's recommended event names from lesson 3.1 where one fits.
Priya's list has three lines: generate_lead on the thank-you page with a value of S$550, whatsapp_click on clicks to WhatsApp links with no value, and a trial booking event on the booking tool's confirmation page with its own estimated value. That list is what you will build and test in lesson 3.4, and drafting your own version is the step that comes next.
For each success action in your measurement plan, write the event name, how it will be triggered and whether it will carry a value.
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