Report on Individual GA4 Conversions in Looker Studio

One limitation of GA4 is that you can’t report on specific conversions in Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio). You can report on how many conversions happened from a GA4 account, but if you have different types of conversions (like the Contact Us conversion), you can’t look at that specifically. 

You can view all GA4 conversions or individual conversions. For example, in the Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition report, there is a “Conversions” column. Click the drop-down on “conversions” and you have the ability to just pick a specific conversion. 

In Looker Studio, you can see GA4 conversions, but there isn’t an obvious way to just look at that one conversion. You can’t filter it, because you’d have to filter it on “event name” — and if you did that, then it would mess with reporting on other events. 

In the video and steps below, we’ll show you a couple of different ways to display individual GA4 conversions in Looker Studio:

• You can do it with a blend. You don’t need to have the ability to make changes to a GA4 account to make this work.
• You can create custom metrics in GA4.

Using a Blend to Report on Individual GA4 Conversions in Looker Studio

Setting up a blend in Looker Studio is a good way to report on individual conversions. The blend allows us to set up a filter of all conversion data. 

Blends in Looker Studio are powerful, but can be pretty complicated. Take a look at my blog/video exploring Mastering Blends in Looker Studio if you’re new to blends. Even if you feel like you understand blends pretty well, it’s always a good idea to spot-check values that result from a blend to make sure it’s doing what you want it to.

1. Create a blend.
   1. Start with a table that includes the Conversions metric as well as other dimensions and metrics you would like to include in your report.
   2. One way to create blends is to click on the two tables and copy them.
   3. Right-click and then click “Blend data.” 
   4. Another table appears with the blended data. You can delete the first two tables.
2. Add a filter for a single conversion event.
   1. With the blended data table selected, on the right side of the screen under “Chart”, click on “Data source.”
   2. On the right side of the blend (the second column, Table 2), click “ADD A FILTER.” Then “CREATE A FILTER.” 
   3. In the search tab, type “event name.” Set “equals” and then enter the name of your event — for example, “Contact_Us_submission.”
   4. Name the filter — for example, “GA4 – Event name equals contact_us_submissions.”
   5. Click save in the lower-right corner – that will automatically apply the filter to the data source.
   6. Rename the Metric you just modified in Table 2. Click “EDIT” next to “Conversions”, and change the Name — for example, “Contact Us.”
   7. Rename the “Conversions” Metric in Table 1, for example to “All Conversions.”
   8. Save your changes to Blend Data and close the window.
3. Add the new filtered metric to the chart.
   1. On the right side of the screen under “Chart”, click “Add metric” and select the filtered metric — for example, “Contact Us.” 

You can blend GA4 to itself several times if there are different types of conversions where you want to have column counts. 

You could also create a calculated field in the report. For example, let’s create a conversion rate column calculated from sessions and the filtered event:

1. Under “Chart”, click “Add metric” and “CREATE FIELD.”
2. Name it “Conv. Rate.” 
3. In the Formula section type in:

SUM(Contact Us)/SUM(Sessions), using your own filtered conversion metric name for “Contact Us.” Click “Apply” and click out of the window.

Blendings can be a little weird, depending on what you’re blending on, and arguably unnecessarily complicated. One of the downsides of blends is that Google introduced API quota limits in November. In dashboards using this blend approach a fair amount, you can hit the limit, and the Looker Studio dashboard stops working. When you have a blend that combines GA4 as a data source four times, that actually counts for four API connections. 

So let’s look at a different way of getting to the same thing.

Using Custom Metrics to Report on Individual GA4 Conversions in Looker Studio

Another way of reporting on individual conversions is to add custom metrics in GA4 for conversions that you want to pull into Looker Studio reports. You can set up a custom metric that counts the number of times an event has fired, and then leverage that custom metric in Looker Studio.

1. In Google Tag Manager, add a parameter to an existing event, calling it for example “contact_form_count”. Set the value to 1. 
2. In GA4’s settings, go to “Custom definitions” for the Property and add a custom metric that aggregates that Event parameter. 

Every time the event fires, it’s going to send the event to GA4. The event is set up as a conversion, so it will be included in the conversions column of reports. When the event fires, it will also send this new Count parameter. And as a unique Event parameter, the new metric is available in Looker Studio anywhere you can add a metric. 

A downside of using custom metrics is that you have to be really committed to them. There are limits to how many custom metrics and dimensions you can add into GA4. More importantly, it just muddies the water unless you’re really sure this is something that you’re going to want to report on over time. 

The blend approach is more nimble, but custom metrics are easier to use and run afoul with Google’s quota limits less often. 

If you know of another way to do this, we’d love to hear it — reach out. And take a look at all our our GA4 Tutorials for help solving other interesting GA4 & Looker Studio challenges, like tracking scroll tracking in GA4.

FAQs

Where can I see the conversion data in Google Analytics 4 reports?

To view all the conversions that have been set up for a GA4 account, go to Admin > Conversions. You can create new conversion events there as well.

You can also view data on how many conversions have been completed within a specific date range on most pages within the Reports section. In the table of metrics on pages like User acquisition, Traffic acquisition, or Pages and screens, scroll to the right until you see the row for Conversions. You can filter the conversions that display in the table by clicking on the dropdown arrow directly below Conversions.

You can also compare the performance of different conversions by going to Reports > Engagement > Conversions.

How do you find conversion rate in Google Analytics 4?

Currently, conversion rate is not automatically provided as a metric in standard GA4 reports. Until Google adds conversion rate as a main metric on its reports, you’ll either need to customize the main GA4 reports or create your own in order to view conversion rate data. 

GA4 offers two types of conversion rate metrics you can add to reports: session conversion rate (number of sessions where a conversion occurred divided by total sessions) and user conversion rate (number of users that completed a conversion divided by total users).

To customize a main GA4 report to show conversion rate, go to the report page you want to update, then click the pencil icon on the top right of the report that displays “customize report” when hovered over. Then, underneath “report data”, click Metrics. There, you can add a metric of session conversion rate or user conversion rate to the report.

If you’d like to create a completely new report, go to the Explore section on the left navigation. From the Explorations page, you can create a new report with whichever dimensions and metrics you choose, including session conversion rate and user conversion rate.

Where can you find the conversion paths report in your Google Analytics 4 property?

To view data on conversion paths, go to Advertising > Attribution > Conversion paths.

How do you display Source and Conversion events in one table?

To view both the source of sessions or users and data regarding specific conversion events in a single table, make sure you have selected the appropriate dimension on the left side of the report table and selected a specific conversion as a metric. 

By default, most standard GA4 reports are set to “Session default channel group” as a dimension, but you can get more specific with the source data you’re looking for by selecting a different dimension from the drop-down menu.

To select a specific conversion event as a metric, click the drop-down arrow below Conversions and select the conversion event that you want to analyze.