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Glossary

Key event

Also called GA4 conversion.

GA4's name for an event you mark as important to your business, such as a purchase, a signup or a booked call.

In GA4, every interaction is an event. A key event is an event you have marked as important, so GA4 counts it in key event reports and uses it for engaged sessions and attribution. Google renamed GA4 "conversions" to "key events" in 2024 and kept the word "conversion" for actions used to measure ad campaigns (Google).

Marking an event as a key event only changes how GA4 reports it from that moment on. It does not count past events again, and it does nothing if the event itself never fires. When "GA4 is not tracking conversions", the cause is usually one of those two. See GA4 not tracking conversions.

Other tools use other names: Sporetag calls them goals, Meta calls them conversion events, and Google Ads calls them conversion actions.

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All 58 terms · Spotted a mistake? Email hello@sporetag.com.