Glossary

Key Events (GA4)

Key events are the GA4 events you marked as most valuable: purchases, sign-ups, contact form submissions. They are GA4's successor to 'conversions' (renamed in 2024) and the website-side counterpart to your ad platforms' conversion tracking.

How to read it

Key events next to ads conversions give you a second, independently measured funnel end, useful for sanity-checking platform attribution claims.

Where it misleads

GA4 attributes key events by its own model (data-driven by default), so the numbers will differ from Google Ads and Meta. Different rules, not broken tracking.

Related terms

Conversions →

Conversions count how often users completed the action you defined as valuable (a purchase, lead form, call, or signup) after interacting with your ad. Conversions are the metric campaigns are ultimately judged by, because they connect ad spend to business outcomes.

Engagement Rate (GA4) →

Engagement rate is the share of sessions that were 'engaged': lasted over 10 seconds, had a key event, or included at least two page views. It's GA4's inverse of the old bounce rate: it measures how many visits showed any real interaction.

Sessions (GA4) →

A session is one visit to your website: it starts when a user arrives and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. One user can have many sessions. Sessions measure visit volume, the standard unit for 'how much traffic did the campaign send?'.

Metrics explained are nice. Metrics watched are better.

HeyMetrix monitors all of these across Google and Meta, with alerts and a nightly AI briefing.

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