Key events, conversions, and the naming decision that compounds

GA4 renamed conversions to key events, which caused a round of confusion and changed nothing structural. What matters is not the label — it is that the names you choose become permanent, and inconsistent names make cross-site comparison impossible.

The decision that compounds

If one site fires contact_form, another fires enquiry, and a third fires form_submission, then any question spanning them requires a manual mapping that somebody maintains forever.

Worse, the mapping is lossy. form_submission on one site might include newsletter signups; on another it might not. By the time you notice, the histories are already inconsistent and cannot be retrospectively harmonised.

The fix is trivially cheap on day one and expensive later: one standard event vocabulary, applied to every site, regardless of what the site calls things internally.

A vocabulary that survives contact with reality

Something like:

• form_submit — any genuine enquiry form
• phone_click — a tel: link tapped
• email_click — a mailto: link
• quote_request — a form specifically requesting pricing
• booking_started / booking_completed — for anything with a funnel
• review_click — outbound to a review platform

The specific names matter far less than that they are the same everywhere.

Parameters, not more events

The instinct when a new variant appears is to create a new event. Resist it. form_submit with a form_id parameter is far more useful than eleven separate events, because it aggregates by default and segments on demand.

Events are the noun. Parameters are the adjectives. Creating an event per adjective is how accounts end up with 200 events and no usable totals.

Marking them as key events

Only mark as key events the things that represent real business outcomes. Everything else can remain an event and still be reportable.

This matters because key events are what Google Ads imports and what smart bidding optimises towards. A key event that fires on a newsletter signup is an instruction to buy newsletter signups.

Values

If the outcomes differ in worth — and they nearly always do — send a value. Without values, optimisation counts events. A quote request worth £40,000 and a brochure download are identical to the algorithm unless you say otherwise.

An approximate value is dramatically better than none. It does not need to be exact to be directionally right.