Tracking the performance of your school's online presence is crucial for optimizing engagement and improving communication with future students, current families, alumni and donors. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) offers a powerful, free platform to monitor and analyze key events on your school's website.
Here’s how to set up Key Events on your website to measure marketing efforts:
While these events are critical for GA4 reporting, they do not necessarily provide you with the actions that are meaningful for you as a school marketer. That is why determining your school's own goals and setting those up as Events gets you the most from your GA4 marketing and admissions reports. Once those are set up, and marked as Key Events (formerly called "Conversions"), there is a lot more reporting and data available to you, thus maximizing GA4's capabilities.
Before setting up key events, you must identify what the goals of your school’s website are. Some samples of key events for schools are:
Once you’ve identified your goals, ensure the goals you have for your website are trackable. In other words, they need to be actions that take place on your site, or a third-party site that has your GA4 Data Stream ID on it. For example, if your inquiry forms are not tagged with your GA4 ID, consider tracking the next best thing—the click of the button to the form.
To set up your key events, go to the "Events" section under "Configure" in your GA4 property. Click on "Create Event," then define the event parameters based on the interactions you want to track. For instance, if you want to track an event registration form submission, you might set an event trigger when a user reaches the thank you page for that event form.
Consider using Google Tag Manager to set up these events. This is Google’s preferred method for managing all of your Google tags as well as third-party tags. It has user-friendly debugging and preview features and saves time by allowing one trigger to fire against multiple platforms, which is great if you want to tie these same key events to conversion actions in Google Ads, Meta Ads, Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or other platforms. Read more on the benefits of Google Tag Manager.
Once your custom events are set up, previewed, and debugged, you can publish them in GTM, or save them in GA4. To set them up as actual Key Events within your GA4 account for more insightful reporting, wait a day or so until these actions have taken place and are recorded in your account. Then navigate to the "Events'' tab under "Data Display" and mark the custom events you set up as “Key Events” on the far right.
Then it’s time to pull reports! The Key Events and Key Event Rate will start appearing in your reports on the far right of most acquisition and engagement reports. This allows you to easily monitor and analyze how well your website and marketing efforts are performing as they relate to your specific admissions and marketing goals.
While standard events report what basic actions users are taking on your website— setting up key events are a critical next step to ensure your school’s marketing objectives are truly being met online. For help with Google Analytics 4 reports, and setting up key events for your school, reach out to Enroll Media Group.