Google has confirmed that “conversions” will be renamed to “key events” in GA4.

The main thing to note is no action is needed on your part, although for those using Google Ads there may be some additional opportunities down the line.

There is an automatic rollout which might take a few weeks, after which your GA4 property will follow these definitions:

Key events are those GA4 events which have been marked in the GA4 interface as being important to your business. For example, purchases, leads, signups, etc. Note that other metrics will change to reflect this so there will be such as thing as “key event rate” (instead of the old “conversion rate”), awkward as that might sound.

Conversions are those GA4 events which you are importing into your Google Ads account for reporting or campaign optimisation purposes. This process will be streamlined and Google will match numbers between GA4 and Google Ads. So even inside GA4, any report that talks about “conversions” is talking about only the subset of events which you want to mark as conversions in Google Ads. This may be a smaller list than key events depending on your objectives.

Industry feedback on the change has been negative, that it’s mostly a pointless renaming exercise by Google to stop people asking why their conversion numbers are different in Google Ads vs Google Analytics. And we agree, however the easier workflow for managing Google Ads conversions from Google Analytics that will come with the change may end up helpful.