How to track your Carrd.co conversion rate with GA4

Introduction: Why track Carrd conversion rates with GA4?

Carrd is an excellent tool for spinning up quick, professional looking landing pages, particularly to get email opt-ins.

Add in Google Analytics and you can start to see where your sign-ups are coming from, and focus on the traffic sources that convert the best.

With Google announcing an end to it’s Universal Analytics tool in July 2023, now is the time to start building up data in the new GA4 tool.

Before we start.

I’m going to assume that you already have:

1. A Google Analytics account, with a new web property using GA4.
2. A Carrd Pro Plus account (so you can use forms, and the Advanced Settings to send events to Google)
3. A Carrd site set up, with a form connected to your email marketing tool of choice.

We’re going to use an opt-in page that we just built at https://theconversionco.carrd.co/.

Right now, it looks like this:

When you submit the form, it sends you to a confirmation page at https://theconversionco.carrd.co/#confirm

Using the old Universal Analytics, we’d have set up this URL as a goal and that’s all there is too it.

Google Analytics 4 is a bit different though. It doesn’t recognise a page in quite the same way. Everything is driven by “Events”.

Lets go through the steps and you’ll see what I mean as we go:

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Step 1: Get your measurement ID from Google.

In GA4 set up the property and copy the measurement ID (G-XXXXXX)

Step 2: Add the Measurement ID to Carrd.

In the Carrd dashboard, click the settings icon for the page you want to track.

Then go to the Settings menus for that site, and add in the Google Analytics Measurement ID you saved above.

Save your settings with the Save Changes button.

(NB you’ll need to save and publish your site again for this to have an effect)

Congratulations, you now have Google Analytics running on your site, but getting a conversion rate for your page is the next level of data we’re here for.

There’s 2 more steps:

First, Carrd is going to send an “event” to GA4, saying that a form has been completed.

Bu there’s lots of events being sent, like page views, scrolls, clicks and other less important actions.

So, we’re going to tell GA4 to recognise our particular event as being a conversion, so we can see it in our conversion reports.

We’ll actually set these up in reverse order so that GA4 is ready and waiting for our event when it happens.

Step 3: Prepare GA4 to receive the event and recognise it as a conversion

We can give our events any names we want, but it always helps to use the recommended event types that Google has given us already. After all, they probably thought about this more than we have.

The one we’re going to use is “generate_lead” from the online sales section.

There’s a similar event called “sign_up” in the “For all properties” section of that page, but this is intended for someone creating an account with a login, so keep that separate.

In GA4, go to the reports for your property and click “Configure” in the left hand menu.

Then in the next page, select the Conversions menu on the left, and click the blue “New Conversion Event” button.

Add the text generate_lead like below, and save.

Now Carrd will be able to recognise when our event comes in and report on it as a conversion.

Back to Carrd again…

Step 4: Trigger our event from Carrd when the form is completed

This is where the magic happens.

In the editor:

• Select the Form
• Choose the settings icon
• Choose the events tab
• Add our code to the “On Success” field

You can see the steps in this screenshot:

The code to add in the On Success field is as follows:

gtag('event', 'generate_lead');

Then click Done, save the page, and publish your changes.

Step 5: Check that our data is coming through OK

One thing to get used to in GA4 is that the data seems to come through a lot slower, but we can still test our code with the real-time reports.

In GA4, select the Reports menu on the left and select Real Time

Then open up your landing page in a new tab and fill in your form.

If everything’s been set up right then in a few seconds in GA4, you should see some events, including a generate_lead appear, and the generate_lead will also appear in the conversions report:

Summary & Next Steps

By now we’ve added GA4 tracking to our page, and we’re firing an event to it using the script:
gtag(‘event’, ‘generate_lead’);

We have a way to see our conversion rates and where the converting traffic is coming from.

Our next steps from here should be to start pushing more traffic to the page, and to start improving the important elements like headlines and images, maybe using another free tool; Google Optimize.

If you want to get more tips about how to optimise your online sales using freely available data, get my emails each week at https://theconversion.co/newsletter