With Universal Analytics, typically we are happy when an average conversion rate across various traffic channels is 2 percent and above. Imagine how surprised I was when I saw the following Google Analytics 4 (GA4) exploration report for one of our clients:

The report shows a 10.33 percent conversion rate. Either we are doing something pretty damn good, or something is off. 

Universal Analytics reports an average conversion rate of 0.31 percent, which I guess could partially be justified by the fact that the store’s average product costs over $2000 or more:

Why does GA4 report, on average, a conversion rate of 10 and Universal Analytics 0.31 percent?

The GA4’s ‘session key rate’ metric is defined as:

The percentage of sessions that converted. This metric is calculated as the number of sessions in which a conversion happened divided by the total number of sessions.

Do you want to see a 100% conversion rate? Now we can. All you have to do is toggle the page_view event on in the ‘Mark as conversion’:

You certainly would not want to do that, though.

To see which events are marked as key events, we can visit the Key events report (previously known as “Conversions”):

All those events I highlighted (add_to_cart, view_home_page, etc.) will affect the session key rate metric. For example, according to the above screenshot, the “view_home_page” event was triggered 4499 times in the last 30 days. There were nearly 3100 sessions (6.67 percent of all sessions) where the “view_home_page” event fired. That’s a 6.67 percent session conversion rate:

If you want to continue relying on the Session Key Rate metric as you did in Universal Analytics, ensure there is only one conversion event. Otherwise, do expect that those metrics won’t align between the two versions of Google Analytics.