Documentation
GA4 Key Events report
Pick one GA4 key event to see its count, session and user rates, its trend, and the channels, sources, pages, countries and devices that drive it.
The Key Events report looks at one GA4 key event at a time, such as form_submit, sign_up or purchase: how often it happened, what share of sessions and users triggered it, how it trended, and which channels, sources, landing pages, pages, countries and devices it came from. It opens on the key event with the most occurrences in the period, and you can switch to any other.
Key events are what GA4 used to call conversions
Google now calls events that measure actions important to your business key events, and keeps the word "conversion" for advertising (Conversions vs. key events). You decide which events count by marking them as key events in GA4 (About key events). Marking an event only affects reports from that moment on (Data API schema), so an event you marked last week shows no key events for the weeks before. AutoPSEO reads which events are marked; it cannot mark or unmark them.
Choosing the key event
The Key event menu lists every event marked as a key event that occurred in the selected period. You can also click Select on a row of the All Key Events table. To open the report on a particular event, add ?event= and the event name to the page address. If no key event occurred in the period, the menu says so and the report has nothing to show.
The nine cards
| Card | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Key Events | How many times the selected event happened |
| Session Key Event Rate | The share of sessions in which it was triggered |
| User Key Event Rate | The share of users who triggered it |
| Sessions, Active Users, Total Users | Totals for the segment, for scale |
| All Key Events | Occurrences of every key event in the period |
| All Events | Every GA4 event, key or not |
| Share of All Key Events | The selected event's share of all key events |
The two rates are GA4's sessionKeyEventRate and userKeyEventRate, narrowed to the selected event.
The trend chart
Bars show the selected event's count per day, week or month. The line, on the right axis, shows its occurrences divided by sessions for each period, capped at 100%. Because the line divides occurrences rather than counting sessions, an event that can fire several times in one session pushes the line above the Session Key Event Rate card, which counts each session once.
Where the event comes from
Six tables break the selected event down by channel, source / medium, landing page, page, country and device. Each row shows Key Events, Key Event Rate (the event's occurrences per session in that row, capped at 100%), Sessions and Active Users, sorted by key events. Winning and Losing compare the event's count with the comparison period. Sessions in these tables are all sessions in the row, not only those with the event.
Using it for SEO
- Set GA4 filters to organic search and read Key Events by Landing Page: the pages through which Google organic visitors entered sessions that led to this event. Those pages deserve internal links and careful updates.
- Compare the Organic Search row in Key Events by Channel with the others. A low key event rate for organic visitors, next to a healthy one for email or direct, suggests the pages that rank do not lead to the action.
- To estimate how many key events each search query brings, run the attribution in Blended (GSC + GA4).
The same data through MCP
ga4_key_events returns the property's events with counts, users and change against the comparison period, key events only unless you ask for all of them. See MCP & ChatGPT app.