Skip to main content
Soft conversions in Google Analytics

Analyze the impact of your product finder on goals other than purchases

Aiden Support avatar
Written by Aiden Support
Updated over a month ago

Using the Impact Dashboard in Aiden, you can easily gain insight into purchases made by product finder users. But sometimes you not only want to know how much impact the product finder has on your sales, but also, for example, how many color samples, test drives or callback appointments have been requested. This is called soft conversions and this information can be found in Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

πŸ’‘ Good to know: This feature is available when you have a Professional license or higher. Contact us if you would like to know more!

Step-by-step

Step 1: Check if your soft conversions are already measured in GA4

The first step is to check that the conversions you want to measure are already coming in to GA4. Do this by navigating in GA4 to Administrator > Conversions. There you will see a list of incoming events (events) that have been flagged as conversions. This list should also include the event you want more insight into. If that event is not in the list yet, you can read how to create a conversion here.

Step 2: Forward the Aiden events to GA4

In addition to the soft conversion events, events from Aiden also need to be forwarded to GA4. You can arrange this by following this tutorial. Make sure you also perform step 1 of the Analyze your data section.

Step 3: Create an Audience in GA4

An audience is a filtered group of website users. Within GA4, you can view all reports for a specific audience. So by creating an audience with product finder users, you can easily gain insight into the behavior of this group.

Please note: Google Analytics has a maximum of 100 audiences. It is recommended to create one audience per product finder. Should you not have enough audiences to do this, please contact us and we will find a solution together.

There are many ways to create your own audiences, we'll give two examples here:

Users who have received advice from the product finder

Follow these steps to create an audience of users who have had a recommendation in the "hiking shoes" product finder:

  • Go to Administrator

  • In the Property column, go to Audiences > New Audience

  • Choose Create a custom audience

  • Name the audience at the top, for example "Hiking shoes product finder advice"

  • Make sure the range is set to Across all sessions

  • Add a new condition

    • Select Events > aiden_product_advised

    • Add a new parameter Custom > aiden_app_name

    • With the condition "matches exactly" with the name of your product finder

  • Click save in the upper right corner

Users who provided a specific answer

Follow these steps to create an audience of users who have provided a specific answer to a question. This can come in handy when you create an alternative advice page depending on a specific answer, where you invite the user to schedule an appointment instead of making an online purchase, for example.

  • Go to Administrator

  • In the Property column, go to Audiences > New Audience

  • Choose Create a custom audience

  • Name the audience at the top, for example, "Hiking shoes appointment."

  • Make sure the range is set to In all sessions

  • Add a new condition

    • Select Events > aiden_answer_given

    • Add a new parameter Custom > aiden_app_name

    • With the condition "matches exactly" with the name of your product finder

    • Add another parameter Adjusted > aiden_question

    • With the condition "matches exactly" and then choose the question to be answered

    • Add another parameter Custom > aiden_answer

    • With the condition "matches exactly" and choose the answer to be given

  • Click save in the upper right corner

Step 4: Analyze Aiden's impact on soft conversions

Now that everything is set up properly, you can analyze the data. Note that users are only added to an audience from the moment this audience is created. So let GA4 collect data for a few days or weeks before you start analyzing this data. You can use the created audience anywhere in GA4 to filter data. In this tutorial, we will use the Traffic Acquisition report.

  • Go to Acquisition > Traffic acquisition

  • Click on Add Equation at the top

  • Choose the following settings:

    • Dimension: Audience name

    • Search type: Matches exactly

    • Value: Choose your audience here, in our example "Hiking Shoes"

  • Click Apply

Throughout the report you can now see the differences between All users and just created audience. In a few steps, you also show the conversion rate in the table at the bottom of the report:

  • Click on the pencil in the upper right corner

  • Click on Values

  • Add the statistic Conversion rate per user

  • Save the report

A column has now been added with the conversion rate. You can also choose a specific event in this column for which you want to see the conversion rate.

In this way, you can gain insight into soft conversions. The created audience can be viewed on each report and using the last steps you can also easily customize each report to show the statistics you would like to see. So do experiment with the different reports, or by creating a new report.

Want to know how to get more insight into your purchases from product finder, check out a tutorial on our Impact Dashboard here!

Did this answer your question?