GA4 Update: Count Conversions Once Per Session in GA4

Previously in GA3 we were able to count a particular type of goal completion only once per session. Asnan example if you have configured a goal for let’s say “visits to contact page” in your GA3 account, it could only record one conversion in a session which indicates that if a visitor visits the contact page twice it would still display as just one goal completion in the Conversions report of GA3, there are a few exceptions to that but we wont discuss them here.

When GA4 was launched the entire tracking ecosystem changed, the entire mechanism of website analytics data collection changed and GA4 replaced the commonly known term Goal Completions to Conversions. In GA4 all Conversions are merely events, so considering the example about a webmaster would have to configure a custom event to fire whenever a user visited the contact page and then mark that particular custom event as conversion by which GA4 moving forward will take the custom event into consideration when counting or recording conversions.

However during the early days of GA4, it was counting multiple conversions of the same event in a single session, which means that if the visitor visits the contact page twice in the same session GA4 was by default treating both the custom events (that fires when the visitor visits the contact page) as conversions. This is a good feature in specific type of conversions but for most conversion types this can cause issues and reduce the confidence in the data collected.

Somewhere around April this around GA4 has offered a fix for this by allowing webmasters to choose how they want to count conversions, the default will be set to “Once per event” which means Count an event as a conversion every time it occurs and there’s a new option added to it called “Once per session” which means “Count an event as a conversion only once within a particular session”. This new controls are on the individual conversion level which indicates we can have some conversions where every event in the same session will be counted as a conversion “Once per event” and some conversions where an event can be counted as a conversion only once in the same session “Once per session”.

Here’s how to turn on “Once per session” option for individual conversions in GA4:-

Step 1: Click on the gear icon on the bottom left corner on Analytics window

Step 2: Click on the “Conversions” Option in Property column

Step 3: Click on the 3 dots adjacent to the conversion event for which you want to customize the conversion count

Step 4: Click on “Change counting method”

Step 5: Select the relevant conversion counting option from “Once per event” & “Once per session”

By default the conversion counting method is set to “Once per event” which means by default the Google Analytics property will be counting every time a conversion event occurs.

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