Introduction
Google Analytics 4 is a powerful tool, relying on its event tracking to track the user actions that matter to website owners and marketers. A shift away from the session-based tracking of Universal Analytics, as users traverse a website, navigating between pages, scrolling and performing desirable, business-critical actions, these are recorded as hits. These hits, carrying data about the user action, are reported as events in GA4 and play a crucial role in understanding user behaviour. You’ll see counts of these events throughout GA4’s reports, allowing you to associate these user actions with acquisition channels, website content and segments of website users.
Whilst understanding user behaviour isn’t just about tracking what users do, it’s about deciphering the why behind what those users do, event tracking is the first step towards that goal. It reveals when, where and how a user performed an action, giving you the foundations for which to go away and understand the why.
Now that we understand why it’s valuable, let’s unpack what GA4 event tracking is, how it’s set up, how it looks in GA4’s reports, and some best practices to keep in mind.
Understanding Event Tracking in GA4
Before diving into configuration options, it’s worth understanding event tracking in more detail, and what types are available to you in GA4. GA4’s event tracking gives you flexibility to track almost any user action on a website depending on your website and expertise level, making it an ideal solution for all manner of websites, with little restriction on complexity or purpose. It can facilitate tracking on lead generation, ecommerce and portal-style websites, amongst others, with GA4 having specific features and reports to accompany that tracking.
Before implementing, you need to consider the type of event tracking you’ll require for your website depending upon the actions that you wish to track, which will vary depending on the complexity of your website and its purpose. At MRS, we often produce measurement plans to understand measurement needs and how to proceed with an event tracking implementation, providing us with a scope of measurement to ensure that what we do track is valuable.
Enhanced Measurement
To begin, GA4 has a selection of events collected via enhanced measurement that will begin populating your reports upon installing GA4, which you may find are sufficient if all you require is a basic understanding of website traffic or user actions. Page views (page view), outbound clicks (click) and file downloads (file_download) are such actions, and don’t typically require any additional configuration beyond that of GA4’s property UI. This can save you a significant amount of time and resources, since you aren’t required to manually track these actions, making enhanced measurement a great option for less complex tracking implementations.
However, in some instances, you may find that GA4 doesn’t track these actions as intended for your website. For example, single-page applications often don’t trigger GA4’s page view measurement, so may require a workaround to ensure accurate page_view tracking, like manually sending page_view hits using Google Tag Manager (GTM), discussed below.
By default, all enhanced measurement events are enabled, including:
| Enhanced Measurement | GA4 Event | Tracking Conditions |
| Page views | page_view | Collected fully automatically every time a page loads or the browser history state is changed |
| Scrolls | scroll | When a user reaches the 90% vertical scroll depth on a page |
| Outbound clicks | click | Triggered when a user clicks a link that leads away from the current domain |
| Site search | view_search_results | Triggered when a user views a search results page, as indicated by a URL query parameter |
| Form interactions | form_start, form_submit | When a user first interacts with a form in a session (form_start), and when a user submits a form (form_submit) |
| Video engagement | video_start, video_progress, video_complete | Requires YouTube embedded videos that have JS API support enabled |
| File downloads | file_download | Triggered when a user clicks a link leading to a file with the extension: pdf|xlsx?|docx?|txt|rtf|csv|exe|key|pp(s|t|tx)| 7z|pkg|rar|gz|zip|avi|mov|mp4|mpe?g|wmv|midi?|mp3|wav|wma |
If your website facilitates the events above, having a site search, forms or files to download as examples, you should see these events populate GA4’s reporting. However, there are conditions to the event collection. For example, file_download will only trigger for files with certain extensions. For full details on GA4’s enhanced measurement and applicable conditions, consult Google’s documentation.
Disable GA4’s Enhanced Measurement
Should your website not facilitate all of these events or if you wish to overwrite these events to improve accuracy, you can customise the enabled events to suit. Within GA4:
- Navigate to admin > property settings > data collection and modification > data streams.
- Select your data stream.
- Select configure enhanced measurement.
- Within this menu, enable and disable enhanced measurements as required.
- Select Save.
Recommended Events
Moving into those that require a dedicated implementation, Google provides a list of recommended events that can assist with reporting other, more contextual user actions, varying by website purpose. This includes events for online sales, like view item (view_item), selecting an item (select_item), adding items to a cart (add_to_cart), and viewing promotions (view_promotion). Note that purchase (purchase) events are automatically tracked by enhanced measurement, though collecting product information or other valuable data requires a dedicated implementation.
Differing from custom events, these events are recognised by Google by name, meaning they can populate GA4’s pre-configured reports automatically when sent to the platform. For example, sending the required online sales events will populate the purchase and checkout journey reports in GA4 without any additional configuration in-platform.
We’d recommend you approach this using GTM, the tag manager solution that allows you to not only install GA4 but facilitates event tracking at a much more granular level than using GA4 standalone.
Custom Events
Finally, GA4 and GTM give you the freedom to create custom events defined by you. These allow you to track user actions and collect data specific to your website and use cases, a highly valuable capability, though make sure to review the other options above first as you may find there’s an automatically collected or recommended event that suits the same action, which could save you time and ensure that GA4’s reports are populated correctly.
Understanding Event and User Parameters
Alongside a simple count of an event in GA4, events contain event parameters and user properties, additional pieces of information that are sent alongside the event hit that contain contextual information about the user action, or the user.
There’s a selection of automatically collected parameters that get sent with all GA4 events, either enhanced measurement or custom events, which facilitate the reporting of events in GA4. For example, GA4 uses an event’s page_path to attribute it to a specific piece of website content, and this is collected automatically as the event is sent to the platform.
However, you can use GTM to define custom parameters to send with your event hits that are specific to your user actions. This capability is invaluable, as you can collect information that helps you differentiate one event or user from another. This could include the item_name and value associated with an ecommerce event, or the file_name associated with a pdf_download.
How to set up event tracking in GA4
Event tracking in GA4 will start in the same way regardless of your approach, by creating an Analytics account and setting up a GA4 property. Google’s documentation runs through this process in detail, accounting for any nuances you may encounter.
Next, you’ll need to get GA4 installed onto your website. This is where the process starts to differ based on your event tracking needs. Whilst you can hard-code this onto your website, we’d recommend installing the GA4 Google Tag, the tag that sends your data to GA4, via Google Tag Manager.
This gives you the freedom to alter the Google Tag’s configuration and adjust how and when it fires to suit your website, all within GTM’s convenient UI. This also facilitates your additional event tracking discussed above.
Tracking Events with Google Tag Manager
Whilst enhanced measurement can provide a basic understanding of your website’s user actions, the real power of GA4’s event measurement lies in the events implemented by you, following Google’s recommended events or as custom events. As discussed, Google Tag Manager gives you the ability to configure event tracking to a highly granular level depending on your website and expertise, either using Google’s list of recommended events, or creating custom events tailored to the actions that users can perform on your website.
In Google Tag Manager, configuring either a recommended event or custom event requires you to follow predominately the same process, deviating to trigger the event appropriately based on the user action and add event and user parameters, discussed below.
Configure a GA4 event tag in GTM
- Navigate to Tags, select New
- Name your tag. We recommend a format like “GA4 – Event – EVENT NAME”
- Select Tag Configuration, Google Analytics, then Google Analytics: GA4 Event
- Input your GA4 measurement ID, the same used for the Google Tag, and input an Event Name
- Under Triggering, add a new trigger by selecting + in the top-right
- Name your trigger, and under Trigger Configuration, select a trigger to determine when to fire your GA4 event tag
Configure custom event parameters and user properties in GTM
- In any GA4 event tag, expand the Event Parameters and User Properties drop-down menus
- Define an event parameter or property name, then assign it a value
- To dynamically populate an event parameter, user property, or the value associated with them, you can add GTM Variables to these fields. To configure Variables in GTM, follow Google’s guidance, which includes a full list of supported variables.
Whenever an event tag fires, any defined event parameter will be assigned to the event, and any user properties will be assigned to the event and user, meaning any subsequent events that event triggers will also be given that property. User properties persist across pages and even sessions, whilst event parameters are individual to each event hit.
Once configured in GTM, you’ll need to define them as custom definitions in GA4, making them available in GA4’s reporting as secondary dimensions.
Event Reporting in GA4
Once you’ve implemented your event tracking and have begun sending event hits to GA4, it’s important to understand how the event works and will look inside GA4’s reporting UI. As discussed above, you’ll start to see event counts populating GA4’s reports. We’d recommend starting at the Events report in GA4, under the Engagement report collection, though the majority of GA4’s aggregated reports contain some degree of event reporting.
Event Count
When sent to GA4, an event hit is reported as a count. This event count is visible across GA4’s reports and applied as a metric for analysis against events themselves, landing pages, and ecommerce products, to name but a few.
Key Events
It’s likely that you’ll value some events more so than others, with some being business-critical. In this instance, you can make use of key events to highlight events that matter the most to you, unlocking additional reporting functionality and metrics.
By specifying an event as a key event, done via GA4’s admin > property settings > data display > key events, this will include these events in GA4’s key event counts and key event rate metrics. Key event rates, scoped by either user or session, showcase the rate of key events associated with your user and session counts. The higher these metrics, expressed as percentages, the more business-critical events occurred in more sessions by more users.
These are common metrics used to help determine the success of your website, as the more business-critical actions users are performing on your site, the greater your website is going to contribute towards your business’s performance.
Marking an event as a key event also gives you the option to adjust its counting method. By adjusting this setting, you can alter whether a count is reported per event that occurs, or whether an event is counted once per session. This is useful for avoiding duplicates for user actions you’d expect to occur only once per session, per user, such as a contact form submission.
As GA4’s normal events, not those marked as key events, don’t have a count option, this can cause a discrepancy between the two. In cases where an event was reporting on an action prior, then marked as a key event with an altered counting method, the count can appear lower. You should take this into account when analysing your event data.
Event Value
If configured, tying a value to an event allows you represent how it impacts your business monetarily. As an example, logging and reporting on the value of a transaction on your ecommerce website, the value of an item that travels through an ecommerce user journey funnel, or the value of a lead submitted via an enquiry form, can help you gauge how much measurable valueyour website is generating for your business.
To calculate the value of events without an inherent value, like an enquiry form submission, consider using your average order value for new customers, average customer lifetime value, or another metric that represents how much value your business could gain from a user performing that action.
For ecommerce, we’d recommend setting this via event parameters or the dataLayer in GTM. But for lead-generation events you can configure this in GA4, by setting a default key event value. Note that this approach only applies to key events.
Using the guidance above, you can begin configuring your GA4 event tracking setup, helping you better understand the behaviour of your users on your website, and begin to decipher why your users display those behaviours.
Need support with your GA4 event tracking?
Whilst Google offers plenty of documented support for implementing GA4 event tracking, it isn’t always accurate, and getting the most out of it requires expertise and experience.
Our Google Analytics setup services can provide you with a GA4 event tracking setup that caters to your exact measurement needs.
Get in touch today.
