Complete Guide to Events in Google Analytics 4

Discover more about events in Google Analytics 4 including the different types of events, how to create them and more.

Events are a great way to track meaningful actions on your website.

While Universal Analytics offered a decent range of actions to track on-site, GA4 offers more in the way of set and custom events that you can create and own.

Events can help you better understand the actions being taken on your website and how they play a part in driving meaningful results.

In this blog, we’ll go through:

What an event is in GA4
What type of events you can track
Where events are in Google Analytics 4
Plus, how to set up an event in GA4

Let’s get started.

What is an event in Google Analytics 4?

Events work differently in Google Analytics 4 from how they worked in Universal Analytics. In UA, events were made to track actions within a page.

Meanwhile, in GA4, events are used to send a wide range of data to your reports.

This is anything from actions on site, to details about users and more.

Previously, this type of data was sent as a ‘hit’, and you had a set list of hits that you could send, which meant you couldn’t collect any custom information.

Hit types in Universal Analytics were:

Pageview hit
Event hit
Ecommerce hit
Social interactions hit
Exception hit
User timing hit
Screen hit (for apps)

Now hits have been replaced by events, you can collect data for anything you like. That leads us nicely onto our next topic.

What types of events are available

There are four different types of events in Google Analytics 4:

Automatically collected events
Enhanced measurement events
Recommended events
Custom events

Google Analytics allows you to have up to 500 defined events in your account.

But remember, you can’t delete any events so be sure to consider what data you need before you set up a new event.

Automatically collected events

These events are automatically collected by Google Analytics 4. They start tracking when you set up the Google tag snippet on your website.

Learn exactly which events will be tracked automatically here.

Enhanced measurement events

These events are tracked automatically when enhanced measurement is enabled within Google Analytics.

You can track:

Page views
Scrolls
Outbound clicks
Site search
Video engagement
File downloads
Form interactions

You can enable enhanced measurement by heading to Data Streams > Web in the Property column of your admin settings.

Under Enhanced Measurement, switch to On to enable all options.

Recommended events

These are events with predefined names and parameters. These can help you unlock further reporting capabilities.

To set these up as well as custom events, you need to do a little coding on your site. Learn how to set up these events.

Custom events

These are a deeper level of customisation within your events. Custom events don’t show up in standard reports, so you need to set up custom reports in order for the data to pull through.

These events also require custom coding to enable them.

Where are the events in GA4?

You can access events in Google Analytics 4 by following these easy steps.

Step one, navigate to your GA4 property and click on Reports.

Next, click on Engagement.

Then, click Events.

Here you can see all of the events you’re currently tracking plus apply a range of filters to your report to better understand your data.

How to set up an event in Google Analytics 4

Setting up an event in Google Analytics 4 is easy.

Just follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Click to Create Event

Under Configure, select Events. From here, you can see a list of all your current events.

To create a new event, just click Create event.

You’ll then be taken to the Custom events screen. Click Create.

Step 2: Configure your event

You need to set up the correct parameters within your event.

First, you need to give your event a name. Make sure to choose something that you can easily recognise.

Next, enter the matching conditions.

You need to specify the conditions you want to track. You can add parameters like page information, item variables and more.

We advise copying the parameters from the source event. Then click Save and you’re ready to go.

Step 3: Check your event works with Debug view

The last step is to confirm your new event is firing as intended. To do this, head to the designated page and complete the chosen action.

This should fire off your event.

To check that it does fire, open up the debug report in GA4 to confirm.

In Configure, select DebugView.

Here you’ll see a real-time report of actions on your site that will look something like this.

How do you check events in GA4?

Remember, you can also mark your events as conversions too.

To do this, head back to the Events section of your configure report. Here, you can simply toggle on and off if you want an event to be tracked as a conversion or not.

Tracking conversions is vital as part of measuring the impact of your website.

Track more than conversions and events in GA4

While tracking your conversions is important, it’s not the most important metric of all.

For us, the best metric is revenue. Sometimes, it can be hard to get revenue into Google Analytics 4, but it’s not impossible.

You can pull revenue from your CRM, no matter if you’re generating leads through your website, not direct revenue.

The trick to getting revenue in Google Analytics 4 is to connect the data all the way through the pipeline.

Marketing attribution is the missing link.

Attribution tracks users from their very first touchpoint on your website, which feeds into your CRM and your analytic tools.

Ruler is a great tool for attribution. It links all of your data together and helps you track, evidence and optimise your marketing data.

💡Pro Tip

Learn exactly what you can discover using Ruler Analytics and how it can help you make better decisions when it comes to optimising your strategy.

Book a demo to learn more about how Ruler can help you connect the dots between your website, CRM and analytics.