Event Tracking and Event Parameters in GA4

With the advent of Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the team at Google also added a new statistics version. This gives you more control and versatility over the information you gather about your target market, their movements, and your website. More alternatives and more flexibility also mean events can become more difficult. Fast. So let’s unpack occasions in Google Analytics 4 and make sense of what they are and how you could use them to gather the needed insights.

If you’ve been using Google Analytics for some time, you're probably already acquainted with event tracking, which has been around since 2007. We will start by discussing the activities we should tune within the preceding version of Google Analytics (Universal Analytics) and evaluate them to the brand new occasions in Google Analytics 4.

Types of Events Tracked By GA4 By Default

Google Analytics 4 robotically tracks numerous occasions by default without any additional configuration. Some of these occasions relevant to web property monitoring consist of the following:

• click.
• file_download.
• form_start.
• form_submit.
• page_view.
• scroll.
• session_start.
• user_engagement.
• video_complete.
• video_progress.
• video_start.
• view_search_results.

By default, it also gathers the following information:

• page_location.
• page_referrer.
• page_title.
• screen_resolution.
• language.

But in most instances, it isn't enough for complete tracking, and here is where custom event tracking comes into play.

What is an event in Google Analytics 4?

An event is a motion that a user makes on your website. Events may be anything from clicking a link to filling out a form. They are there to help you track and recognise how customers engage with your website and content. It’s critical to recognise that activities work differently in Google Analytics 4 than they did in Universal Analytics. In UA, occasions have been made for music to move within a web page.

Meanwhile, in GA4, occasions are used to ship extensive information on your reports. This is something from movements on a website online to details about users and more. Previously, this sort of information was sent as a ‘hit’, and you also had a fixed list of hits you could send, which meant you couldn’t gather any custom data.

Hit sorts in Universal Analytics had been:

• Pageview hit
• Event hit
• E-commerce hit
• Social interactions hit
• Exception hit
• User-timing hit
• Screen hit (for apps)

Now that hits have been changed utilising events, you can gather data for something you want.

Why use events in Google Analytics 4?

If you’re extreme about tracking the interactions of your internet site traffic and leads, then you need occasion tracking.  Without event monitoring, you’re in the dark. You don't have any idea whether or not you are still having meaningful interactions in your business.

By monitoring occasions, you may gain valuable insights into how users use your internet site or app, and you may use these records to enhance your touchdown pages, content material, and advertising and marketing campaigns.

Here are a few examples of ways you can use occasions in Google Analytics:

• Measure clicks on buttons and hyperlinks: See which buttons on your internet site or app get the most clicks and help convert extra customers into leads or income.
• Analyse scroll depth: Measure how far users scroll down your web page and enhance your pages' content material and format.
• Track downloads: Track your downloads and hyperlink them to your touchdown pages and site visitors' assets (e.g., Natural search, e-mail, social, etc.)
• Track shape submissions: Capture form submissions in GA4 to understand how your advertising campaigns and content influence your consumers’ trips.

These are only a few examples of ways you may use events in Google Analytics. Form submissions are generally the least-used event tracked in Google Analytics. But even though Google Analytics event monitoring is a terrific start, it’s no longer the best solution for tracking form submissions or leads. Here are some of the reasons:

Google is putting off most rule-based attribution models. This will limit how marketers attribute occasions to pages and visitor assets in GA4.

Google Analytics only tracks the variety of bureaucracy submitted. It doesn’t, for my part, contain identifiable facts. This makes it tough for marketers to close the gap between advertising and pipeline activity. Out-of-the-container, Google Analytics doesn’t track offline conversions. This is exceptional if the majority of your leads are generated through bureaucracy. But if calls are a vital part of your lead generation, chances are you’re hugely underestimating the cost of your advertising.

If you’re looking for music form submissions and leads, there are better alternatives. One option is to use advertising and marketing attribution tools.

Marketing attribution tools are better for monitoring form submissions because they offer more specific facts about the journey that ends in a form submission or conversion.

For example, marketing attribution tools can:

• track any interaction that a person has with your internet site. This can include visiting your internet site, clicking on an advertisement, or starting an email.
• Link the actual person's data again to their advertising touchpoints on every occasion they convert into a lead or sale.
• Attribute closed revenue returned to your inbound efforts, permitting you to measure advertising and marketing effectiveness and ROI correctly.
  

Event Parameters in Google Analytics 4

Events with parameters can be sent to Google Analytics. Parameters are greater pieces of information that are tied to the event. For example, the page_view event is dispatched for your reports with the page_location and the page_referrer parameters. The page_location parameter lets you see the web page URL that a person regarded, and the page_referrer parameter lets you see the URL of the previous page they considered.

Google Analytics will robotically ship parameters on every occasion. These can include:

• The ga_session_id parameter includes the particular identifier assigned using Google Analytics for the consumer’s consultation.
• The page_location parameter sends the URL of the page presently being viewed.
• The page_title parameter sends the name of the web page presently being considered.
• The page_referrer parameter sends the URL that a person regarded earlier than the modern-day page. This can encompass other pages on your internet site or third-party websites (if someone clicked through your site from any other website).

For activities robotically tracked by Google Analytics, additional parameters are also sent. This brings us to computerised events.

What forms of events are to be had in Google Analytics 4?

In Google Analytics 4, there are four exclusive kinds of activities:

• Automatically collected events
• Enhanced measurement events
• Recommended events
• Custom events

Google Analytics lets you have as many as 500 described activities in your account.

But remember that you can’t delete any activities, so remember what information you want before you install a brand new occasion.

Automatically collected events

Google Analytics 4 tracks automatically collected events by default. These occasions provide primary facts about how users engage with your internet site or app, the pages they visit, their actions, and the time they spend on your site.

Some of the automatically collected events in Google Analytics 4 are as follows:

• first_visit: This event is precipitated when a consumer visits an internet site or launches an Android immediate app with Analytics enabled for the first time.
• Session_start: This occasion is triggered when a person starts a brand new consultation for your website or app.
• User_engagement: When the app is in the foreground or the website is in awareness for at least one second
  

Enhanced measurement events

The most important difference between “automatically collected events” and “enhanced measurement events” in GA4 is that routinely tracked activities are accumulated by default. In contrast, stronger dimension activities can be enabled or disabled. Also, more suitable dimension occasions offer greater specified statistics about how customers interact with your website or app. The first-rate element is that those events are accumulated mechanically without additional configuration or code.

To locate enhanced measurement events, visit Admin > Data Streams > Select the internet statistics flow. A window will open, and you also need to see Enhanced Measurement. Here are a few examples of enhanced events in Google Analytics 4:

• Video engagement: This event is induced when a user watches a video on your internet site or app.
• File download: This event occurs when a consumer downloads a report from your website or app.
• Search: This event occurs when a user searches for something on your website or app.
• Checkout: This occasion occurs when a user starts the checkout process on your website or app.
• Purchase: This event is prompted when a user purchases from your website or app.

As stated, you could disable or enable more desirable activities anytime. To do that, click the equipment icon within the Enhanced Measurement segment and then the toggle buttons. You also have the option to personalise certain activities to your specifications using “advanced settings”.

Recommended events

Recommended events in Google Analytics 4 are those that Google recommends monitoring for particular companies. These occasions offer precious information about how users engage with your internet site or app and will let you improve your advertising campaigns and website design.

Google has also posted several times about tracking online income and the gaming enterprise. It’s worth noting that advocated activities aren’t robotically prompted and logged unless you manually put them into action.

Custom events

These are deeper levels of customisation within your activities. Custom events don’t appear in popular reports, so you want to set up custom reports so that the statistics can drag through. These activities also require custom coding to enable them.

Where are the events in GA4?

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

First, navigate to your GA4 belongings and click on Reports. Next, click on Engagement. Then, click Events.

Here you can see all of the events you’re currently monitoring, plus follow several filters to your record to better apprehend your records. For instance, you could see the wide variety of times each event was induced, the common time spent on each event, and the share of customers who triggered each event.

How to install an event in Google Analytics 4

For this demonstration, we will reveal how to install an occasion directly in Google Analytics 4. To set up an occasion with Google Tag Manager, go to our manual on putting Google Analytics 4 with Google Tag Manager in place.

Step 1: Click to Create Event

Click Admin and pick Events. From here, you can see a listing of your current occasions. To create a new occasion, just click Create Event. You’ll then be taken to the Custom Events display screen. Click Create.

Step 2: Configure your occasion

You need to set up the appropriate parameters for your event. First, you want to give your event a call. Make sure to choose something that you can easily understand. Next, enter the matching conditions. You need to specify the situations in which you need to record. You can upload parameters like web page facts, item variables, etc. We endorse copying the parameters from the supply event. Then click on Save, and you're also ready to go.

Step three: Check that your event works with the Debug view

The last step is to affirm that your new occasion is firing as intended. To do this, head to the detailed web page and complete the chosen action. This must kick off your occasion. To determine whether it does hearth, open up the debug file in GA4 to confirm. In Add, choose DebugView. Here you’ll see an actual-time record of movements on your site, so it'll look something like this.

Step four: Mark your event as a conversion

Remember, you may also mark your activities as conversions. To do this, head to Conversions. You need to see your custom event listed. All you want to do is mark it as a conversion using the slider, and you’re good to go. Do not be alarmed if you do not see your custom event. Sometimes it can take some time for it to appear. Once finished, you could mark your events as conversions opposing your site visitors' assets and preferred metrics.

How to track an event using JavaScript

Now that you know how to install an event, let’s track it. You can track menu clicks by sending them as custom events to a GA4 property!

In the WordPress default theme “Twenty Twenty and Twenty Twenty-One”, you can use the menu-item- ... ID values.

You can use this CSS selector for grabbing menu item elements with this HTML code:

li[id^='menu-item-'] > a

After grabbing the menu items, you can hook them up with event listeners and callbacks.

Inside the event callback code, you have to need to add your call to gtag.js. It will look like this.

gtag("event", "MenuClick", {
menu_item_name: name,
menu_item_url: url,
});

The name of the menu item (also known as the menu item text) and the menu item's URL can be sent as two parameters to the MenuClick event in the snippet of code above.

(function () {
  if (typeof gtag === 'undefined') return;
  // Grab all the menu items on Twenty Twenty WordPress theme page.
  const menuElts = document.querySelectorAll("li[id^='menu-item-'] > a");
  console.log(`I found ${menuElts.length} menu items to process.`);
  // If no menu items, bail.
  if (menuElts.length === 0) return;
  // Convert to an array so we can map over the array
  // if you don't want to use the spread syntax.
  // let menuItemsArr = Array.from(menuElts);
  // menuItemsArr.map((elt) => {
  // Spread and map.
  [...menuElts].map((elt) => {
    // Set up the listener and handler at the same time.
    try {
      elt.addEventListener("click", function (evt) {
      console.log("Sending menu click to GA4.");
      let name = evt.target.innerText;
      let url = evt.target.getAttribute("href");
      // DEBUG
      // evt.preventDefault(); // Don't navigate!
      // console.log(`Menu item clicked: ${name} ${url}`);
      gtag("event", "MenuClick", {
        menu_item_name: name,
        menu_item_url: url,
      });
    });
  } catch (e) {
    console.log("Something wrong happened when setting up event handling for the menu items.");
}
});
})();

Conclusion

There you've got it, our guide to tracking events in Google Analytics 4. If you’re trying to track user behaviour on your internet site, then Google Analytics 4 is the precise tool. With its superior abilities, GA4 permits you to gain treasured insights into consumer behaviour and interactions. For conversion events, your best bet is to use an advertising attribution tool.

Google Analytics 4 doesn’t provide a whole picture of the purchaser's journey. It only tracks facts from your internet site. In other words, it cannot inform you how leads came in, how they interacted with your brand, or how far they made it down the funnel. But advertising attribution can fill this gap.

Unlike GA4, advertising and marketing attribution consider the different touchpoints in a user’s journey and may assign sales returned on your landing pages, traffic resources, and commercials based on their importance. You can't go wrong when Google Analytics and marketing attribution information sponsor you. You have an extra-accurate picture of the effectiveness of your advertising, permitting you to optimise for an optimal fee.