GA4 Events Tracking: GA4 Custom Events & Parameters Set-up Guide

Google Analytics 4 is a new event data model-based version where everything is an event, even pageviews. It provides you with an in-depth view of user actions, errors, and other metrics from your website and apps.

Events are user interactions with content that could be measured independently from a web page or mobile app. Examples of events include downloads, link clicks, form submissions, and video plays. The data captured in Google Analytics 4 reports comes from events that are triggered while users interact with your website or app. For instance, a page_view event is triggered when a user views a page on your website.

You can learn and master all about GA4 events in an offline mode too. Simply download the eBook with step-by-step instructions.

Types of Events in GA4 –

Events are very important for collecting data and analyzing user behavior using those data points. Diving deeper into how you can use these events to achieve your business goals is important. 

And that’s why we are here with our new ebook launching next week that could serve as a quick guide to all your queries and concerns around GA4 Events. A lot has been written about this topic but our main purpose is to collate all the necessary and minute details on the concept for you in one place, so you do not have to keep wandering from one resource to another.

Here’s a glimpse of what you can expect in the ebook:

• Different types of events in GA4

• Understand how events are getting collected in GA4 and can be leveraged to analyze your users better

• How events in GA4 are different from GA3 (UA)

• Create or modify events without making any changes to your backend codes

• How GA4 event structure will enable you to analyze your data with ease and perfection

• How these events can be used at their best for your business

We have picked a few things from the book to give you an initial idea of the topic. 

Events in GA4 are basically categorized into four types:

1. Automatically Collected Events:

Basic predefined events that most businesses would want to track on their website include first_visit, session_start, and user_engagement. As the name suggests, these events are automatically collected and do not require any manual code or additional configuration.

2. Enhanced Measurement Events:

They enable marketers to capture more user behavior data, again, without the need for additional configuration for these events. They are ‘out-of-the-box’ and traditional events that start collecting as soon as you implement the configuration tag on your website.

3. Recommended Events:

These events require some bit of coding on your website to capture them in GA4 reports. But they are slightly different from custom events because Google has already done some of the thinking for you regarding naming convention and the parameters you could pass with them. As you can imagine the list of recommended events includes mostly everyday user interactions. And they are very important for leveraging the advanced reporting capabilities in GA4.

4. Custom Events:

This is where the real potential of GA4 comes alive. Custom events are very similar to Recommended events in terms of implementation. However, with an exception of the freedom to capture any data point with your choice of naming convention and parameters; so fully custom as the name suggests. Before planning on a list of custom events, make sure they are not already a part of either of the other three categories to avoid any conflict and get efficient insights.

Event Parameters in GA4:

The GA4 event Parameters are the additional information that can be collected with each interaction. Some of the parameters like language, page_title, screen_resolution, etc are collected with all types of events and it does not require any additional configuration. 

If there is any additional information that is not automatically collected, you can configure custom parameters that include both custom dimensions and custom metrics. Custom dimensions are mainly of two scopes, Event, and User. You can register these parameters in GA4 and configure them from the backend to get values.

GA4 does not have an option to create product-scope or session-scope dimensions due to its event-based data model. However, there is some set of pre-defined product-scope parameters for e-commerce events that can still be used.

User-scoped parameters in GA4 are used to describe user attributes. Some of the user properties that are collected automatically in GA4 include age, gender, country, language, and a few more.

Conclusive thoughts:

There is a lot to say about events and how you can leverage these events for your tracking needs. You can use these events to measure how well your business is performing and track any changes in user behavior. By using these events, you can improve your user experience and increase overall traffic to your website and/or app. 

Watch out for a comprehensive ebook written by our certified and experienced team of Google Analytics Consultants to get all the interesting information around and about events.

A well-proven measurement plan is what you need to successfully build an analytics infrastructure for your business. Reach out to explore all the success factors we can bring in for your organization and achieve digital maturity in no time.