The Ultimate Guide to GA4 Events

Google Analytics 4 is, at its core, a tool for collecting and reporting on events.

Get these events right, and Google Analytics 4 will become indispensable for finding out which ads and marketing campaigns are bringing visitors to your website, and what kind of design and copy are getting those visitors to stay and convert.

But get the events wrong and your GA4 reports and explorations will create more questions than answers, putting the value of tagging and analytics in question.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration, then, to say that the events you choose to collect in your GA4 property—and how you choose to collect them—can make or break your implementation of the tool.

In our client work, I’ve seen good and bad GA4 implementations. Some setups were so complex that I’ve had to sanity-check them with Google’s enterprise architects.

Yet over time, I’ve learned that even the most intricate Google Analytics implementation projects can succeed by getting the basics right, much of which comes down to well-designed event collection.

So here’s everything you need to know to achieve success.

The Three Types of GA4 Events

There are three types of events you need to know about when implementing Google Analytics 4:

• Enhanced measurement events
• Recommended events
• Custom events

Since getting these events wrong can require you to rework your setup (or, in extreme cases, trash the first implementation and start from scratch), you’ll want to spend a good amount of time thinking about them in advance.

Enhanced Measurement Events

Google Analytics 4 can automatically collect a number of standardized events from common user interactions with your website.

These events are page views, scrolls, outbound clicks, website searches, video interactions, file downloads, and form submissions.

Their automatic collection is called enhanced measurement, and it works just by having the Google tag on your website’s pages.

The only thing you have to do is go to your data stream’s settings and switch enhanced measurement collection on. Once you do, the enhanced measurement events will start flowing to your GA property immediately, without the need to add tags in Google Tag Manager or change your website’s code.

Enhanced measurement events are helpful, but your ability to customize them is incredibly limited.

For example, you can change the URL parameter that Google Analytics should look for when firing the search event to match the URL patterns of your content management system.

You can also choose which file extensions trigger the file download event.

However, you can’t customize the parameters that enhanced measurement events are saved with in your Google Analytics property. So if you need to enrich these events with parameters that aren’t already there, your only option is to disable their automatic collection and create the tags to trigger them yourself.

And that’s how you decide whether or not to switch enhanced measurement events on. If their built-in triggers and parameters work for you, then by all means, turn enhanced measurement on. And if they don’t, disable automatic event collection and go custom.

The important thing is to only use automatic collection or manual collection, but never both at the same time.

For example, a client asked us to audit their GA4 implementation because their analytics agency had questioned the integrity of the data.

After conducting the audit, we found that the analytics agency had been right—on some pages, the client was collecting both automated click events through enhanced measurement and manually-configured events in Google Tag Manager, which meant that clicks on certain buttons and links were being double-counted.

You can find a complete list of all enhanced measurement events and their parameters on this page.

Recommended events

Recommended events are custom events that Google recommends you track in Google Analytics.

However, since those events require extra knowledge to trigger or additional data in their parameters so that they can be useful in your reports, GA4 doesn’t collect them automatically with enhanced measurement.

Instead, Google simply recommends their collection and leaves that collection up to you.

One example of a recommended event is the purchase event. Google can’t possibly foresee the checkout flow of every website that uses Google Analytics 4, so it simply recommends that website owners who have online stores track purchases with this event name.

You can find the complete and latest list of GA4 recommended events on this page in Google’s product documentation.

Note that Google also recommends a set of parameters to capture for each recommended event. You can see all recommended parameters for all recommended GA4 events here.

Custom events

Custom events are the events you collect in Google Analytics 4 on your own, whether that’s through Google Tag Manager, the Google Analytics SDK, or via the Measurement Protocol API.

Since you’re in full control of event collection when collecting custom events, if you want your GA4 setup to deliver value, it’s essential that you get both the event names and parameters right.

I’ve already written about the naming rules and best practices for your GA4 custom events, so I’m not going to go into the details of that here. What I want to focus your attention on instead is the importance of consistency in event and parameter naming.

For starters, event names, parameter names, and parameter values are case-sensitive. So if you’re sending the same event with all lowercase letters in one place and with a capital first letter in another, you’re effectively forking the setup by sending two distinct events.

I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen this happen in large organizations, especially as agencies change and internal or agency staff members turn over. Simple deviations like this can cause significant headaches if accidentally made and left unattended, especially in properties with millions of events flowing in daily.

If there’s one thing I’ve seen consistently from one client project to another, it’s that disciplined data collection pays off. Manage your events and parameters like you would manage any other piece of taxonomy—have a dictionary, document the rules and patterns, govern them formally, and implement strict controls for who can do what in Google Tag Manager.

And if you have questions or need help, give us a call.