Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for beginners - Events in GA4 (part 1)
While Universal Analytics (also known as Google Analytics 3) was mainly built around 'sessions', Google Analytics 4 is all about so-called 'events'. In this part of the Google Analytics 4 for beginners guide, we will what events are exactly, and what types of events exist. In a later installment of this beginners guide, we will elaborate on this.
Remark: In this article we will use the terms 'Google Analytics 4' and 'GA4' as synonyms. In case we write 'GA4' you can read this as Google Analytics 4. This also applies to 'Google Tag Manager' and 'GTM'.
Remark: This article requires you to have already created a Google Analytics 4 account. If you have not yet created a GA4 account, please refer to this manual first. We also assume you have already created a Google Tag Manager account, added the GTM code to your website and linked a Google tag to your GA4 measurement ID. If you have not already done so, please refer to our Google Tag Manager for beginners guides after having read the aforementioned GA4 guide. We recommend that you return to this page only after this.
Remark: Google has a habit of regularly changing the interface of Google Analytics 4. This means that the GA4 interface in our images may look different compared to the GA4 interface in your browser. This usually results in minor aesthetic differences, but in some cases, Google has moved around entire features. If you can't find the specific feature we are highlighting, please consult Google to see where the particular feature has been moved to.
Hoe kan ik beginnen met Google Analytics 4?
Misschien niet het antwoord wat u graag zou willen horen, maar het beginnen met Google Analytics 4 begint niet bij het leren van bepaalde GA4 features. Sterker nog, het begint buiten GA4. Het beginnen met Google Analytics 4 begint met uw bedrijfsdoelen. (De bedrijfsdoelen die te maken hebben met uw website/app.) Zonder doelen zijn de tabellen en grafieken in GA4 slechts dat, tabellen en grafieken. Google Analytics is een uitstekende tool om te meten of wat u doet om uw bedrijfsdoelen te verwezenlijken daadwerkelijk werkt. Zonder deze doelen zult u slechts een scherm met cijfers voor u hebben.
Bij het nagaan wat uw bedrijfsdoelen kan het helpen om te beginnen met het opschrijven van uw algemene bedrijfsdoelen, deze vervolgens specifieker te maken, en uiteindelijk SMART. Stel dat u uw website gebruikt om uw diensten te verkopen, en één van uw bedrijfdoelen is om meer omzet te draaien. U kunt dit doel specifieker maken door u af te vragen hoe u dit wilt realiseren, bijvoorbeeld door middel van het genereren van meer leads. Vervolgens kunt u dit doel nóg specifieker maken door bijvoorbeeld te stellen dat u meer leads wil genereren door middel van een social media campagne. U kunt dit doel uiteindelijk concreet maken door het doel SMART te maken. (Specifiek, Meetbaar, Acceptabel, Realistisch en Tijdgebonden.) En ja, SMART is erg oud en haast cliché, maar het werkt. Uiteraard kunt u SMART vervangen door het acroniem/model dat u of uw organisatie al gebruikt, zolang het de doelen maar concreet maakt. Hoe concreter het doel, des te beter. Als u geen bedrijfseigenaar bent is het wel belangrijk dat u de bedrijfsdoelen niet zelf verzint, maar de daadwerkelijke bedrijfsdoelen gebruikt. In veel gevallen kunt u uw KPI's als startpunt nemen.
Opmerking: voor meer informatie over SMART kunt u deze PDF van de Universiteit van California gebruiken.
What are 'events' in Google Analytics 4?
Put simply, events in Google Analytics 4 are interactions between your visitor and your website or app. For instance, clicking a button is an interaction. So is scrolling down a page or watching a video. By measuring these events, GA4 is able to tell you what your visitors are doing on your website. For example, it allows GA4 to keep track of which pages your visitors visit most often, which products and/or services they tend to purchase, and where and when they leave your website. With the help of these and other insights, you will be able to adjust and improve your website, after which you will be able to monitor the impact of the changes you have made.
Obviously, not everyone has the same wants and needs when it comes to measuring events. Where some people might be satisfied in seeing the total number of website visitors and perhaps their most visited website pages, other people might want to zoom in to a more granular level and monitor when and how many times specific buttons have been clicked. Some people might even go so far as to measure whether, for example, different colored buttons result in more or fewer clicks (A/B testing). Fortunately, Google Analytics has something for everyone. Depending on your needs, you can choose to use GA4 straight out of the box, configure it to your heart's content, or anything in between. Whatever you decide, it's good to know which events are measured automatically by GA4, as well as which options are available to you to customize it.
Google Analytics 4 knows four types of events:
• Automatically collected events - These include basic events, such as the first time a visitor visits your website, starting a session, clicking a link, loading a page or scrolling down a page. If you are only interested in a general overview of your website, e.g., knowing how many visitors have visited your website, automatically collected events will most likely be enough for you. In that case, you won't have to tinker with the settings because, as the name suggests, these events will be automatically collected for you by Google Analytics 4. As long as the Google Tag is loaded in Google Tag Manager, these events will be collected for you.
• Enhanced measurement events - These are events from 'enhanced measurement', which you already encountered in part 3 of our Google Tag Manager guide for beginners. These include downloading files, playing videos and clicking on outgoing links. Some of the events in this category have an overlap with the events in the category above. The main difference being the ability to add parameters with enhanced measurement events, which allow you to more accurately measure events. The great thing about enhanced measurement events is that you can turn them on with the click of a button and have them measure events on autopilot.
• Recommended events - These include events such as logins, signing up for a newsletter, sharing one of your web pages on social media, and e-commerce related events. However, GA4 doesn't collect these events by default. You will have to put in some work to measure recommended events, but if you want to take your website and marketing activities to the next level, this is a must. It is not without reason that Google calls this category 'recommended events'. Google even goes so far as to state that these events are useful for all customers in all business verticals.
• Custom events - It is entirely possible you want to measure events that Google does not explicitly recommend. If you are looking to measure an event which doesn't fit into one of the above categories, you have the option to create an event. You will even be able to name these events and parameters yourself, with the only caveat being that a self-invented event name may not appear on the reserved event name list.
With the exception of custom events, all events in Google Analytics 4 have their own name. (Naming custom events is something you will have to do yourself.) For example, loading a web page is known to GA4 as page_view. What is immediately noticeable is that event names do not contain spaces. Each space is replaced with an underscore. This may seem a bit strange to people without a technical background, but this is one of GA4's technical requirements. Event names may also only consist of letters, numbers and underscores, and no capital letters are used in event names. Although it might seem a bit unusual at first, the more you familiarize yourself with GA4, the more you'll get used to it. You can read more about the event naming conventions here.
Below we'll dive a little deeper into the first two categories: automatically collected events and enhanced measurement events. Although there isn't much to say about the former category, there is certainly something to explain about the latter category.
Automatically collected events
As the name suggests, GA4 will automatically collect certains events for you. As long as you have placed the Google Tag Manager code on your website and configured your Google tag (formerly known as the GA4 configuration tag), these events will be collected for you by default. Automatically collected events include basic interactions with your website, such as someone's first visit to your website (first_visit), loading a web page (page_view), and having your website active in the foreground (user_engagement). There are also certain mobile app and advertising events which will be collected for you by default. You can read more about automatically collected events here.
Enhanced measurement events
You have already encountered them while creating a data stream: improved measurement events. But what are they? And how are they useful?
Enhanced measurement events are basic interactions a visitor will have with your website. These events are a step up compared to the automatically collected events. These enhanced measurement events include, for example, scrolling down on a page, using the search bar on your website, and downloading files. You will be able to read a bit more about the improved measurement in this article.
Just like automatically collected events, Google Analytics 4 will be able to measure enhanced measurement events for you on autopilot. However, unlike automatically collected events, you will have to manually enable enhanced measurement events first. Fortunately, this is done with a click of a button. To enable improved measurement, please follow these steps.:
To enable improved measurement, firstly, log in to your Google Analytics 4 account. Then press the gear icon at the bottom left to go to the admin section.
In the admin section you will either have to click on 'Data streams' in the menu on your left-hand side, or, alternatively, in the Data collection and modification section to the right.
Click on the data stream you want to enable enhanced measurement for. As a reminder: in this context, a data stream is the data input for your property. It's where your data comes from, which is most likely your website or mobile app.
In the 'Events' section, you will be able to turn on 'enhanced measurement'. To do so, flip the switch so that it turns blue.
To get more information about all the specific events belonging to 'Enhanced measurement', click on the cogwheel. In case you don't want to collect all enhanced measurement events, you will be able to turn off/on specific events here.
Below we briefly explain what these events mean:
Page views - As soon as someone either visits a page on your website or refreshes the browser, the page_view event will be triggered. GA4 uses this event to keep track of how often a specific page is loaded and displayed to your website visitors. This will give you insight into which particular pages are most popular, which pages might need improvement, and (if applicable) results of social media and/or advertising campaigns. As can be seen from the color of the switch, page views cannot be disabled. By clicking 'Show advanced settings', you can, however, turn the option 'Page changes based on browser history events' on and off. This option automatically tracks page views based on the browser history of your website visitors. For example, if your website uses JavaScript to add more content to a page without reloading the entire page, GA4 looks for these changes in the browser's history.
Scrolls - GA4 has the ability to measure when your website visitors scroll down on your web pages. The scroll event will be triggered once your visitors have scrolled down 90% on a web page. Unfortunately, this percentage cannot be adjusted to a value of your choosing through improved measurement. As an alternative, you can create your own scroll event through Google Tag Manager, which allows you to set a custom percentage as a bottom value.
Outbound clicks - Outbound clicks are clicks which take your website visitors to destinations outside of your own website/app. For example, if you have placed a link or button on your website which will direct your website visitor to a different website, then a click on this link or button is considered an outbound click. As soon as a visitor clicks this link or button, the click event will be triggered and GA4 will register the click as an outbound click. Internal links don't count as outbound clicks. This means that if you have a link on one of your website pages, which links to another page on your own website, a click on this link will not be considered an outgoing click. (If you have enabled cross-domain tracking, clicks to linked domains will not be registered as outbound clicks either.) Measuring outbound clicks will give you insight into which external websites your visitors find valuable and relevant. In addition to the click event itself, a number of parameters (extra pieces of information) are also sent with it:
• link_classes - These allow you to categorize the clicks based on CSS class. Suppose you have given certain links a class called 'social media link'. Based on this class you will then be able to group these clicks.
• link_domain - This is the domain being you're pointing the link towards (without the addition of a specific page). If you refer to an article on Wikipedia, the link_domain will be Wikipedia.com.
• Link URL - The link URL is the full web address your link points towards, including the specific page, such as 'https://wikipedia.com/page.html'.
• Link ID - Each link is assigned a unique link ID, which allows you to distinguish between all the different links on your website.
• Outbound - You will be able to keep track of whether a click is actually an outbound click. It is a boolean value, which means that the value will either be true or false.
Site search - If your website contains a search bar, this option allows you to automatically capture your visitors' searches. This is done by triggering the view_search_results event. Search results are obviously very valuable, because they gives you a glimpse into what your visitors would like to see on your website. Depending on how your website displays search queries, you may need to adjust some settings in order for GA4 to correctly register search results.
• After clicking on 'Show advanced settings', you will see the following fields.
• Saving a visitor's search is done based on the URL which loads after your website visitor has searched for a search term. In other words, whenever a website visitor has typed one or more words into the search bar on your website and has pressed the search button. To measure your visitors' searches through improved measurement, your website will have to use so-called 'query parameters'. These are pieces of information which are added to the URL after your visitor has used the search function. This is perhaps best explained using an example.
• Suppose a visitor lands on your website and uses the search bar on your website to look for contact details. The website visitor types in the word 'contact details' in the search bar on your website. After the visitor has pressed the 'search' button, your website loads the URL 'https://your-website.com/search?q=contactdetails'. The first word or letter after the question mark is the query parameter. In this case it is 'q' (without the quotation marks).
• To test which query parameter your website uses, simply use your website's search bar and look at the URL that is then loaded by your browser. If the query parameter in your URL (i.e. the character or word after the question mark) matches one of the query parameters which populate the field by default, no action is necessary on your part. If your particular query parameter is not yet listed, simply add it manually.
• You will also see the heading 'additional query parameters', with an empty field below it. After using the search bar on your website, there might be even more useful parameters available. You can put these into the aforementioned empty field. For example, suppose your URL would looks like this: 'https://your-website.com/search?q=searchterm&page=2'. In this case, you could enter 'page' as an additional query parameter in the empty field. It's also entirely possible the search bar on your website doesn't utilize query parameters. While it is still possible to measure this in GA4, it's a subject that falls outside of the scope of this beginners manual.
Form interactions - If your website uses a form which has to be filled out by your website visitors, it is possible to measure your visitors' interactions with this form. For example, if you have a contact form on your website, you will be able to measure the amount of times a form is completed and sent. This is done with the form_start and form_submit events, which measures when a user fills out the form for the first time in that session and when the user submits the form, respectively. Unfortunately, it appears that measuring form interactions is not always reliable, so it might be wiser to build your own solution using Google Tag Manager.
Video engagement - If you have embedded videos on your website, you might want to measure your visitors' interactions with said videos. This is done by using the events video_start, video_progress and video_complete measure. These measure when a visitor starts watching a video, when the visitor has watched a certain part of the video (10%, 25%, 50%, 75%) and when the visitor reaches the end, respectively.
To measure video engagement, you will need to add the following code to the URL of each video: ?enablejsapi=1. For example, suppose you want to embed a YouTube video on your website. To do this, you will first have to navigate to the relevant YouTube video on youtube.com, then press 'Share' and then 'Embed'. You will see an embed code which you must place on your website. You will have to add the aforementioned code to this embed code. More specifically, add the code immediately after the URL of the video (no spaces). In the embed code this is the 'https://www.youtube.com/embed/........' part. It will ultimately look something like this:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jNQXAC9IVRw?enablejsapi=1" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Unfortunately, at the moment, measuring video engagement does not work for every website and every video player. For instance, you cannot measure videos hosted on Vimeo using enhanced measurements. If you want to measure video engagement for videos hosted on Vimeo, you will need to create a solution for this yourself in Google Tag Manager.
File downloads - Your website might host downloadable files for your visitors to download. Luckily, you will be able to measure how often these files are downloaded. For example, let's say you have a link on your website which allows your website visitors to download a PDF file by clicking on it. Using enhanced measurements, every time a visitor downloads the PDF through that link an event called file_download is triggered. Through this event, GA4 is able to keep track of, among other things, whether the file has been downloaded. Currently, this is only possible if the downloaded file has one of the following extensions: .pdf, .xls, .xlsx, .doc, .docx, .txt, .rtf, .csv, .exe, .key, .pps, .ppt, .pptx, .7z, .pkg, .rar, .gz, .zip, .avi, .mov, .mp4, .mpe, .mpeg, .wmv, .mid, .midi, .mp3, .wav, .wma . Unfortunately, it is not possible to your own extensions through enhanced measurements. You will have to manually build a solution for it in Google Tag Manager.
Where can I find the results of enhanced measurements?
You might wonder where you can find the results of enhanced measurements in Google Analytics 4. Well, look no further.
To see what you have collected in terms of improved measurement events, first hold your mouse over the circle at the top left (1). After this, a menu will slide out. Click on 'reports'. Then click on 'engagement' to slide out the menu below. Finally, click on 'events'.
Here you will see a line graph, horizontal bar chart and a table containing the collected data per event.
Below you will see a table containing the collected data per improved measurement event. In this table you can click on the individual events to dive deeper into the data for that specific event. You can also draw comparisons by clicking on the + sign (top left).
This brings us to the end of part 1 of our guide to events in Google Analytics 4, which is part of the Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for beginners series. In part 2 we will take a look into the world of recommended events.