Google Analytics is an analytical tool for websites and apps that track the data about users and their behavior in the platform.
Google Analytics 4 got the feature of both App + Website where it allows you to measure both your mobile app and your website rather than having different properties like in universal analytics
Especially if you got an e-commerce website these events play a pivotal role in understanding your customer behavior.
Event is the data collected by Google Analytics 4 from the user’s activity on a website or an app.
For example, every time a user views a page on your website page_view event is triggered and recorded in Google Analytics 4. Likewise, there are many other events where data can be collected through various method
Four Events in Google Analytics 4
There are 4 categories of events in Google Analytics 4 that help you collect data according to your needs.
- Automatically collected event
- Enhanced measurements
- Recommended events
- Custom events
Automatically collected event
Events that are triggered automatically and data collected after basic activities within your page.
Basic activity/interactions such as
Video_start: When a video starts playing on your site.
first_visit: when a user visits your website for the first time when the analytics is enabled.
session_start: when a user engages with your website
Enhanced Measurements
It is also an automatically collected event where once you enable Enhanced measurements in the data stream in google analytics 4
It collects data such as
- page_views
- scrolls
- clicks
- view_search_results
- Video engagements (video_start, video_progress, video_complete)
- File_download
Recommended Events
These are the events recommended by Google that are tracked only when it is executed manually with the help of tag manager
The name of the event and the parameters should have the exact name as Google recommended, if not the event will fail to trigger.
Google has recommended different events according to respective industries
What are Parameters?
Parameters are the extra set of information about the event, collected when it’s triggered.
Some parameters are automatically collected by default by Google analytics 4, these are called automatic parameters
Medium
Source
Page_Title
These are some of the parameters that are automatically collected by GA4
When you manually add parameters then it is called custom parameters.
Custom Events
Events that are manually configured with the help of Google Tag Manager. Before configuring custom events check if the event already exists in automatic, enhanced measurements and recommended events.
Create Events in Google Analytics 4
Let’s say you want to create an event for the checkout page and where you want to track users who have been to the checkout page and mark it as conversion.
Since you need to track only one page, automatic event pae_view won’t come in handy in such instances. So, we create an event in the GA4 interface.
You could find that in the Event tab and click create event
Fill in the custom event name for your reference and conditions that match the event.
In my case
Custom event name: checkout_progress
Conditions: page_location contains /checkout
So when a user reaches the page, the event gets triggered and data is taken into account.
After configuring the event you can test in Debug view in GA4, your event trigger can be seen, and by clicking the event you can see all the parameters that were triggered during the event.
