Introducing GA4 Events

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What are events in GA4?

Events are a core feature of Google Analytics 4. They refer to valuable actions that users take on your website or mobile app. Essentially, they track user interactions and engagements with website pages or mobile app elements.

Basic events such as downloading a piece of content or scrolling through your webpage can be tracked automatically by GA4 through the enhanced measurement settings in your GA4 data streams. However, it’s also vital that you create custom events for specific interactions on your website using tools like Google Tag Manager or with the help of your mobile app developer.

Why track events?

Events can provide more insight into how users are interacting with your website and content. So rather than just tracking what pages people look at, you can see what actions they take on your pages and what tasks they are trying to complete.

These actions (or ‘events’) might include:

• Clicking a call to action (CTA) button,
• Downloading files, such as brochures, guides, or other PDFs
• Viewing (or partially viewing) a video

If you consider a basic event to be valuable to your business (such as completing a purchase or filling out a lead form),  you can mark that event as a key event, which is what a conversion is called in GA4.

Think of it this way. Events are the micro actions that people take when interacting with your site or mobile app. These micro actions help them on their journey to completing a task, such as buying from you. Micro actions could include clicking your CTAs or watching a video, and then the macro action or conversion is buying or completing a purchase.

Note: Although not all events are directly valuable to your business, they might still assist the customer in their journey towards a valuable action, so think of key events as conversions or the valuable action people take the end of the customer journey event. Some events simply track the steps and engagements that lead up to a key event conversion. Conversions are likely to be at the end of the customer journey, when website visitors or mobile app users do something that’s valuable to your business like buy or fill out a lead form. However, many other steps lead to that final destination and these should be tracked as events.

Common key events

Common key events include:

• Purchases
• Sign-ups
• Email subscriptions
• Filling out a lead form
• Downloading a specific piece of content

Note: GA4 can automatically track content downloads, such as PDFs, but it won’t differentiate between different PDFs or file downloads. In other words, it simply notes that a file was downloaded. So these auto-tracked events might not be so illuminating, thus the need for specific or custom event tracking.

Custom events

Bear in mind that you might not consider all content downloads to be a key event. After all, some content types might be more valuable to your business than others. For this reason, it’s important to set up custom events for your different content download types so you can mark the most important events as conversions. This way, you can be more specific in your tracking.

Budget and resource considerations

From a digital marketing, budget, and resource perspective, when you track the most valuable interactions on your website and mobile app as key events, this allows you to track and relate these valuable actions back to the channels that drive the key event or assisting traffic. This, in turn, enables you to understand how much of your resources, time, and budget to invest in a channel.

It’s good practice to identify what channels and campaigns drive different key events or conversions, and what content on the site helps to drive these valuable events. You can then apply more resources to your best-performing channels and content.

In essence, key event tracking allows you to measure conversions  and helps you to understand what doesn’t work as well, so you can focus your effort on high-impact activities, channels, and content, instead of wasting effort on activities that aren’t delivering results.