How to Check Events in Google Analytics

Switching to Google Analytics 4 means embracing an entirely new way of thinking about your website data, focused almost exclusively on events. Instead of hunting for categories, actions, and labels, you can now track virtually any user interaction as a distinct event. This article will show you exactly where to find and analyze this event data, from quick real-time checks to custom deep-dive reports.

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A Quick Refresher: What Are Events in GA4?

In the old Universal Analytics, tracking was built around sessions and pageviews. Events were a special type of hit you had to manually set up for things like button clicks or video plays. In GA4, everything is an event. A pageview is an event, the start of a session is an event, a scroll is an event, and a purchase is an event. This model gives you a much more flexible and user-centric view of how people interact with your site.

There are four main categories of events you'll find in your GA4 property:

• Automatically Collected Events: These are the foundational events GA4 tracks for you out of the box, no setup required. Think of things like session_start (when a user begins a session), first_visit (the first time a user visits your site), and user_engagement (when the session lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion, or has at least 2 pageviews).
• Enhanced Measurement Events: These are a set of common web interactions that GA4 can track automatically with just a flick of a switch (found under Admin > Data Streams > Web Stream Details > Enhanced measurement). This includes incredibly useful events like scroll (when a user scrolls 90% of the way down a page), click (for outbound link clicks), and file_download.
• Recommended Events: Google provides a list of recommended events with standardized names for common business scenarios across different industries (e.g., e-commerce, gaming). Using these names, like generate_lead for a form submission or add_to_cart for an e-commerce action, helps GA4 understand your data better and unlocks more reporting features.
• Custom Events: If the interaction you want to track doesn't fit into any of the above categories, you can create your own custom event. This is where you get to define exactly what you want to measure, like newsletter_signup, get_a_quote_click, or webinar_registration.

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The Simplest Way to Check Events: The Realtime Report

The fastest way to confirm whether your events are firing correctly, especially ones you just set up, is the Realtime report. It shows you activity on your site as it's happening, giving you instant feedback without the typical data processing delay.

Here’s how to find it and what to look for:

1. On the left navigation menu, go to Reports.
2. Click on Realtime.

On this page, you'll see a card titled "Event count by Event name." This is a simple, live-updating list of all the events that have been triggered in the last 30 minutes. If you just configured a new contact_form_submit event via Google Tag Manager, you can submit the form on your website and watch for its name to pop up in this list. Clicking on an event name in this report will let you see the parameters that were sent along with it, which is incredibly useful for debugging.

While the Realtime report is an excellent debugging tool, it's not meant for historical analysis. For that, you'll need to go to the standard reports.

Diving Deeper: The Engagement > Events Report

The main hub for your historical event data lives within the standard reports. This is where you’ll go to see how many times each event has been triggered over a selected date range, how many users triggered them, and other top-level metrics.

To access this report:

1. From the left navigation menu, click on Reports.
2. Expand the Engagement section.
3. Click on Events.

Initially, you'll see a summary chart and a table. The table is the core of this report, displaying all of your event names alongside several key metrics:

• Event count: The total number of times the event was triggered.
• Total users: The number of unique users who triggered the event.
• Event count per user: The average number of times an event was triggered per user.
• Total revenue: The sum of revenue associated with an event (only applicable if you have e-commerce tracking configured correctly).

This table is a great starting point, but its real power comes from adding a secondary dimension. To add more context, click the blue plus sign (+) next to "Event name." You can add almost any other dimension available in GA4. For example, selecting "Session source / medium" will show you which marketing channels are driving the most generate_lead events.

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How to Check Parameters For Your Custom Events

When you set up creative events, you often send extra information along with them called "parameters." For example, with a file_download event, you might send a file_name parameter to know which PDF was downloaded. Or, for a video_play event, you could include a video_title parameter.

The tricky part is that these custom parameters don't automatically show up as dimensions in your GA4 reports. To use them for analysis, you must first register them as custom definitions.

Step 1: Register Event Parameters as Custom Dimensions

Think of this step as telling GA4, "Hey, I'm sending this piece of extra data with my events, and I want to be able to use it to filter and break down my reports."

1. Navigate to the Admin section by clicking the gear icon in the bottom-left corner.
2. Under the "Property" column, find Data display and click on Custom Definitions.
3. Click the blue "Create custom dimensions" button.
4. Now, fill out the form:
5. Click Save.

Keep in mind that it can take up to 24-48 hours for data to start populating a newly created custom dimension. Don't worry if it doesn't show up right away.

Step 2: Checking Your Events Using Custom Dimensions

Once your custom dimension is active and collecting data, you can use it in your standard reports just like any other dimension. Go back to the Engagement > Events report. Click on a specific event name in the table, like file_download. This will take you to a detailed report for just that event. Now, any custom dimensions you registered for that event will appear as cards in this detail view, allowing you to see metrics broken down by file name, video title, or whatever you configured.

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Creating Advanced Reports with Explorations

The standard reports are useful for quick overviews, but for truly custom analysis, you'll want to use the Explore section. Explorations let you build reports from scratch using any combination of dimensions and metrics you want, kind of like an advanced pivot table tool built directly into GA4.

Let's walk through building a simple free-form exploration to analyze our generate_lead events by landing page.

1. On the left navigation menu, click Explore.
2. Select Blank exploration to start fresh.
3. Give your exploration a descriptive title in the top-left, like "Lead Generation by Landing Page."
4. Import Dimensions: In the "Variables" column, click the "+" next to DIMENSIONS. Search for and import "Event name," "Session source / medium," and "Landing page + query string."
5. Import Metrics: Click the "+" next to METRICS. Search for and import "Event count" and "Total users."
6. Build the Report: Now, you just drag and drop your imported variables into the "Tab Settings" column.
7. Filter for the Right Event: Right now, the table is showing values for all events. We only want to see data for our lead submission event.

And that's it! You've successfully built a custom report showing which of your landing pages is generating the most event counts and users for a specific event. You can get as granular as you'd like here, adding more dimensions (like device category or country) to rows or columns to slice the data however you need.

Final Thoughts

Understanding where to find event data is the first step toward getting meaningful insights from GA4. You can use the Realtime report for quick checks, the standard Engagement report for high-level overviews, and the highly flexible Explorations tool for building custom reports that answer your most specific business questions.

As you've seen, getting to these insights can involve a lot of steps and a significant learning curve. To make this process easier, we built Graphed to connect directly to data sources like Google Analytics. You can skip the tedious clicks and custom report building entirely and simply ask questions in plain English, like "Show me a chart of our top landing pages by lead captures this month." We handle pulling the real-time data and building the visuals for you automatically, so you can get back to acting on insights instead of hunting for them.