How to Track Events in Google Analytics 4

Tracking what users do on your site is the whole point of analytics, and in Google Analytics 4, everything revolves around events. This article will show you exactly how to track events in GA4, starting with what’s tracked automatically and moving all the way to setting up fully custom events unique to your business.

What 'Event-Based' Actually Means in GA4

If you used the older Universal Analytics, you’re used to a model built around sessions and pageviews. It was a good system for measuring web pages, but less effective for tracking nuanced user journeys across web and apps. GA4 flips this on its head with an event-based model, where every single user interaction is captured as an event. A page view is an event, a button click is an event, adding an item to a cart is an event - you get the idea.

This approach gives you a much more flexible and accurate picture of user behavior. Instead of just knowing someone visited a page, you can understand the sequence of actions they took, providing a far richer dataset for analysis.

The Four Kinds of GA4 Events

GA4 categorizes events into four main types. Understanding the difference between them will help you build a clean and effective tracking strategy without creating unnecessary work for yourself.

1. Automatically Collected Events

These are the foundational events that GA4 collects the moment you install the tracking code. You don’t have to do anything to enable them, they work right out of the box. Think of them as the answers to the most basic analytics questions.

Some key automatically collected events include:

• first_visit: The first time a user visits your website or app.
• session_start: Triggered when a user begins a new session.
• page_view: Fired each time a page loads (this is a classic, but now it's classified as an event).
• user_engagement: Fired when a session lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least two pageviews.

These events form the bedrock of your GA4 data, and you'll find them in your reports without any setup.

2. Enhanced Measurement Events

Enhanced Measurement is one of the best quality-of-life updates in GA4. It lets you automatically track common web interactions with a simple toggle switch - no code required. When you set up a new GA4 web data stream, these are enabled by default.

Events tracked through Enhanced Measurement include:

• Scrolls: When a user scrolls 90% of the way down a page.
• Outbound clicks: Clicks that lead users away from your domain.
• Site search: Captures what users are searching for in your site's search bar.
• Video engagement: Tracks plays, progress, and completions for embedded YouTube videos.
• File downloads: Automatically logs clicks on links that lead to common file types (like PDFs, docs, or spreadsheets).

You can manage these settings by navigating to Admin > Data Streams > Click your web stream > Enhanced measurement. From there, you can turn any of them on or off.

3. Recommended Events

Google provides a list of "Recommended Events" with predefined names and parameters for common business scenarios. While you don't have to use them, it's highly advised. Using Google's naming conventions means your data will be understood by GA4's reporting system, unlocking more detailed reports and future-proofing your analytics.

Some popular examples include:

• For all properties: login, sign_up, share
• For Ecommerce: add_to_cart, begin_checkout, purchase
• For Lead Gen: generate_lead, submit_form

Think of these as templates. Google has already done the thinking for you on how to structure data for common actions, making your analysis work much easier later on.

4. Custom Events

This is where the real power and flexibility of GA4 shines. A custom event is any event you name and implement yourself. If you need to track an interaction that doesn't fit into the automatic, enhanced, or recommended categories, you can create a custom event for it.

Are you tracking clicks on a specific promo banner? Watching how many users interact with a pricing calculator? Or monitoring sign-ups for a very specific webinar? These are all perfect use cases for custom events.

Setting Up Custom Events an Easy Way (Inside the GA4 Interface)

You don't always need to be a developer or a Google Tag Manager wizard to set up custom events. GA4 lets you create new events based on other events that are already being collected. This is perfect for simple tags, especially those based on visiting a specific page.

Let's walk through a classic example: tracking contact form submissions by creating an event when a user lands on the "thank you" page.

1. Navigate to your GA4 account and click on Admin (the gear icon) in the bottom-left corner.
2. In the Property column, go to Data settings > Events.
3. Click the Create event button.
4. In the new view, click Create again.
5. Now, you'll configure your new event:
6. Click Create in the top-right corner.

That's it. From this point forward, every time a user triggers a page_view event on a URL containing "/thank-you," GA4 will also create a brand new contact_form_submit event.

Setting Up Custom Events the Powerful Way (With Google Tag Manager)

For more control and scalability, Google Tag Manager (GTM) is the way to go. It lets you create and manage all your tracking tags in one place without needing to edit your website's code directly. Let's create an event to track clicks on a specific "Subscribe Now" button.

Step 1: Enable Click Variables in GTM

For GTM to identify which button was clicked, you need to turn on its built-in click variables.

• In your GTM container, go to Variables.
• Under the Built-In Variables section, click Configure.
• Scroll down to the Clicks section and check the boxes for variables like Click Classes, Click ID, and/or Click Text. These will let you target buttons precisely.

Step 2: Create a Trigger

A trigger is a listener. It waits for a specific action to happen on your page. Here, we'll configure a trigger to fire when a user clicks our subscribe button.

• Go to Triggers > New.
• Give your trigger a name, like "Click - Subscribe Button".
• Click Trigger Configuration and choose Click - All Elements.
• Change the trigger to fire on Some Clicks.
• Set the firing condition. For this example, let's say our button has a CSS class of "cta-subscribe-button". The condition would be: Click Classes contains cta-subscribe-button.
• Save the trigger.

Step 3: Create the GA4 Event Tag

The tag is what actually packages the data and sends it to Google Analytics.

• Go to Tags > New.
• Name your tag, such as "GA4 Event - Subscribe Click".
• Click on Tag Configuration and select Google Analytics: GA4 Event.
• In Configuration Tag, select the GA4 Configuration tag you've already set up. If you don't have one, you'll need to create it first with your GA4 Measurement ID.
• For Event Name, enter what you want the event to be called in GA4 reports. Let's use subscribe_click.

Step 4: Link the Tag and Trigger

Now, we connect the trigger to the tag. In the Tag Configuration window, click on the Triggering section at the bottom. Select the "Click - Subscribe Button" trigger you created in the previous step. Save your tag.

Step 5: Preview, Test, and Publish

Before making your changes live, you must use GTM's Preview mode. Click the Preview button in the top right, enter your website URL, and connect. A new debug window will open. Go to your site and click the subscribe button. You should see your "GA4 Event - Subscribe Click" tag fire in the debug panel. Once you've confirmed it works, go back to GTM, click Submit, and publish your changes.

How to Verify Your Events in GA4

After setting up events, you need to make sure GA4 is receiving them correctly. There are two primary places to check:

• Realtime Report: Found under Reports > Realtime, this dashboard shows activity on your site from the last 30 minutes. Your new events should appear in the "Event count by Event name" card within minutes of being triggered.
• DebugView: This is a more powerful tool for granular testing. Go to Admin > Data streams > DebugView. When you have GTM's Preview mode active, DebugView provides a live, second-by-second stream of events from your device. You can click on each event to inspect the parameters being collected.

Remember, it can take up to 48 hours for data from new events to appear in your standard GA4 reports outside of Realtime and DebugView.

Marking Key Events as Conversions

Not all events are created equal. Some, like a purchase or a form submission, are direct indicators of business success. In GA4, you can mark these key events as conversions.

The process is incredibly simple. Just go to Admin > Data streams > Events. You'll see a list of all events GA4 has collected. Find your important event (e.g., contact_form_submit or subscribe_click) and flip the toggle in the "Mark as conversion" column. This makes the event appear in all conversion-related reports and allows it to be used for bidding optimizations if you link GA4 to Google Ads.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics 4's event-based tracking forces a smarter, more deliberate approach to analytics. By understanding the four distinct event types and mastering the setup process - either through the GA4 interface or the more robust Google Tag Manager - you can capture every user interaction that truly matters to your business goals.

Of course, tracking events in GA4 is only part of the battle. The next challenge is connecting that data to your other marketing and sales platforms to understand the full customer journey. Tying GA4 conversions to campaign spend from Facebook Ads or deal stages in Salesforce often turns into a messy, time-consuming process of exporting spreadsheets. With Graphed, we connect directly to your data sources, including Google Analytics. You can simply ask questions in plain English, like "Show me a dashboard of purchase events broken down by traffic source" or "Which campaign has the lowest cost per generate_lead event?", and get a real-time answer instantly, without ever having to wrangle a CSV again.