What Are Key Events in Google Analytics 4?

If you've recently migrated from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4, you might be looking for "Goals" and wondering where they went. They've been replaced by a more flexible and powerful feature called Key Events. This guide will walk you through what Key Events are, why they are essential for understanding your business performance, and exactly how to set them up.

The Big Shift: From UA Goals to GA4's Event-Based Model

To understand Key Events, you first have to grasp the fundamental change in how GA4 measures user activity. Universal Analytics (UA) was built around sessions and pageviews. "Goals" were specific actions you configured to track conversions, an exception to the normal flow of data.

GA4 flips this entire model on its head. Everything a user does is an "event," from starting a session (session_start) and viewing a page (page_view) to scrolling down a page (scroll) and clicking a button. This event-based model provides a much more detailed and user-centric view of the customer journey, moving beyond the simple "did they visit the thank you page?" logic of the past.

So, where do Key Events fit in? A "Key Event" isn't a different type of hit, it's simply a toggle you flip on for any existing event that you decide is important to your business. It’s GA4’s way of letting you say, "Out of the hundreds of events I'm tracking, this is one of my key performance indicators."

What Counts as a Key Event?

Think of Key Events as the actions that directly correlate with your business objectives. They are the user interactions that signal a step toward or the completion of a desired outcome. While a standard event like scroll tells you about user engagement, a Key Event tells you about conversion.

Common examples of valuable events to mark as "key" include:

• Leads and Sign-ups: generate_lead, contact_form_submit, sign_up
• E-commerce Actions: add_to_cart, begin_checkout, purchase (Note: purchase is automatically a Key Event).
• High-Intent Engagement: schedule_demo_click, request_a_quote_button, view_pricing_page

By marking these events as key, you unlock deeper reporting capabilities in GA4, allowing you to analyze which marketing channels and user pathways are driving the most valuable results for you.

The 4 Types of Events You Can Promote to Key Events

Before you can mark an event as "key," it first needs to exist. In GA4, events are categorized into four types. Understanding these will help you figure out what you can already track and what you might need to create yourself.

1. Automatically Collected Events

As soon as you install the GA4 tag on your website or app, a set of foundational events are tracked automatically. You don't have to lift a finger.

These include fundamental interactions like:

• session_start: When a user begins a new session.
• first_visit: The first time a user visits your site or app.
• user_engagement: Fired when a session lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a key event, or has at least 2 pageviews.

While critical for core measurement, you typically wouldn't mark these events as key since they measure general activity rather than specific business outcomes.

2. Enhanced Measurement Events

This is where GA4 starts to show its muscle. Enhanced Measurement is a setting that, when enabled (it's on by default), automatically tracks more complex user interactions without needing any code changes.

These events include:

• Scrolls (scroll): When a user scrolls 90% of the way down a page.
• Outbound clicks (click): When a user clicks a link that leads away from your domain.
• Site search (view_search_results): Fired when a user uses your website's internal search function.
• Video engagement (video_start, video_progress, video_complete): Tracks interactions with embedded YouTube videos.
• File downloads (file_download): When a user clicks a link to a common file type (e.g., PDF, DOCX, ZIP).
• Form interactions (form_start, form_submit): Tracks when a user starts filling out and successfully submits a form.

The form_submit event is a fantastic candidate for being a Key Event, especially if you have an important lead-capture or contact form on your website.

3. Recommended Events

Google provides a list of suggested event names organized by industry. These are not tracked automatically, but they represent common actions you’ll likely want to measure. Using Google's recommended naming conventions ensures that your reports are standardized and helps GA4's machine learning better understand your data.

Examples for an e-commerce store include add_to_cart, view_item, and begin_checkout. A software company might use login, sign_up, or generate_lead.

Implementing these requires a little bit of technical setup (often through Google Tag Manager), but they are prime candidates for becoming Key Events.

4. Custom Events

If an action you want to track isn't covered by the first three categories, you have the ultimate flexibility to create a Custom Event. You can name these whatever you want (within Google's limits) and trigger them based on any specific interaction you can define.

This is where you can get really specific. For example, you might create a custom event named demo_video_watch_2min when a user watches the first two minutes of your main product demo, or an event called clicked_enterprise_plan when someone clicks the button for your highest pricing tier.

Custom events you create are often the most valuable events to mark as key because they are tied directly to your unique business funnels and terminology.

How to Set Up Key Events in GA4: A Step-by-Step Guide

Setting up a Key Event is incredibly simple once the underlying event is being collected. Here are two main scenarios you’ll encounter.

Scenario 1: Marking an Existing Event as a Key Event

This is the most common and easiest method. You use this when GA4 is already collecting an event you consider valuable, such as form_submit from an important contact form.

1. Navigate to your GA4 property.
2. In the bottom-left navigation, click on Admin (the gear icon).
3. Under the Data display section, click on Events.
4. You will see a list of all event names your property has collected in the selected date range. Find the event you want to designate as a key conversion (e.g., generate_lead, sign_up).
5. On the right side of that event's row, you'll see a toggle switch in the "Mark as key event" column. Simply click this toggle to turn it on (it will turn blue).

That's it! GA4 will now start counting every instance of that event as a conversion. Be aware that it may take up to 24 hours for Key Event data to start appearing in your Conversions report and other attribution reporting sections.

Scenario 2: Creating a New Event and Marking it as Key

What if the action you want to track doesn't have a pre-existing event? The most common example is tracking a visit to a "Thank You" page, similar to the old "Destination Goals" in Universal Analytics. For this, you can create a new event directly in the GA4 interface.

Let's walk through creating a new event called signup_confirmation that fires when someone lands on your /thank-you-for-signing-up page.

1. Go to Admin > Events.
2. On the Events page, click the Create event button.
3. In the Custom events list, click Create again.
4. Now you will configure your new event:
5. Click Create in the top-right corner.

Now, your newly-created signup_confirmation event will begin collecting data. After 24-48 hours, it will appear in your Admin > Events list. Once you see it there, simply follow the steps from Scenario 1 to toggle it on as a Key Event.

Why Bother with Key Events?

Setting up Key Events isn’t just an administrative task, it’s the most critical step you can take to make GA4 useful.

• Measure What Truly Matters: Key Events shift your focus from vanity metrics like traffic and sessions to business outcomes like leads and sales. They are the scoreboard for your website.
• Unlock Attribution Reporting: Once you have defined your key outcomes, you can use GA4's Advertising reports to see which channels (Organic Search, Paid Search, Social, etc.) are most effective at driving these outcomes. This allows you to intelligently allocate your time and marketing budget.
• Power Google Ads Bidding: For advertisers, this is a game-changer. You can import your GA4 Key Events directly into your Google Ads account as conversion actions. This enables powerful, automated bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions or Target CPA, where Google's AI will optimize your campaigns to get more of the events you care about, dramatically improving your ROI.

Final Thoughts

Key Events are the heart of performance measurement in Google Analytics 4. By identifying the user interactions that matter most to your business and marking them as "key," you transform GA4 from a simple traffic-counting tool into a powerful engine for business intelligence that can drive strategic decisions.

Tracking Key Events in GA4 is a fantastic start, but true insight comes from seeing the whole picture. It can still take hours to pull GA4 reports, combine them with spending data from Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and performance data from your CRM to figure out what's really working. We built Graphed to eliminate that exact pain. You just connect your data sources once, then ask questions in plain English like, "show me a dashboard of my GA4 Key Events by channel next to Facebook Ads spend for the last 30 days," and get a live, automated dashboard in seconds.