How To Set Events In GA 4?
One of the most useful features of Google Analytics is event tracking. With just a little extra code, you can collect a wealth of information about how visitors interact with your site. Event tracking allows you to track almost any action on your site that doesn’t result in a new page loading, providing invaluable data for site improvement.
You can set up event tracking in Google Analytics in two different ways. One option is to manually enter the code. The other option is to use Google Tag Manager to set up tracking.
Creating new events (and conversions) in GA4
Step 1: Click “Create Events”
Start in GA4’s “All events” report and click the middle button for “Create event” on the top right of the events table.
The Custom events screen will then appear. Click the “Create” button.
Step 2: Confirm Your Event
Is there any interest in an event that tracks visits to my About page so that I can easily get a count of those pageviews without having to dig through parameter reporting?
- First, you will come up with a unique name for your new event. I’m going to call it “page view about” in this case.
- After that, you’ll enter the matching criteria. First, you’ll need to specify the event from which you’d like to create your own. It’s the page view event, in this case, so you’ll put that on the first condition line for event name equals page to view.
- Then, as a separate event, you’ll add an additional condition to distinguish the About page view from the rest. For this condition, you’ll use the page location that contains about.
Finally, your event tracking parameter settings. If you only want to use the parameters that were already present in the original page view event, you can uncheck the box for “Copy parameters from source event.” Otherwise, you can use the event page view with your own/additional parameters.
Step 3: Test Out Your New Event
The final step is to ensure that your new event is functioning properly. To do so, you’ll go to your website (Alkye.com) and go to the About page. This should now cause your new page view about event to be triggered. You’ll open the Realtime report in GA4 to make sure it fires. That’s all there is to it!
You’ve all finished creating your new event now that you’ve confirmed it’s firing as expected. Isn’t it amazing how easy that was?
Final Thoughts
The ability to track what people do on your site (rather than just what pages they view) is a key feature of Google Analytics, and Event Tracking is central to this. You should use it as much as possible, whether you use Google Tag Manager or manually add the code to the site.
