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Creating events within GA4
August 15, 2024
If you need to create an event in GA4 but not sure where to begin, well you might just be in the right place.
There’s many reasons why you would want to create events in GA4:
- No access to Google Tag Manager
- Lack of technical knowhow
- No access to a developer
And choosing to create events in GA4 is no bad approach – but my recommendation from experience is to choose an approach and stick with it. It’s so confusing when you see an event and you’ve got no idea where that’s being fired from.
So let’s take a look at creating events in GA4.
Table of Contents
Creating a custom event in GA4.
There are two ways to create a custom event in GA4:
- Through the admin section of GA4
- As an audience trigger
Let’s focus first on creating on in the admin section of GA4.
Creating an event through the admin section
If you have the right level of access, head to Admin > Data Display > Events > Create Events
Clicking on the Create event button pops up the create event functionality.
You can then click the ‘Create’ button again to start creating an event afresh.
This pops up the event creation configuration menu.
So what do we do from there?
Event Creation Run through
Here’s a run through of the event creation process:
- Create a custom event name (recommended to use snake case e.g. lower case and underscore)
- Set your matching conditions using event_name and additional parameters.
- Choose whether to copy parameters from source event
- Choose whether to modify parameters.
Simple right!
Well, there’s a few things to reference here.
Matching Conditions for GA4 custom events
The limitation of this feature is that the event creation within GA4 must match already tracked events within GA4.
So this could be a page_view event, a pdf download event, or a link click to an external event.
This is much easier if you have included enhanced measurements within GA4, as this automatically enhances events – and you can use those for creating your events in Google Analytics 4.
Creating events in GA4
You can only create events within GA4, based on previously created events.
Page View Custom Events
If you want to create an event for when someone lands on a specific page, or a thank you page. This can be created within the GA4 interface.
The matching conditions (if I had a thank you page that contains /thank-you) would be:
- event_name equals page_view
- page_location contains /thank-you
Therefore, every time a user gets to the thank-you page, an event will be fired called form_fill_thank_you_page.
Page Referrer
If you feel that users land on a thank you page, but don't fill out the form - artificially inflating your figures, you could also add a parameter of page_referrer. This could equal your page with the form on it.
File Download Custom Event
If you’ve got a really important document, for example:
- a brochure
- a catalogue
- a guide
and you want to track that, you can do that within GA4.
Say I’ve got a PDF document called kyles-guide-to-zelda.pdf and I want to track that, the matching conditions would be:
- event_name equals file_download
- file_name contains kyles-guide-to-zelda
Outbound Click Custom Event
If you want to track everytime someone wants to head to an external site – maybe a donation page if you’re a charity or a booking form for a restaurant or a hotel, that can be tracked too.
Remember – I’m taking these pre existing events from enhanced measurements.
I want to track when someone heads from my hotel to a booking engine (in this case synxis). I want to call the event booking_engine_click.
- event_name equals click
- link_url contains synxis.com
Creating custom events via audience triggers
In the words of Yoda – there is another (way).
If you’re creating an audience within GA4, you can create the audience as an audience trigger.
This will send an event every time that someone enters into that audience.
GA4 Custom Events Limitations
There are some things to consider when creating custom events in GA4.
- You can create up to 5o per GA4 account
- The data is not retroactive
- They can only be created based on existing events
- The maximum length of an event name is 40 characters (no War & Peace sorry)
- There are reserved event names which you can’t use
- You only have the opportunity to create 25 parameters per event (does anyone seriously need more???)
Custom Events to Key Events
When you’ve created your custom events and now want to mark these as key events, it’s really simple!
There’s 2 ways.
If you’ve created the event and you are now seeing that event in Admin > Data Display > Events you can toggle that specific event as a key event on and off.
Alternatively, if you want to ensure that every event from inception is marked as a key event, you can head to Admin > Data Display > Key Events.
From there, click New Key Event and insert the name of the event that you’ve created.
It must match exactly the event you’ve created. So I like to copy the name of the newly created event as I’m creating it, and then immediately mark it as a key event.
So there you have it – how to create custom events in GA4. Hopefully that’s useful. Happy custom event creating!
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Author
Hello, I'm Kyle Rushton McGregor!
I have been working in PPC and SEO for over a decade now. I have expertise in supporting charities, SAAS and B2C – helping them drive more traffic and conversions. My experience covers