In any industry, understanding user behaviour matters most. In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), every user interaction is recorded as an event.
Events fall into four categories: automatically collected events, Enhanced measurement events, recommended events and custom events. The first three cover basic and common interactions. When they can’t capture the interactions you want to track, custom events can. Better still, you don’t need any coding knowledge: follow the tips below and you can create custom events easily.
1. Why use custom events
1. Benefits
- Flexibility: understand user interactions that aren’t tracked by default, and set them as conversions to monitor
- Deeper insight: focus on more detailed user interactions to gain more insight
- Simpler reporting: use the same event name across different properties and data streams
- Better marketing results: set events as conversions or as audience conditions, then use them in your advertising
2. Use cases
- Online sales: how many people visited the customer reviews page?
- B2B: how many people visited the contact us page?
- Media performance: how many times was a specific piece of ad content clicked?
- Campaign promotion: who visited a specific campaign page and scrolled more than 90%?
2. Creating a custom event
Now that you know what custom events are for, let’s go to the GA4 interface and create one.
Step 1. Start creating an event
Click the gear icon in the bottom left click Events click Create event.
Step 2. Choose a data stream
Click the data stream where you want to create the custom event. (If the property has only one data stream, you won’t see this step.)
Step 3. Create the event
Click Create.
Step 4. Set the name, conditions and parameters
1. Event name: choose something clear and easy to recognise, and note the following:
- Names are case-sensitive (for example, CloudAD and cloudad are different events)
- You can use English and non-English letters, numbers and underscores, but no spaces
- Names must start with a letter, not a number or underscore
- Don’t use reserved prefixes or event names (for example, first_open, session_start, google_)
- Keep names within 40 single-byte characters, or the event may not be able to be marked as a conversion
2. Matching conditions: specify one or more matching conditions. To track views of the contact us page, for example, you can set two conditions: “event_name equals page_view” and “page_location contains contact”.
3. Parameter settings: tick “Copy parameters from the source event” to reuse the parameters of the matching event.
4. Click Create: once you’ve finished, click Create, or you’ll lose everything you just set up.
Step 5. Test the custom event
With debug mode turned on for your website or app, carry out the event conditions you set, then use GA4 DebugView to check whether the custom event is actually triggered. For example, in the previous step we set the custom event to trigger when someone views the contact page, so now we go to a page whose URL contains “contact” and check whether the event fires.
Step 6. View the reports
Usually 24–48 hours after setup, you can see data for the custom event, such as event count or number of users, in the various reports.
3. Things to note when creating custom events in the GA4 interface
- Events you create are not applied to historical data
- You can create up to 50 events
- Only people with at least the GA4 Marketer role can create events
Use custom events to deepen your data analysis
GA4’s event tracking gives us a deeper understanding of user behaviour. With custom events you can also set specific conditions to capture the most important interactions, greatly increasing the depth and value of your data analysis.
Once setup is complete, use CloudAD’s own event health check report to confirm that GA4 is collecting basic, common and custom user interactions. Click here to run the check.
CloudAD has a highly professional data consulting team and extensive experience with GA4 implementation and GA360 services. For brands ranging from small and medium-sized businesses to multinational companies, we provide tailored technical support and consulting based on each brand’s needs. CloudAD helps you get your data in order, steer your brand through data turbulence and turn data into decisions. Get in touch.
