Google Analytics 4 Events Guide: Event Tracking Explained

What Is an Event in Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) events are user interactions or system occurrences on a website or app.

Events are the foundation of all GA4 tracking.

Any time a web interaction takes place—whether it’s a page view, click, scroll, or purchase—GA4 records that data as an event.

This is quite a change from the prior version. In Universal Analytics (UA), events were one of many types of data you could track. In Google Analytics 4, all user interaction data points are tracked as events.

Here’s how it works:

The technical name for one of those tracked web interactions is a “hit.” As you can see below, Universal Analytics had multiple hit types. But in GA4, all hits (interactions) are events.

Now, let’s look at two crucial differences between GA4 event tracking and UA.

Google Analytics 4 Event Tracking vs. Universal Analytics: What Changed?

There are two major changes you need to know when comparing Google Analytics 4 events to Universal Analytics.

GA4 Has Different Types of Events

Universal Analytics did not have different types of events.

As you’ll learn in this guide, GA4 event types include automatically collected events, enhanced measurement events, recommended events, and custom events.

Although they all produce event data, they work differently in terms of creating event tracking.

GA4 Allows Custom Event Creation With and Without Google Tag Manager

Universal Analytics required you to use Google Tag Manager to create all events.

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