How to use GA4 events to track and measure your KPIs

Compared to Universal Analytics (UA), Google Analytics 4 (GA4) offers a more flexible, event-focused approach to tracking user behavior and greater granularity.

Events can be compared to individual user interactions, such as page views, specific clicks on a particular call to action or purchase form submissions. Configuring and analyzing these events against your market goals and KPIs measures performance, and gain granular insight into how people interact with your website.

This data can help identify audience segments and the channels that generate the most qualified users, or those who intend to purchase or complete specific actions on the site.

What are events in GA4?

In GA4, everything revolves around events. Unlike UA, which had different “hit types” (pageviews, transactions, etc.), GA4 simplifies things: Every interaction is tracked as an event.

There are three main event types to know: 

• Automatically collected.
• Recommended.
• Custom events.

Automatically collected events

These include first_visit, session_start, page_view or file_download, which don’t require specific implementation or setup. All GA4 accounts have these by default, providing foundational insight into how users navigate and interact with your website.

Recommended events

These are specific events Google suggests tracking to help you understand user behavior and business performance. These can include events like:

• Logging in to a user account.
• Completing a purchase or refund.
• Performing a site search.
• Adding an item to a cart.
• Beginning the checkout process.

It is crucial to mark business-critical or essential KPIs as key events. Key events tell Google Analytics to treat the event as a conversion. GA4 will highlight them in reports and dashboards, providing more accurate fill-from-in segmentation and supporting attribution modeling.

Dig deeper: Why the shift from ‘conversions’ to ‘key events’ in GA4 is a game-changer

Custom events

You can set up and add these events to define and track specific interactions that are important to your business but are not automatically covered or collected.

These can include tracking users when they:

• Donate.
• Interact with a specific call to action or buttons on a page.
• Accept a cookie consent banner.
• Interact with particular fields.
• Use specific filters or facets on ecommerce product pages. 

Mapping events to KPIs

You must align your event and GA4 tracking strategy with your marketing and business key performance indicators to get the most out of GA4 features and data insights.

Events can provide a measurement framework, and KPIs can give them further context and direction. You can utilize the API from GA4 to create better reporting in Google Sheets or another platform, or even lightweight reporting in Looker Studio to keep an active viewpoint on how well your website contributes to your overall KPIs.

First, you need to understand what success looks like. Combining these can lead to long-term overall success, whether more sales, leads or high user retention.

As an ecommerce brand or SaaS company, your goal might be to increase purchases or generate more demo requests. While your main KPI may be quantitative, such as total revenue or demo requests, achieving these goals requires monitoring other user interactions.

You want to understand how users are engaging with your products.

• Are they adding items to their basket?
• Are users interacting with key pages like product or blog content if you’re a SaaS brand?
• Are your calls to action clear and being clicked?

These signals help move users from researching your product to signing up for a trial or getting in touch.

You can build a more substantial data narrative by mapping events that directly support or contribute to your primary KPI. As a result, it will be easier to show how your marketing efforts are working, even when there isn’t direct attribution to the final KPI.

Common KPI examples and the events to track them

GA4 is highly adaptable to different business needs, and there are many scenarios in which you may want to track more than just the basics.

You can track metrics like page views, scroll events and click patterns for user engagement. You can also look at metrics such as engaged sessions, session duration or a variation of bounce rate.

Creating a custom event for “quick backs” is applicable. When a user visits a page but quickly hits the back button to return to a previous page, this can signal a poor experience or mismatched content, even though the user didn’t leave the site.

It’s also valuable to track micro-conversions across your site. These include actions like add-to-cart events, newsletter sign-ups or video plays. While add-to-cart events are significant for understanding the ecommerce conversion funnel, tracking these behaviors can help you better understand your audience.

This deeper insight can improve how you build remarketing audiences or analyze pre-conversion behavior, ultimately supporting more intelligent marketing and content decisions.

Dig deeper: How to understand sessions in GA4

Understanding event metrics in GA4

Once set up, events will trigger in Google Analytics, providing several valuable metrics to help you understand user behavior.

Event count per user

This metric shows how often a particular event occurs on average for each user. It helps you assess whether users repeatedly engage with key actions — for example, watching multiple videos during a visit; telling you how users interact with your content and where they might be in the funnel.

Event value

Event value is the sum of any value parameters sent along with an event. It’s beneficial when tracking things like revenue, lead value, average order value, or even custom goal scoring. It helps you assign weight or importance to specific user actions.

Important note on scopes

When working with event metrics in GA4, remember that dimensions and metrics must share the same scope — event, session or user level — for the data to be valid. That is a change from UA and something to watch out for when building custom reports or using Explorations.

Continuous analysis and refinement

When used correctly, Google Analytics 4 can be a key to understanding your audience, optimizing your website experiences and growing your business. 

Tracking is never a “set it and forget it” process. You must continuously review your Google Analytics 4 data and regularly revisit your KPIs and events. You also need to look for any unexpected behavior, anomalies or longer-term shifts in user behavior.

Dig deeper: 3 reports in GA4 that use analytics to eliminate customer friction