GA4 Events

  • mattatnicolebarkerva

    (@mattatnicolebarkerva)


    2 years, 10 months ago

    Hi Web Stories team! We have successfully segmented web story traffic in GA4 on multiple sites. Thank you for the updates and support.

    I am not sure what to make of the events we are receiving though. In UA we would see web story events such as

    • story_pages_viewed
    • story_page_count
    • story_page_attachment_enter
    • etc

    Now I am seeing the following

    • Custom (the majority of traffic is listed as custom event)
    • page_view
    • session_start
    • first_visit

    Is there documentation somewhere that gives us more information about events and what they mean? Second….what is the recommended way to understand clickthrough’s from a web story page attachment or link? Our clients definitely want to track links to the article the story is about. Is there a way to do that in the current G4 abilities?

    Thanks ahead of time!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Luckyna San

    (@luckynasan)

    2 years, 10 months ago

    Hi @mattatnicolebarkerva , I’d suggest starting with GA4 Documentation or to consult the Google Analaytics help center and community, as that’s the best place to get answers for your questions.

    Thread Starter mattatnicolebarkerva

    (@mattatnicolebarkerva)

    2 years, 10 months ago

    Thank you for the response @luckynasan , but I don’t understand exactly why you are deferring me to GA4 documentation.

    Does the plugin not play a part in the generation of Web Story events? Is there no way for the plugin to create events that make sense and help users accurately track activity?

    I was under the impression when you created the micro-plugin for event tracking in UA, that the Web Story plugin team had some responsibility for events being triggered by Web Stories. Is that level of integration with GA4 just not available to your team any longer?

    Please help as we currently have very little information from any Google source on how we should accurately track events, click-throughs, and other conversions in web stories.

    nathan.araujosantos

    (@nathanaraujosantos)

    2 years, 10 months ago

    That was my question too. I saw that these events are being triggered by the plugin, you can see it by Chrome’s dev tools. But for some reason we don’t know they don’t appear in GA4.

    Plugin Author Pascal Birchler

    (@swissspidy)

    2 years, 10 months ago

    Does the plugin not play a part in the generation of Web Story events? Is there no way for the plugin to create events that make sense and help users accurately track activity?

    I was under the impression when you created the micro-plugin for event tracking in UA, that the Web Story plugin team had some responsibility for events being triggered by Web Stories. Is that level of integration with GA4 just not available to your team any longer?

    Well, yes and no. By default, the Web Stories plugin uses a predefined analytics configuration that is tailored towards the needs of typical Web Stories creators. This configuration is not controlled by us, but by the AMP project.

    With the move from UA to GA4 this has not changed. So if you have trouble finding the data in GA4, their help center is the place to get support with that.

    Now, if you want to track different events, beyond what’s in the predefined configuration, you could use a custom plugin like this one to do so.

    Thread Starter mattatnicolebarkerva

    (@mattatnicolebarkerva)

    2 years, 10 months ago

    Thank you @swissspidy ! I will give the custom plugin a shot. I used your micro-plugin in UA and it was great.

    Just for feedback to the overall team. To me, the simplest things creators would want to see is

    • Story entered
    • Pages clicked
    • Stories completed (meaning every slide was seen)
    • Ad displayed (not sure if this is possible, but it would be awesome to know when the random ads were shown)
    • Page attachment clicked
    • Link clicked

    As far as I can tell, AMP / GA4 by default may support a couple of these things.

    Thanks (as always) for your support. The Web Story community appreciates your work greatly!

    Thread Starter mattatnicolebarkerva

    (@mattatnicolebarkerva)

    2 years, 10 months ago

    Hi @swissspidy !

    I just wanted to report back. The GA4 Microplugin is working great. I did notice that all events are now going to the “Event Name” of “Custom”. It’s kind of annoying in GA4 reporting tools because the “Event Action” isn’t available to report on in many instances, so all Custom events get grouped together without the ability to drill into the actual action.

    I modified your plugin slightly to change the Event Name to be the same as the Action. So both fields now say “story_click_through” or “story_page_attachment_enter”. It seems to work perfectly in GA4 and all of my reporting for my client dashboard is back online. Not sure if that’s against Google practices, but I wanted to document it here so others have reference, or maybe you would even consider changing yours to do the same.

    Thanks as always for the support!

    Matt

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

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