GA4 Event Based Reporting

Why use GA4's event-based tracking?

GA4’s event-based tracking offers enhanced reporting capabilities with greater detail in path analysis. It gives credit to events that help identify the specific touch points or interactions contributing most to incremental conversions. This comprehensive tracking system enables your team to optimize marketing strategies accordingly.

The Benefits of Event-Based Reporting on GA4:

• Path Analysis: Analyzes the sequence of events leading up to conversions and identify the specific touch points or interactions that contribute most to incremental conversions.

• Attribution Modeling: Attributes conversions and interactions to specific events rather than just sessions. This helps identify the impact of different marketing channels/campaigns on driving user engagement and conversions.

• Granularity: Tracks specific user interactions or events, such as button clicks, video views, form submissions, etc. This shows how users are engaging with your website or app beyond just page views or sessions.

• Flexibility: Defines custom events that are relevant to your business goals. This flexibility helps tailor your tracking to measure the user behavior and actions that matter most to your organization.

• User-Centric Approach: Focuses on individual user interactions rather than aggregating data at the session level. Gain an understanding of the complete user journey across multiple sessions and a more holistic view of user behavior and engagement.

• Enhanced Reporting: Includes customizable event parameters, event sequences, and path analysis. These features enable you to analyze user behavior in greater detail and uncover insights that may not be apparent with session-based tracking alone.

Why does Wunderkind use event-based reporting during the evaluation period?

Wunderkind builds its business case (in other words, how we guarantee revenue) based on a client’s prior performance, as measured in GA4 with event-based tracking. Using the same attribution methodology to evaluate our performance enables us to accurately demonstrate the lift Wunderkind provides over a prior solution through a true apples-to-apples comparison.

Is using session-based reporting bad or inaccurate?

Nope! While session-based tracking still provides valuable insights into overall website or app performance, event-based tracking offers a more nuanced and customizable approach - better suited for understanding user behavior and optimizing marketing strategies. Event-based reporting distributes credit to upper-funnel channels, rather than giving complete credit to session before last-click.

Building Explore Reports in GA4

To easily view and analyze performance, as measured via event-based tracking follow the steps below:

1.  Select explore on the left hand side
2.  Select blank report on the screen
3.  Add the Dimensions (Default Channel Group (optional), Campaign, Source/Medium, Event Name)

4. Add the Metrics (Key Events, Purchase Revenue)

   Note: Do not add Session Source/Medium, Session Campaign, or Sessions* *Sessions cannot be added to this report, since it relies on the event-based model. For accurate sessions metrics, use the Traffic Acquisition report instead.

5.  Add Rows (Source / Medium, Campaign)
6. Add Values (Key Events, Purchase Revenue)

FAQ

1.  What are "events" vs. "sessions” and “page views" metrics?

   • Events: Every action on a client website triggers an event. Every event can include extra pieces of information, which can be passed to Google. Multiple events can be tracked in a session.

   • Sessions: A group of user interactions with your website or app that take place within a given time frame.

   • Pageviews: The number of times a user navigates away from one page and to another on a given website.

2.  What is event vs. session-based measurement? 

   UA uses a measurement model based on sessions, where a single session can be comprised of multiple pageviews, transactions, events, etc. On the other hand, GA4 measures based on events and parameters. Every interaction in GA4 is an event; even a pageview is an event. The new measurement model influences how GA4 tracks and quantifies user behavior and other data compared to UA.

Types of Attribution models

1. GA4 Attribution Model:

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  • GA4’s set of rules for assigning credit to the various touch-points in the conversion path.

2. Most commonly used event-based models:

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  • Google Data-Driven Attribution (Multi-Touch): Uses Machine Learning (ML) to evaluate how factors such as time from conversion, device type, number of ad interactions, the order of ad exposure, and the type of creative assets used impact conversion. This model differs from the former because it takes into account clients’ account data to calculate the actual contribution of each click interaction.
  • Paid & Organic Last Click Attribution: Ignores direct traffic and attributes 100% of conversion credit to the last pre-conversion channel a customer clicked through.

3. Other less common models:

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  • Google Paid Channels Model: Attributes 100% of conversion credit to the last Google Ads channel a customer clicked through before converting.
  • User attribution (only found in "user" reports, not event reports): Assigned at the user level and represents the source / medium that acquired the user in the first session
  • Session-based attribution: Attributes conversion to the entire session. Credit is given to channel to the session that drove the final conversion (always uses cross channel last click).