The short version: a Google Analytics event is any specific action someone takes on your website or app, a click, a scroll, a video play, a form submit, a download, and tracking them is how you find out what people do on your site rather than just how many of them showed up. Without events you know your traffic numbers and your bounce rate, and almost nothing about what happened in between. Set up the right ten or twelve events and you’ll know within a week which page is quietly killing your conversions.
What an event is, in plain English
Forget the technical definition for a second. An event is just something someone did. Clicked your phone number. Scrolled to the bottom of your pricing page. Watched forty seconds of your explainer video. Downloaded your PDF. Filled in your contact form but didn’t hit submit. Every one of those is an event, and GA4 (the version of Google Analytics everyone’s on now, since Universal Analytics stopped collecting data in July 2023) is built around events as the basic unit of measurement, not pageviews.
That’s a genuine shift from how Google Analytics used to work. In the old Universal Analytics, pageviews were king and events were something you bolted on if you fancied it. In GA4, almost everything is an event, including a pageview itself, which now fires as page_view. I’ve written before about what counts as an event in Google Analytics, and the honest answer is that far more counts than most business owners realise. Scrolling, outbound clicks, site searches and file downloads all get tracked automatically the moment you turn on GA4’s enhanced measurement settings.
Why this matters more than your traffic number
Here’s the bit that people skip past. Knowing 8,000 people visited your site last month tells you almost nothing useful on its own. What matters is what those 8,000 people did once they got there. Did they read your blog and leave? Did they click through to your services page and then vanish? Did they add something to a basket and abandon it at the postage cost screen?
Traffic is a vanity number. Events are where the actual behaviour lives, and behaviour is what you can act on. If you only ever look at sessions and bounce rate, you’re running your marketing on a fraction of the information that’s already sitting there for free.
A real example: the client who thought their form was broken
A few years back I worked with a homeware retailer based in Kent, small team, decent traffic, a website that looked lovely and converted terribly. Their gut feeling was that people just weren’t interested, that traffic was “low quality.” We set up event tracking, seven events in total: add to basket, begin checkout, add shipping info, add payment info, purchase, form start, and form submit on their contact page.
Within eleven days the data told a completely different story. 41% of sessions that hit “add to basket” never reached “begin checkout.” That’s not a traffic quality problem, that’s a friction problem sitting somewhere on the basket page itself. We dug in and found the postage cost only appeared after the customer had already clicked through two steps, a classic bit of sticker shock buried too deep in the flow. We moved the shipping estimate onto the product page instead. Checkout starts went up by roughly a quarter within the month. No new traffic, no new ad spend, just the events showing us exactly where people were giving up.
Without event tracking, that basket-page problem would have stayed invisible forever, because pageviews alone can’t tell you that someone loaded a page and then quietly gave up on it.
Automatic events versus the ones you need to set up
This is where I’ll say something most guides on this topic gloss over. When you install GA4 with enhanced measurement switched on (which is the default), Google will automatically start tracking a handful of events without you lifting a finger: page views, scrolls (triggered at 90% depth), outbound clicks, site searches, video engagement on embedded YouTube videos, and file downloads. A lot of business owners see events appearing in their reports and assume the job’s done. It isn’t.
Those automatic events are generic. They’ll tell you someone clicked an outbound link, but not which outbound link mattered to your business. They’ll tell you someone scrolled 90% down a page, but not whether that page was your refund policy or your highest-margin service page. The events that change decisions are the custom ones you build around your specific business: a “quote requested” event, a “demo booked” event, a “pricing page CTA clicked” event, a “trial started” event. Nobody sets those up for you. If you’ve never opened Google Tag Manager or your GA4 admin panel and built a custom event, you almost certainly aren’t tracking the one action that predicts whether someone becomes a customer.
How to set up an event, step by step
Here’s the process I walk clients through, using Google Tag Manager, which is the least fiddly way to do this without touching code:
- Decide what action matters commercially. Not “clicks” in general, something specific, like “clicked the Book a Call button” or “submitted the newsletter signup form.”
- In Google Tag Manager, create a new trigger. For a button click, choose “Click – All Elements” or “Click – Just Links” depending on what the button is in the code.
- Narrow the trigger with a condition, usually the Click Text or Click URL matching whatever’s unique about that button.
- Create a new tag, type “Google Analytics: GA4 Event,” pick your GA4 configuration, and give the event a clear name (lowercase, underscores, something like
call_booked_click). - Attach the trigger you just built to that tag.
- Preview mode in GTM before you publish anything. Click the actual button on your live site in preview and confirm the tag fires.
- Publish the container, then check GA4’s Realtime report to see the event landing within a minute or two.
That’s the whole process for one event. Most small businesses need somewhere between eight and fifteen custom events to cover the actions that matter: form starts and completions, key button clicks, video engagement past a meaningful threshold, and any checkout or booking steps. Once you’ve mapped that out for one site, replicating it for the next one takes under an hour.
The uncomfortable bit nobody likes to say out loud
I’ll be blunt about something most articles on this topic won’t touch. A huge number of businesses set up beautiful event tracking, spend a day or two building it in GTM, feel very proud of themselves, and then never open the reports again. The events fire, the data collects, and nobody looks. I’ve inherited GA4 accounts with twenty-plus custom events configured, going back over a year, where the client couldn’t tell me what a single one of them meant or why it existed. Someone (often an agency, sometimes a well-meaning freelancer) set it up as a tick-box exercise and moved on.
Tracking events isn’t the win. Looking at them regularly and changing something because of what you see is the win. If you’re not going to check your form-abandonment event once a month and adjust your form because of it, you’re better off spending that setup time on something else. Data nobody reads is just a very organised way of doing nothing.
There’s a second uncomfortable truth tied to this: event data in GA4 is not perfectly accurate. Ad blockers, cookie consent refusals, and Safari’s tracking prevention all mean you’re seeing a sample, not a full picture, often somewhere between 10% and 30% under-reported depending on your audience. That doesn’t make events useless. It means you should trust the trend and the relative comparison (is this button converting better than that one) far more than you trust the absolute number.
Which events are worth your time (and which aren’t)
Not every click deserves an event. If you’re tracking forty different things and reading none of them, you’ve built noise, not insight. Here’s roughly how I prioritise for most small and mid-sized businesses:
- Always track: form submissions, checkout or booking steps, phone number and email clicks, PDF or resource downloads, and CTA button clicks on your money pages.
- Usually worth it: scroll depth on your highest-traffic blog posts, video watch time past 50%, outbound clicks to partner or booking tools, site search terms.
- Rarely worth the setup time: tracking every internal link click, every hover state, or micro-interactions that don’t map to a business decision you’d make differently.
If you’re new to Google Analytics generally and not sure where events sit in the bigger picture, it’s worth reading through what Google Analytics is and why it matters for your marketing first, since events only make sense once you understand what GA4 is measuring underneath them. And if you’re weighing up whether the whole exercise is worth the money, I’ve broken down what Google Analytics costs to set up and run, because the tool itself is free but your time (or someone else’s) isn’t.
Where events feed into the rest of your marketing
Events aren’t just for admiring in a dashboard. Once you’ve got conversion events set up in GA4, you can mark the important ones as “key events” (what used to be called conversions), and from there they feed straight into your ad platforms. If you’re running Google Ads and want your spend to optimise towards people who book a call rather than people who just land on the page, you need those events flowing correctly, which is exactly why linking Google Ads with Google Analytics correctly matters so much. Get that link wrong and you’re feeding Google’s bidding algorithm bad signals, which quietly wastes budget for months before anyone notices.
Events also matter if you’re building anything on top of GA4, in Firebase for an app or in a broader martech stack, and it’s worth knowing which tools add value on top of the raw data versus which ones just repackage it. I cover that in what Google Analytics tools every business owner should know, and if you’re running a mobile app alongside your website, I’ve also written about how I decide with clients on whether to enable Google Analytics inside Firebase.
What to do this week
If you take one thing from this, make it this: open your GA4 account today and check whether you’ve got any custom events beyond the automatic ones. If you haven’t, pick the two actions that most directly lead to money in your business, a form submission or a checkout start, and build those two events first. Don’t try to track everything on day one. Track the two things that would change a decision if you saw them drop off, watch them for two weeks, and then add the next one. That’s how the Kent homeware client ended up with a working set of seven events instead of the twenty half-understood ones I’ve seen sit dormant in other accounts for years.
Frequently asked questions
What’s the difference between GA4 events and Universal Analytics events?
Universal Analytics treated events as an optional extra layered on top of pageviews, with separate categories, actions and labels you had to define manually for almost everything. GA4 treats everything, including a pageview, as an event by default, and automatically tracks a handful of them (scrolls, outbound clicks, downloads) the moment enhanced measurement is switched on, which is on by default for new properties.
Do I need Google Tag Manager to track events?
Not strictly, GA4 does let you set up some events through the interface using existing events as a base, but Google Tag Manager gives you far more control over exactly which click, scroll or form triggers an event, and it’s the standard approach most consultants and agencies use because it doesn’t require touching your website’s code directly.
How many events should a small business track?
Somewhere between eight and fifteen custom events tends to cover what matters for most small businesses: key button clicks, form starts and completions, and any checkout or booking steps. Tracking more than that usually creates noise nobody reads rather than insight anyone acts on.
Are GA4’s automatic events enough on their own?
No. Automatic events like scrolls and outbound clicks are generic and won’t tell you which specific action matters to your business, such as a demo booking or a quote request. You need to build custom events around the actions that predict whether someone becomes a customer.
