Setup guide
GA4 records everything as events. This guide walks through Enhanced Measurement, Google Tag Manager tags, custom events, and marking conversions — the setup most marketing teams need.
Open your GA4 web data stream and enable Enhanced Measurement. GA4 will automatically collect page_view, scroll, outbound_click, site_search, video_engagement, and file_download events. This is the fastest baseline — but it will not catch custom actions like "demo request submitted" on JavaScript-heavy forms.
For CTAs, forms, and signups, use Google Tag Manager. Create a GA4 Event tag, set the event name (for example form_submit), and attach a trigger that fires when the user completes the action.
Events only appear in conversion reports after you mark them as key events under Admin → Events. Flag demo requests, signups, and purchases. Without this step, events collect but never surface in acquisition or funnel reports.
In GA4, every interaction is an event. A conversion (called a key event) is an event you mark as important — like form_submit or purchase. You can have dozens of events but only flag the handful that represent business outcomes.
GTM is recommended for most sites because you can add and change event tags without editing site code. Enhanced Measurement handles basic events automatically, but custom actions like demo requests almost always need GTM or gtag.js configuration.
Use GA4 DebugView for real-time validation, or GTM Preview mode to see which tags fire on each action. In Chrome DevTools, filter Network requests by "collect" to confirm hits reach Google.
Common causes: the event name does not match what you expect, the event is not marked as a key event, consent mode blocked the hit, or standard reports have not processed data yet (allow 24–48 hours). DebugView confirms collection immediately.