Website analytics: What should you track with GA4?

GA4 should first track actions that bring the business revenue or customers: actions such as form submissions, phone and WhatsApp clicks, and purchases are marked as “key events,” then their originating channels and pages are monitored. Visitor count alone does not produce a decision; answering what to track in GA4 begins with which business question each report answers.

This guide covers settings to enable after installing Google Analytics 4, selecting key events, separating campaign traffic using UTM parameters, linking Search Console, data retention periods, and Google consent mode in relation to KVKK (Turkey’s Personal Data Protection Law) and cookie consent. The menu names and limits described are based on Google’s official help documents.

How does GA4 measure? The event-based approach

GA4 records everything happening on the website as an event; page views, scrolling, file downloads, and form submissions are all events with names and parameters in the same structure. The “goal” concept in the previous Analytics version has been replaced by marking the events that matter to the business.

When planning what to track in GA4, measurement is considered in three layers: business outcomes at the top (quote requests, orders, calls), steps leading to these outcomes in the middle (product page views, starting a form, moving to the pricing page), and traffic sources at the bottom. The top layer is marked as key events, the middle helps identify bottlenecks, and the bottom helps direct the budget to the right channel.

This structure has two practical consequences. First, every action to be measured must correspond to an event; actions without a corresponding event do not appear in reports. Second, choosing consistent event names from the beginning matters because subsequent changes do not apply to historical data. Writing a measurement plan on the first day of setup, listing which action will be collected under which name, prevents most confusion in later months.

The first check after setup: Enhanced measurement

Enhanced measurement is a GA4 feature that automatically collects a range of interactions without additional code and is enabled or disabled in web data stream settings. According to Google’s enhanced measurement documentation, these options are managed under Data streams in Admin and cover the following events:

• Page views (page_view): on every page load; cannot be disabled
• Scrolling (scroll): when the visitor first reaches the lower part of the page
• Outbound clicks (click): when links to another domain are clicked; this includes WhatsApp links such as wa.me
• Site search (view_search_results): when a search results page opens
• Form interactions (form_start, form_submit): when someone starts completing a form and when it is submitted
• Video interactions: starting, progressing through, and completing embedded YouTube videos
• File downloads (file_download): when PDF, Excel, and similar files are clicked

Automatic form events may not work as expected with every form structure; depending on how the form is submitted, undercounting or overcounting may occur. Form measurement is therefore tested with a real submission after setup and, if necessary, based on a thank-you page view or a custom event defined through Tag Manager.

Why did conversions become “key events”?

In GA4, actions valuable to the business are now called “key events”; the name “conversion” is reserved for actions selected in Google Ads to evaluate campaign results and guide automated bidding. Announced on March 27, 2024, in the Google Analytics release archive, this change aims to resolve confusion caused by different numbers appearing under the same name across the two platforms.

According to the comparison of conversions and key events, any collected event can be marked as a key event. The step described in older guides as “mark as conversion” corresponds in the current interface to marking an event as a key event. Previous conversion data remains available as key event data, so annual comparisons are not interrupted. When GA4 is linked to a Google Ads account, Google Ads conversions can be created from selected key events; the advertising bidding strategy then targets the same action measured on the website.

Which events should be made key events?

A key event is an action that takes the business one step closer to a customer or revenue; treating every click as important fills the report with activity instead of actual demand. The most concrete answer to what to track in GA4 is the following list of events, which varies by business type:

Deriving a new event from an existing one can be done without coding through GA4’s event creation feature; however, Google’s documentation states that modified and newly created events do not apply to historical data, and changes may take an hour or more to take effect. Each key event is fed from a single source to prevent the same action from being counted twice through two different events.