Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is currently experiencing some issues, but it has also introduced several new innovations that its predecessor did not have.

One such feature is the GA4 Enhanced Measurement feature, which enables basic event tracking without the need for additional coding or the use of Google Tag Manager.

This mechanism can be beneficial in certain situations, which we will discuss in this article, along with the following points:

– The main aspects of Enhanced Measurement in Google Analytics 4;
– Where to find Enhanced Measurement in Google Analytics 4;
– Recommendations for GA4 Enhanced Measurement;
– Limitations of GA4 Enhanced Measurement.

The main aspects of Enhanced Measurement in Google Analytics 4

Currently, there are seven types of actions that we can track with the Enhanced Measurement events, which makes ten events. These are:

  1. Page views
  2. Page scrolling
  3. Outbound clicks
  4. Search on the website
  5. Form interaction
  6. Engagement through videos
  7. Uploading files

In addition to pageview events, other events can be disabled or enabled through the GA4 data flow settings.

In contrast to Universal Analytics, where each event required configuration through GTM or manual coding, GA4’s innovations enable users to track these events without the need for additional code or tags in GTM.

Page views

This interaction results in a page_view event that populates the “Views” metric in GA4. This event is triggered when a page is loaded or when the browser history state changes in the case of Single Page Application (SPA) websites, where the URL changes without reloading the page.

Unlike other events, this one cannot be disabled. Page view events are collected with two parameters:

  • page_location (Page URL)
  • page_ referrer (Page referrer)

All events include the following information: page location, page link, page title, screen resolution, and language settings. These settings can be either automatic, advanced, recommended, or custom.

Page scrolling

The scroll depth event has been a known concept for many years, since the days of Universal Analytics. In GA4, the scroll event is triggered when the user first reaches the bottom of each page, or when 90% of the vertical depth of the page is visible.

The Scroll fills the percent_scrolled dimension, representing the percentage of scrolling. However, with the GA4 Extended Measurement, the value is 90 because that is when the event is triggered, and otherwise it is empty. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about this.

If you do not utilize scrolling in your day-to-day analysis, it is likely that the default 90% event will be sufficient for your needs and that further customization is not necessary (which is not possible in the GA4 interface).

Outbound clicks

It’s useful to know if people are clicking on outbound clicks. This is activated when a user leaves the current domain.

It is evident that the addition of specific domains for cross-domain tracking will not result in the triggering of this event, as they are considered to be part of the same business. If you have multiple websites, you should add them to the configuration section of your GA4 domains.

Interestingly, outbound clicks are measured by click events – not a very useful name, since everything is a click.

When this event is enabled in Enhanced Measurements, you have five options available to you:

  1. link_classes (Link classes);
  2. link_domain (Link domain);
  3. link_id (Link identifier);
  4. link_url (Link URL);
  5. outbound (True/False).

If you do not wish to use the link text, which is not available in the default settings, this event can be useful in most cases.

Search on the website

This is another useful event that can be tracked in GA4 thanks to the enhanced measurement capabilities. When a user searches for something on a website and the URL contains one of the five following query parameters:

  1. q;
  2. s;
  3. search;
  4. query;
  5. keyword.

The best part is that you can tweak the search parameters to fit your needs if none of the above five options do.

The process is initiated by the view_search_results event, which includes the search_term parameter.

Website search is very useful. Generally, you don’t need to use the GTM route unless your website has complex search features, filters, etc. that you can track.

Form interaction

Enabling form interaction results in two events. Thus, enhanced measurements do not always result in tracking only two events.

These are two events:

  1. form_start – triggered when a user interacts with the form for the first time during the session.
  2. form_submit – triggered after submitting the form.

The presence of two Google events allows you to view the number of users who launched the form and the number of submissions during the session.

Both events have three common parameters and one that is exclusive to form_submit:

– form_id (form identifier)
– form_name (form name)
– form_destination (form destination – the URL to which the form is sent)
– form_text (form text – applied only to the form_submit event to get the text of the submit button, if there is one).

Video engagement

Similar to form interaction, enabling video interaction leads to three events:

  1. video_start – triggered when the video starts playing.
  2. video_progress – triggered when the video progresses beyond 10%, 25%, 50%, and 75% of the duration.
  3. video_complete – triggered when the video is complete.

Please note that these events are only triggered for YouTube-embedded videos with JavaScript API support enabled. Therefore, if you have videos hosted on other platforms, you must select the GTM option.

These three events result in the following parameters:

  • video_title (Video title);
  • video_url (Video URL);
  • video_current_time (current video time);
  • video_duration (video duration – displayed in seconds);
  • video_percent (Video percentage – video threshold value, but without the % symbol);
  • video_provider (Video percentage is the video threshold, but without the video provider symbol, it will always be YouTube, as it is the only supported platform);
  • visible (True/False).

It’s pretty useful if you have a YouTube video, but not so much if you don’t.

File uploading

Finally, the file_download event is triggered whenever a user clicks a link and opens or downloads a file with the following extensions: pdf, xls, xlsx, doc, docx, txt, rtf, csv, exe, key, pps, ppt, pptx, 7z, pkg, rar, gz, zip, avi, mov, mp4, mpe, mpeg, wmv, mid, midi, mp3, wav, or wma.

Google divides these files into the following types:

  • document;
  • text;
  • executable file;
  • presentation;
  • compressed file;
  • video;
  • audio.

For the majority of websites, this event should be sufficient for file uploads. However, if it is not, they will need to switch to GTM. The file upload event has the following parameters:

1. file_extension (file extension);
2. file_name (file name);
3. link_classes (link classes);
4. link_id (link identifier);
5. link_text (link text);
6. link_url (Link URL).

Where to find Enhanced Measurement in Google Analytics 4

Let’s start by clicking on the Admin icon in the lower left corner. Next, click on Data Streams in the Data Collection and Modification section on the sidebar or in the admin home page interface.

Click on the stream of your website and you will see the stream details interface below, where you can find the enhanced measurement events.

In this interface, you can enable/disable enhanced measurement for all interactions or click the gear in the bottom right to customize each event individually. You will then see a list of all the interactions we discussed above.

This interface makes it easy to disable events you don’t want to track, except for page views, which you can’t disable.

However, you can configure it for browser history events, which is more useful for SPA websites, by checking the option “Page changes based on browser history events”.

The next item on the list with advanced settings is the site search interaction. Here, we can select the search term query parameters and specify any other URL query parameters we want to collect with this event. Please note that the 10-parameter limit applies to both.

As usual, you can find Extended Measurement events in Reports → Engagement → Events.

This report also includes all other special events and any eCommerce events. You might need to scroll through the list to find them. Just click on the events to find out more, including any options they have.

You can also create studies with these events and their parameters, even if you haven’t registered them as special definitions (special parameters, special indicators, and calculated indicators) in GA4. This lets you perform even better analysis.

Recommendations for GA4 Enhanced Measurement

It’s easy to turn Enhanced Measurement events on and off, but it still takes some thought to get the best out of them. Here are a few practical tips:

  • If you want to use the parameters in standard reports and other tools like Looker Studio, as well as for research, you should register them as custom definitions.
  • Unless there’s a good reason, don’t turn them all on or off. It’s a good idea to plan which events will be more useful for your business.
  • If you’re using GTM to track the same events as enhanced measurement, just disable them in the GA4 interface. Otherwise, you’ll get an overestimated number of events.
  • If you’re using GTM for tracking and not changing the names of the generic parameters, you can reuse them for the same events in an enhanced measurement. Otherwise, you’ll have to re-register them as special parameters, which we already have a limited quota for (50 for standard GA4 properties).
  • This is basically an extension of the previous one, but the idea is to reuse the Enhanced Measurement event parameters for any special events you track with GTM and use less of the available quota.

These methods should be good enough to improve data quality and keep your implementation clean.

So, Enhanced Measurement is going great, but is it all smooth sailing? There are a few limitations to keep in mind.

Limitations of GA4 Enhanced Measurement

It is important to understand the limitations so that we can get the most out of these interactions. Here are some of them:

  • Register as special definitions. If you want to use the parameters in standard reports or export them to other tools like Looker Studio, you’ll have to register them, which might use up your quota. It might be worth using them out of the box since these events are built into GA4.
  • Limited customization. Please note that if you wish to send any additional parameters alongside the events, you will not be able to do so with the Enhanced Measurement events. Therefore, this does not make it convenient to use events such as outbound clicks where there is no link text in the parameters (yet), but it is available for file uploads.
  • The lack of built-in tracking for other popular video platforms such as Vimeo, Wistia, etc. means that you won’t be able to use video interaction events either.
  • Data accuracy. This is a significant issue with form interactions, as they frequently launch into search fields, fail to submit forms, and do not track AJAX forms.

Please be aware that page view events with history changes on SPA do not track URL fragments, which are the parts that start with #, if that’s what you want to see in your reports.

Please note that the scroll event only tracks 90% depth, which may not be sufficient for users who wish to see how many users have scrolled down to 50%.

So, given these limitations, is it worth using Extended Measurements?

For certain interactions, such as file uploads, outbound clicks, site searches, and page views with history changes for SPA, they can be highly beneficial (if you do not wish to see URL snippets as well).

However, interactions with forms, video content (if not YouTube) and scrolling can be deemed less valuable, and therefore, may be skipped. This is also the case with form interactions, as they are important and require proper tracking using custom tracking through GTM.

Knowing these limitations and nuances will help you make smart decisions when using GA4 Enhanced Measurement events.

Conclusion

We gained valuable insights into Extended Measurements in Google Analytics 4, including their definition, the events that trigger them, when they occur, and the parameters they utilize, which result in different dimensions.

We also looked at how we can enable, disable Enhanced Measurements and configure advanced options in the Data Flow Settings interface in GA4, as well as find them in the standard GA4 report.

The best practices we have identified can be highly beneficial in ensuring the collection of quality data that is both useful and optimized. Finally, we gained insight into the limitations of these Extended Measurement events and the potential for missing data until improvements are made.

It would be great if Google could provide their parameters by default, so we don’t have to use our ownership quota for custom definitions.

Two more things would be helpful:

  1. The ability to add any special parameters to these events from the GA4 interface.
  2. Support for other popular video platforms – that’d be great!

We’re really hoping that Google Analytics 4 will bring us lots more useful features and tools in the near future.

Also, you can always read real reviews about our services on GoodFirms.