Exploring the Transition from Google Universal Analytics to GA4 Event Tracking

[Rishi]

Sure! When switching to GA4 from Universal Analytics, the events need to be translated uniformly. In the case of Universal Analytics, ‘action’ (ea) maps to ‘event_name’ in GA4. Similarly, ‘event_category’ (ec), ‘event_label’ (el) and ‘event_value’ (ev) from Universal Analytics change to parameters with the same names in GA4 along with their respective parameter values.

For instance, if you had an event in GA4 that corresponded to ‘Listen’ in Universal Analytics, you’d structure it like:

gtag('event', 'Listen', {   
'event_category': 'Stream',   
'event_label': 'The Show',   
'event_value': '10' 
});

Here’s a handy Google help center article to understand this better.

[Dakota]

To convert your Universal Analytics events to GA4 events, you can use the GA4 Measurement Protocol API. This protocol works a bit differently from the previous one. In GA4, instead of events being categorized under Event Category, Action, and Label, data is sent as event name and parameters. The event name can be any string and you are allowed to send up to 25 additional parameters with each event, which can be values or nested parameters. For example, in your case, the ‘Stream’ category can likely be the event name and ‘Listen’ can be a parameter for that event. There should be similar restructuring for other parameters as well. It’s also important to note that some parameters are reserved for automatically collected events and you should avoid using these names for your custom event parameters. Ensure to check the GA4 documentation for more details.