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  • GA4 event path debug tests show event is not recording

    Posted by Emma on 28 March 2023 at 6:50 am

    Hey there! So I’ve been playing around in Google Tag Manager and created a neat little GA4 event, ids2_verify_email. It’s supposed to fire when a page’s view trigger hits a pathway containing verify-email and when Page is Reloaded CJS is set to false.

    Page is Reloaded CJS, by the way, is a little user-defined variable nugget I came up with. It’s made of custom JS and looks like this:

    function() {
      return performance.navigation.type == 0 ? false: true;
    }
    

    Basically, it’s here to make sure we don’t keep firing the event every time the page reloads (got the idea from this cool article).

    Anyway, these GTM changes have been live for a week already.

    Our dev guys can confirm that users have been verifying emails and hitting the URL with verify-email in them over the past week. Plus, our Amplitude report shows around 250 users hitting these:

    • au.example.com/verify-email?xxx
    • uk.example.com/verify-email?xxx
    • us.example.com/verify-email?xxx

    But here’s the kicker: GA4 isn’t recording a single instance of the ids2_verify_email event in the past week, even though it’s recording heaps of other events.

    When I test the ids2_verify_email GA4 tag in GTM and run our email verification URL, it fires up just fine and shows up on the GA4 real-time report.

    So, why isn’t the ids2_verify_email event showing up in the GA4 Engagement > Events report for the past week? I’m really scratching my head here. Any ideas or suggestions would be really appreciated!

    Michael replied 1 year, 2 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Noah

    Member
    12 June 2023 at 6:00 pm

    It seems there’s a discrepancy between having the GA4 event “ids2_verify_email” show up when you’re testing it and not when it’s run live. This could be due to a few reasons. For instance, users might have JavaScript disabled and hence the Google Tag Manager code isn’t running on their end. It’s also possible that there’s an error in the custom JavaScript variable causing the event not to fire in certain situations. Often, issues like these can be traced back to specific browser or device types, so that might be worth investigating. Lastly, it can sometimes take up to 48 hours for certain events to show up in Google Analytics, although if it’s been a week, this probably isn’t the case. This is a complicated issue and would require more troubleshooting to figure out the exact cause.

  • Michael

    Member
    26 June 2023 at 3:00 am

    The issue you’re facing seems to be related to your Google Tag Manager (GTM) trigger not properly recording the ids2_verify_email event in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). This event is supposed to trigger when a user verifies their email and visits a URL containing verify-email. However, despite getting actual traffic to these URLs, GA4 is not registering any events. When you manually test the event in GTM, it works fine, which increases the confusion. There could be several reasons for this.

    Maybe your actual users are reloading the page before the GTM tag fires, therefore preventing the event from registering due to the custom JavaScript that checks if the page is being reloaded. It might also be that there are some flaws in the condition that defines when your tag should fire. Lastly, there might be an issue with how GA4 processes or displays the data.

    To determine the exact cause, you would need to debug the issue further, potentially by tweaking your GTM configuration, inspecting how users interact with the page, or checking how GA4 handles your data.

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