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In short, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) gives you two main ways to track user interactions: automatic tracking, where GA4 figures out what to track for you, and custom tracking, where you code specific events you want to monitor.
Now, your concern is that you’re tracking a lot of custom events (mostly clicks) that might look messy in the GA4 interface. You hoped to group all these different clicks under one mega ‘click event’, and the way you tried this was by tagging your custom clicks as ‘click’ events and giving them unique labels. This would, in theory, let you filter clicks by these labels and thus see each custom click’s data individually while keeping your events dashboard clean.
But you’ve run into problems: namely, you can’t find these custom click labels anywhere in GA4, and you’re worried that your custom click tracking overlaps with GA4’s automatic click tracking, which might duplicate your data.
Unfortunately, GA4 doesn’t currently support categorizing events the way you’re trying to do it — but don’t fret. You can instead use Google’s recommended approach of creating custom events for each of your unique click events, just like you were doing before. Though you might initially find it more cluttered, the extra organization can help you better analyze your interactions in the long run.
Concerning the double counting of clicks, if you use GA4’s automatic click tracking and your custom click events together, you indeed might count some clicks twice. To avoid this, you’ll have to turn off GA4’s automatic click tracking if you decide to track clicks with custom events — or vice versa.
Lastly, if leaving automatic click tracking on for some reason is not an option, then yes, creating custom events might be your best bet. But, if you have the flexibility, utilizing both automatic and custom tracking can yield the most comprehensive picture of user engagement on your site.
