Automatic vs. Manual Event Setup in Google Analytics

Automatic is a great concept when things run perfectly and life is made easier. But when something that is supposed to be hands-off doesn't work, that's when you need to roll up your sleeves.

Here is a great example of why we tag events manually rather than blindly trusting the automatic tagging in your analytics.

For those unfamiliar, GA4 is the current Google Analytics platform which is not only free but widely adopted across the world for organizations to monitor their website traffic. It comes with an assortment of built-in reporting features and also offers automatic event tagging to get an idea of how users behave on your site.

It’s a valuable tool, however, like most tools with automatic settings, it’s worth testing to see how it works. For example, check out the chart showing daily event tracking above.

The two metrics in the chart are key events (formerly known, and still often referred to as, conversions) that are supposed to be tracking the same thing - the instance of a user submitting a contact form on a client’s website. The blue “generate_lead” is the one we set up manually, and the purple “form_submit” is the one created by GA4 automatically.

Hot take: they don’t match!

Why? There could be multiple reasons, but evidently GA4 watches for a signal that is different than the one we defined when setting up and testing the event.

We discussed this with the client, and they were able to look into their lead handling system to investigate the website leads they received in this period. We then compared the actual leads with what is tracked in GA4, and it turns out the manually tracked event matches reality.

The total reported by each here is not the point, rather the accuracy. You don’t want to believe whichever event gives a higher total just to flatter a report, you want good data.

So What?

When basing decisions on conversion tracking, the fact that there is so much variance between two things claiming to report the same thing matters a lot. If you had a campaign which was underreporting conversions, and you decreased its budget based on that info, you would be shooting yourself in the foot.

Conversely, there are instances where a campaign overreports conversions. Sometimes multiple events occur in the same session, but they’re just from the one customer probing about the same transaction, which only represents one sales opportunity and not multiple.

It begs the question: what is your source of truth? Have you set up analytics software, complete with accurate event tracking?

All of our advertising packages include the setup of analytics, conversion & audience tagging, and configuring the various pixels used by the ad platforms to work their magic and report as accurately as possible. We also monitor traffic from all sources, watching for anomalies and predicting activity based on seasonality.

Using data to your advantage is our job.

If trusting the black box has worked out for you so far, that’s great, but if you want a second opinion, get in touch with us!