Posting Custom Events to Google Analytics

Jump to GA4 Custom events

Many people use Google Analytics for tracking AdWord conversions and for aggregate anonymous data reporting. To assist with this, ActiveDEMAND can be configured to post events to Google Analytics. While ActiveDEMAND can be used with pre-configured events, custom events in Google Analytics Universal as well as in GA4 offers more flexibility and power.

Using custom events grants further control over when ActiveDEMAND tells Google Analytics that a conversion has happened. Unlike the pre-configured events, you now have much more complete control over when and what to fire events for. Our favourite use here is to throw an event when a lead passes the filters to be sent to sales, or when a lead is claimed by sales. Now you’re getting “sent leads” or “claimed lead” as conversions in Analytics and Google Ads, which for some companies, is a much higher signal of a quality lead than a regular conversion. You can also enter an event value, allowing for varied values in Analytics and better ROAS calculations.

See this article about setting up Google Services in ActiveDEMAND

Once you have the Google Services integrated with ActiveDEMAND (specifically Google Analytics), ActiveDEMAND will automatically post events to GA whenever a tracked number is called or a form is submitted. If you want to shut this feature off or customise the event behaviour, turn off the auto-posting feature in ActiveDEMAND (Account Settings- Google Integration)

Customising the Event Behaviour:

ActiveDEMAND has a Post Event to Google Analytics workflow action object. This allows you to fully customise the Label, Event, Category, Value, and timing of the event posting to Google Analytics. In your Autoresponders or Custom Workflows,



You can use dynamic fields to populate the data in the GA event.

For example, you could put this into your Sales Notification Workflow and wait, for example, for a deal value (custom field) to appear. Then once you have a deal value, post the value with the session that triggered the conversion.



The dynamic field above is %CONTACT_HISTORY.CREATED_AT%.



The dynamic field above is %CONTACT.RECENT_WON_DEAL_VALUE%.

In the above example, if the conversion occurred as a result of a Google Paid Ad Click, then the GCLID will be posted with the event, hence attributing the conversion to the specific Adwords campaign.

For the custom event, as shown, you have full control over the timing of when the event is posted, and you can set, using dynamic fields, the

Event Name
Event Category
Event Action
Event Label
Event Value

If you are customising your event posting, it is a good idea to turn off the default Event posting (account settings) to avoid duplicate event posting.

Posting GA4 Events

Google Analytics 4 is the newest version of Google Analytics. We currently recommend that ActiveDEMAND customers use both the older Universal as well as GA4 because GA4 does not do everything that universal does yet.



You can easily add both GA4 and Universal Analytics custom events to ActiveDEMAND workflows.



Add the event name, parameters, and user properties you wish.

Ideas:

Post event to Google Analytics on chat
Post event to Google Analytics when a lead is sent to sales
Post event to Google Analytics when a lead is claimed by sales
Post event to Google Analytics on email open
Post event to Google Analytics on form submit
Post event to Google Analytics on phone call
Post event to Google Analytics on twitter follow

Creating Events and Conversions in GA4 from ActiveDEMAND events

Just detecting form submits is perhaps too high level and you may want to separate events for different forms.
To create a custom event in GA4 for a specific ActiveDEMAND form, you can use a matching condition like this:




You can either match on form_name or form_id, but make sure you've added them as Custom Definitions before using them.

Supported GA4 event parameters for FormSubmit:

form_id: will correspond to the AD form ID
form_name: will match the AD form name with spaces
page_location will give the page URL
page_title will give the page titletag
campaign, medium, source as per usual

Updated on: 28/06/2023