Adding these events to your website or mobile app helps you measure additional features and behavior as well as generate more useful reports. Because these events require additional context to be meaningful, they're not sent automatically.
Use the links in this article to see the prescribed parameters for each event. You should send recommended events with their prescribed parameters to get the most details in your reports and to benefit from future features and integrations as they become available.
To learn how to set up a recommended event on your website, see Set up events. For your app project, see Log events.
Measure user activity with recommended events in Google Analytics
For all properties
We recommend these events to all customers in all business verticals. Later sections in this article include some of these events when we recommend sending the events for the given use case.
| Event | Trigger when |
|---|---|
| ad_impression | a user sees an ad impression, for app only |
| earn_virtual_currency | a user earns virtual currency (coins, gems, tokens, etc.) |
| join_group | a user joins a group to measure the popularity of each group |
| login | a user logs in |
| purchase | a user completes a purchase |
| refund | a user receives a refund |
| search | a user searches your content |
| select_content | a user selects content |
| share | a user shares content |
| sign_up | a user signs up to measure the popularity of each sign-up method |
| spend_virtual_currency | a user spends virtual currency (coins, gems, tokens, etc.) |
| tutorial_begin | a user begins a tutorial |
| tutorial_complete | a user completes a tutorial |
For online sales
We recommend these events when you want to measure sales on your site or app. They're useful for retail, ecommerce, education, real estate, and travel. Sending the events populates the Ecommerce purchases report. To learn more about these events, see Measure ecommerce for your website. View Measure ecommerce (app) for events in your app project.
| Event | Trigger when |
|---|---|
| add_payment_info | a user submits their payment information |
| add_shipping_info | a user submits their shipping information |
| add_to_cart | a user adds items to cart |
| add_to_wishlist | a user adds items to a wishlist |
| begin_checkout | a user begins checkout |
| generate_lead | a user submits a form or a request for information |
| purchase | a user completes a purchase |
| refund | a user receives a refund |
| remove_from_cart | a user removes items from a cart |
| select_item | a user selects an item from a list |
| select_promotion | a user selects a promotion |
| view_cart | a user views their cart |
| view_item | a user views an item |
| view_item_list | a user sees a list of items/offerings |
| view_promotion | a user sees a promotion |
For games
We recommend these events for games properties. Sending these events populates the games reports.
| Event | Trigger when |
|---|---|
| earn_virtual_currency | a user earns virtual currency (coins, gems, tokens, etc.) |
| join_group | a user joins a group to measure the popularity of each group |
| level_end | a user completes a level in the game |
| level_start | a user starts a new level in the game |
| level_up | a user levels-up in the game |
| post_score | a user posts their score |
| select_content | a user selects content |
| spend_virtual_currency | a user spends virtual currency (coins, gems, tokens, etc.) |
| tutorial_begin | a user begins a tutorial |
| tutorial_complete | a user completes a tutorial |
| unlock_achievement | a user unlocks an achievement |
Verify your events
When you create a new event, you can monitor how GA4 collects it in the DebugView tool by sending the event in debug mode. You can also view the Realtime report to see events coming in from real users as they happen.
Event recommendations in Analytics
The Events report provides recommendations on events to collect based on the data you already collect or the app category in the Google Play Store or iOS App Store (e.g., ecommerce, travel). Three recommendations appear at the top of the Events table by default.
- To see more recommendations, click Show All.
- To display the code snippet to collect an event, click the row for the event.
- To dismiss a recommendation, hover over the event name and then click
.
Considerations for updating SDKs to Android 17.2.5 (or later) and/or iOS: 16.20.0 (or later)
If you used prior versions of either SDK and are planning to upgrade to Android 17.2.5 (or later) and/or iOS 16.20.0 (or later), you should consider the following:
- Upon upgrade and from that point forward, you will only be able to access item data within the repeated items array; item data will no longer be available in standard event parameters as it has been prior to these SDK versions.
- This change was made to support multiple-product analysis.
- You may need to adjust your references to item/product data as a result.
There is a BigQuery schema format change during this upgrade. Item/product data will begin to appear in a repeated field, enabling analysis of multiple products within a single event. You should take care to adjust any query that references item/product data fields during this upgrade