Enhanced measurement in Google Analytics 4

What are the Enhanced Measurement in Google Analytics 4?

In Google Analytics 4, enhanced measurements are a set of features that automatically collect several types of interactions as soon as GA4 is installed on your website. No need to touch code or configure events in Google Tag Manager. In theory, this would seem to make Google Analytics a turnkey solution, but we’ll see in this article that this is far from the case.

In concrete terms, when you create a web data stream in GA4, enhanced measurements are enabled by default. To access them, go to Admin > Data Stream, select your web data stream, and you’ll see the dedicated section.

Automatically collected events

When enhanced measurements are enabled (which they are by default), GA4 immediately starts tracking the following 7 types of interactions:

• Page views (page_view)
• Scroll beyond 90% of the page (scroll)
• Outbound clicks to other domains (click with outbound set to true)
• Internal searches (view_search_results)
• YouTube video engagement (video_start, video_progress, video_complete)
• File downloads (file_download)
• Form interactions (form_start, form_submit)

Each event can be managed individually.

You can keep the ones you want and disable the others. This flexibility allows you to tailor your data collection to your needs.

Recap table of recommendations

Page views

The page_view event is triggered each time a page is loaded. This is by far the most important event to set up to obtain quality data in GA4.

Unlike other enhanced measurement events, it is not possible to disable page_view from the GA4 interface. It is an integral part of the measurement system.

Each page view automatically transmits essential contextual information: browser language, full page URL, visitor’s original page, page title and screen resolution. This data accompanies all GA4 events, not just page views.

The Google Tag contains a parameter that controls the automatic sending of page views. In certain specific cases (notably for Single Page Applications), you can disable this automatic sending by setting send_page_view to false, then manage page views manually via a dedicated event tag.

<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-XXX"></script>
<script>
  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
  function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
  gtag('js', new Date());

  gtag('config', 'G-XXX', { send_page_view: false });
</script>

Page views in Single Page Applications (SPA)

Single page applications (often coded with React, Angular, Vue or NextJS) pose a particular challenge: the URL changes without the page actually reloading. GA4 attempts to handle this case by tracking history changes through the gtm.historyChange-v2 event, but this remains an automatic operation that you should test to make sure it meets your expectations and needs.

If this is not the case, you can manually listen for history changes using the History Change trigger in Google Tag Manager.

Scrolling

GA4 automatically registers when a visitor scrolls beyond 90% of the page height.

GA4 parameters used

Outbound clicks

An outbound click occurs when a visitor clicks on a link that takes them to a domain other than your own. GA4 automatically registers these interactions via an event named simply click, distinguished by an outbound parameter with the value true.

GA4 parameters used

Example of an outbound link

<a id="outbound-link" class="bg-dark color-blue" href="https://www.example.com" target="_blank">Go to example.com</a>
<!--
link_id -> outbound-link
link_classes -> bg-dark color-blue
link_url -> https://www.example.com
link_domain -> www.example.com
outbound -> true
-->

Site search

GA4 automatically detects when a user performs a search on your site with the view_search_results event by analyzing query parameters.

Default query parameters supported

If your search URL looks like example.com/search?q=shoes, GA4 will automatically capture the term “shoes”.

Did you know?

Let’s imagine that on your site, the search is done with the term parameter like this example.com/search?term=shoes.

As term is not one of the query parameters listened to by GA4 by default, you can add it to the list in the enhanced measurement settings.

In all, 10 different parameters can be used.

GA4 parameters used

Video engagement

If you embed YouTube videos on your site, GA4 can track the following interactions automatically under certain conditions:

• start viewing (video_start)
• progress over 10, 25, 50 and 75% (video_progress)
• complete viewing (video_complete)

GA4 parameters used

Example of an embedded YouTube video

<script src="https://www.youtube.com/iframe_api"></script>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nS8HLdwmVlY?enablejsapi=1"></iframe>

<!--
video_current_time -> 210
video_duration -> 517
video_percent -> 40
video_provider -> youtube
video_title -> Google Analytics MCP Setup Tutorial
video_url -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS8HLdwmVlY
visible -> true
-->

File downloads

As soon as a visitor clicks on a link to a downloadable file, GA4 records the action via the file_download event.

Supported extensions

GA4 parameters used

Example of a download link

<a href="./files/doc.pdf" download="document.pdf" id="dl_link" class="bg-black color-white">Download file</a>

<!--
file_extension -> pdf
file_name -> /files/doc.pdf
link_classes -> (empty) no value comes up in my test
link_id -> dl_link
link_text -> Download file
link_url -> https://example.com/files/doc.pdf

Document name when downloaded by visitor: document.pdf
-->

Form interactions

GA4 promises to track forms automatically with the following events:

• form_start when a user starts filling in a field
• form_submit when the form is submitted.

GA4 parameters used

Lessons learned

I generally disable GA4’s enhanced measurement completely on customer projects for several reasons:

• Lack of flexibility: enhanced measurement is too rigid.
• Data quality: automatically collected data may lack precision.
• Automatic behaviour: I prefer to have total control over what is tracked.

However, if you’re new to GA4 and don’t have the resources for a custom setup, the enhanced measurement may be a good place to start. They offer basic data collection without extra effort.