How to Send Custom Events & Parameters to GA4

Navigate to the Website screen of your ListenLayer account and add your website domain name. Then copy the Website Script to place on your website using Google Tag Manager.

Create a Custom HTML Tag inside of Google Tag Manager that fires on All Pages. Place the tracking script from your ListenLayer account. A sample is shown here, but you must use the code from your account, not this example code!

Enable Listeners for your website so that you can begin to capture user activity into the browser’s data layer automatically. This is the first step to being able to send custom events and parameters to GA4. You can search for and enable Listeners in the library.

You’ll also need to enable Activity Features on the Listeners you want to utilize. For example, you can see here we have enabled two Activity Features inside the Hubspot Forms Listener.

Turn on the “Custom Data Layer Values” feature for the Listener you are using. Once enabled, a Custom Values menu item will appear under the Listener’s navigation, where you can write rules to define custom values in your data layer.

This powerful feature will enable even more customization of GA4 using events and parameters.

Create new data layer variables at the global level. These become available to push values across all of your Listeners.

Write rules to define values in your custom data layer variables. In the example shown here, we already have rules built to easily identify the quality of a form submission based on the email address the user submits.  This can be sent to Google Analytics 4 as a property along with a custom event.

You’ll be getting custom values and events from the data layer to power your GA4 Events & Parameters, so you’ll want to preview the data layer activity, test the behavior, and become familiar with the setup. ListenLayer will automatically push details from your applications and your custom values into the data layer.

In this example, we can see custom data layer values that ListenLayer has pushed into the data layer, and we will be using this in our GA4 events.

To use custom data layer variables inside GA4, we need to first make them available inside Google Tag Manager. To do this, create a Variable inside GTM using the Data Layer Variable type. Then copy the path to the data layer variable and paste it into the Event name.  Watch the use case video for more details on how to do this.

Now it’s time to send our events to Google Analytics 4. To do this, we’ll create a new tag and select the “Google Analytics: GA4 Event” tag template. Next, configure your event name and add any parameters you would like to send along with the event.  In this example, we will use our formQuality variable from the previous step as a parameter.

You’ll want to select a trigger for your event as well. Use a common event name from ListenLayer to focus on specific activities such as form submissions. Watch the video for more details if you are unfamiliar with this step.

Now you can publish or preview your Google Tag Manager changes and trigger your activity on your website. If you have Google Analytics 4 open in the same browser, navigate to the Debugger (as shown here), and you should see your new event appear automatically. Then, you can click on the event and begin to analyze its properties – you should see your custom property from the previous step.

Now you can make sure all of your changes are fully published and wait 24 hours for your data to settle inside of Google Analytics 4. Once settled, you will see the event and parameters being to appear.