Think of GA4 as answering three simple questions:
Where did my visitors come from?
What did they do?
Did they complete an entry?
Once you can answer these, you can spend more time on the promotion that works and less on the promotion that doesn't.
Before you start: make sure you've completed Track Event Bookings with Google Analytics 4. Without it, GA4 won't see your entries.
How do Google Tag Manager and GA4 work together?
Google Tag Manager is the wiring and GA4 is the dashboard. You set things up in one and read the results in the other.
Google Tag Manager (GTM) places small sensors on your website and booking pages. Each sensor notices when something happens, such as someone opening the booking form or completing an entry, and sends a message to GA4.
GA4 collects those messages and turns them into reports.
Once GTM is set up and tested, you'll rarely need to go back into it unless something stops working. GA4 is where you'll spend your time.
Why bother? Eventrac already tells you exactly who entered. What it can't tell you is how they found you and what persuaded them. GA4 fills that gap, and putting the two side by side is where the real value lies.
Why use GA4 for your event?
More visitors doesn't always mean more entries. Imagine this:
500 people visit from Facebook and 5 enter.
100 people visit from your email newsletter and 20 enter.
Facebook sent five times the traffic, but email produced four times the participants. Without GA4, you'd only see that entries went up. With it, you can see which effort earned them.
That lets you answer questions like these:
Which marketing actually sells entries? Social posts, newsletters, Google ads, a partner club sharing your link: you can compare them on entries, not just clicks.
Where are people dropping out? If lots of people open the booking form but few finish, something may be putting them off, such as price, a long form, or confusion over distances.
Which ticket types sell, and through which channels? For example, whether your 10K entrants come from different places than your half marathon entrants, or how an early-bird release compared with general sale.
Is paid advertising paying for itself? If you run Google Ads, you can feed completed entries back to Google so it shows your ads to more people likely to enter.
Are we on track compared with last year? Once you've tracked a full entry cycle, every future campaign has a benchmark.
What does GA4 track?
Once you've completed the setup guide, Eventrac sends the following to GA4 automatically. No names, email addresses or card details are ever sent.
What's tracked | What it tells you |
Page views in the booking journey | How many people started booking, which booking pages they saw, and where they dropped out |
Completed bookings (GA4 calls these purchases) | Every successful entry. This is your most important number |
Booking value | Revenue by marketing channel, average booking value, and return on advertising spend |
Ticket types (GA4 calls these items) | Which entries sell best, such as Marathon, Half Marathon or Junior Race |
Transaction ID | A unique reference for each booking, so GA4 never counts the same entry twice |
Following people across websites. Many organisers have their own event website, with booking handled on Eventrac pages. Cross-domain tracking means GA4 treats a visitor as the same person throughout, rather than two separate visits. So if someone clicks Instagram → your event website → the booking form → checkout, the entry is credited to Instagram, not lost as a "direct" visit. See Cross-Domain Conversion Tracking For Landing Pages.
Which GA4 reports should I use?
All four live under Reports in the left-hand menu of GA4. New data can take 24 to 48 hours to appear.
Reports snapshot
Where: Reports → Reports snapshot
An overview of visitors, new visitors, entries, revenue and where visitors came from. Use it after launching a campaign and ask: are visits going up, and are entries going up with them? If visits rise but entries don't, something between your marketing and your booking form needs a closer look.
Traffic acquisition
Where: Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition
This is the most valuable report for most organisers. It lists each channel, such as Google search, Facebook, Instagram, email, other websites and direct visits, alongside how many visitors, entries and how much revenue it produced.
What you might conclude:
Google search brings lots of entries. Keep your event website up to date and well described, so it continues to rank well.
Email has the highest conversion rate (the share of visitors who enter). Your mailing list is valuable: well-timed newsletters around price rises and deadlines are likely to pay off.
Paid adverts bring visitors but few entries. Review the advert's message, who it's targeting, and the page it sends people to.
Pages and screens
Where: Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens
Shows which pages people viewed and how long they spent on them. Use it to check whether people are reading about your event, which pages are most popular, and which pages people leave from quickly.
Ecommerce purchases
Where: Reports → Monetization → Ecommerce purchases
This is where your completed entries appear: number of bookings, revenue, average booking value and ticket types sold. For most organisers it becomes the most important report, because it shows whether your marketing is producing entries.
Before you trust the numbers
Why does GA4 show fewer entries than Eventrac?
Some people block tracking or decline cookies, so GA4 never sees them. This is normal and not a fault. Use Eventrac for your true entry count, and use GA4 for trends and proportions, such as "about a third of our entries come from Facebook".
Why do so many visits show as Direct?
If you share plain links in emails, social posts or partner websites, GA4 often can't tell where the visitor came from and files them under Direct. A large Direct figure usually means untagged links, not loyal visitors typing in your address.
The fix is to add a short label to the end of each link you share, called a UTM tag. For example:
<https://yourevent.com/enter?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=earlybird>
Google's free Campaign URL Builder creates these for you. Eventrac's own tracking links also work alongside UTM tags.
Once your links are labelled, instead of asking "Did Facebook work?" you can say: Facebook generated 48 entries, Instagram 21, email 63 and Google search 39. Of everything in this guide, labelling your links will improve your reports the most.
A simple monthly check
You don't need to look at GA4 every day. Ten minutes once a month is enough for most events, perhaps weekly in the run-up to a price rise or closing date.
Question | Where to look |
How many people visited? | Reports snapshot |
How many completed an entry? | Monetization → Ecommerce purchases |
Which channel produced the most entries? | Acquisition → Traffic acquisition |
Are people starting to book but not finishing? | Engagement → Pages and screens (compare booking page views with completed entries) |
Which pages were most popular? | Engagement → Pages and screens |
Which ticket types sold best? | Monetization → Ecommerce purchases |
Is Direct a large share of visits? | Acquisition → Traffic acquisition (if so, check your links are labelled) |
GA4 words in plain English
GA4 says | It means |
Users | People who visited (roughly; one person on two devices counts twice) |
Sessions | Visits. One person can make several |
Purchase | A completed entry |
Items | Ticket types |
Revenue | Money taken through tracked entries |
Conversion rate | The share of visits that ended in an entry |
Engagement time | How long people spent actively on a page |
Channel | The broad route people arrived by, such as Organic Search, Paid Social or Email |
Direct | GA4 couldn't tell where they came from, usually because a link wasn't labelled |
Remember
Google Analytics doesn't tell you what to do. It gives you the evidence to make better decisions. The aim isn't to collect lots of data, but to answer three questions: which marketing is working, where should I spend my time, and what's helping more people enter my event?