Some of the automatic events GA4 logs for your website are hard to report on in GA4. The one we’re going to look at today is the file download event. We’ll look at what you can report on in GA4 and create an exploration to get more detail. Then we’re going to set up a custom metric to count file downloads and make a custom GA4 report for file downloads look great.
So let’s have a look.
Since we don’t have a standard report that shows file downloads, we’re going to create one and save it into the Reports menu. In doing so, you’ll see one of the limitations with reporting on file downloads and regular reports. Later, we’ll create a custom metric for reporting on file downloads, which will make this custom report in GA4 a little bit nicer to look at.
Now we have a taste of what this report is going to look like. It would be really nice if we could add a filter for event name–then we could filter for just file downloads. But we can’t.
That means we see one line in the report table with a whole bunch of events counted. Most events in the website are not file downloads and so don’t have file names associated with them. Once we create our custom metric, we will be able to get rid of that line.
Now let’s add the report into the Reports menu.
Now you’ll see the File downloads report under the Engagement section of your Reports menu.
This gives you the ability to show file downloads without doing any further customization. If you’d like to remove that extra line on the report that includes non-file_download events, skip down to the Custom Metric section of this blog.
Now let’s have a look at what we can do in Explorations where there is a little bit more control.
You’ll see a table listing each file name, its event count, and the total users. This data is filtered for just events that are file download events, so that’s an advantage over the custom report we created above.
Another way we can customize GA4 to get a better file download report is to create a custom metric that counts file downloads. We’re going to be modifying an existing event, GA4’s automatic file_download event, by adding a parameter to it which records a “1” every time a file download happens. And then we’ll add the metric to the file download report we made above.
One note, custom metrics start collecting data when you set them up, and don’t apply to historical data.
Now your report only shows rows for file download events and counts the number of downloads.
We’ve got loads more GA4 and Looker Studio videos & tutorials, check them out on our GA4 tutorials page.
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