Connect Google Analytics 4 to your subscription form

The Google Analytics 4 (GA4) integration sends events from your SendPulse-powered subscription form to GA4, which helps you track form submissions and other analytics.

With this integration, you can:

• Count subscriptions as a key event in GA4 and measure form conversion rate.
• Attribute new subscribers to specific traffic sources and UTM campaigns.
• Continue tracking submissions after the shutdown of Universal Analytics.

Let's talk about how to configure GA4 on your website and view subscription data.

How it works

When a visitor submits your subscription form, the form script detects which Google library is installed on your page (gtag.js or Google Tag Manager) and sends an sp_form_submit event through the matching API.

Prerequisites

Before getting started, make sure you have:

• A Google Analytics 4 account with an active data stream for your domain.
• GA4 installed on your website through gtag.js or GTM.
• A subscription form created in SendPulse and embedded on the page where you want to track submissions.

Send events to GA4

Open your subscription form in the SendPulse editor and go to Form settings > Analytics and statistics. Turn on the Send subscription event to Google Analytics toggle.

You can also capture UTM parameters and traffic sources when users join your mailing list. To do this, turn on the Send utm tags and additional conversion information toggle.

Configure GA4 on your website

The form supports two integration methods. Choose the one that matches how GA4 is installed on your website.

Through GA4 code (gtag.js)

If you installed GA4 through gtag.js, no extra setup is needed. When your form is submitted, the script automatically sends the following event:

gtag('event', 'sp_form_submit', {
  eventCategory: 'Sendpulse Email Form',
  eventAction: 'Email Signup',
  eventLabel: '<your form name>'
});

Make sure the GA4 snippet loads on the page before the form script.

Through Google Tag Manager

If you installed GA4 through GTM, the form pushes the event to dataLayer:

window.dataLayer.push({
  event: 'sp_form_submit',
  eventCategory: 'Sendpulse Email Form',
  eventAction: 'Email Signup',
  eventLabel: '<your form name>'
});

To forward this event to GA4, create a trigger and a tag in your GTM container. In the trigger, select Custom Event as the type and enter sp_form_submit as the event name. In the tag, select Google Analytics: GA4 Event as the type, link your GA4 configuration, and bind the tag to the trigger you've created. Publish the container.

Event parameters

The sp_form_submit event has the following parameters:

In GA4, eventCategory and eventAction are not standard dimensions. To use them in reports and explorations, register them as custom dimensions. Go to Admin and select Data display > Custom definitions, then create a custom dimension for each parameter you want to analyze.

Test the integration

To confirm that GA4 receives the event, open your Google Analytics 4 property and go to Reports > Realtime. Open the page with your form in another tab and submit a test subscription.

Note: Standard GA4 reports update with a delay of up to 24–48 hours

The sp_form_submit event appears in the Realtime report within a few seconds. This means that setup is successful and your form is connected to Google Analytics 4.

View subscription data

You can view information about your subscribers in Reports.

To view live sp_form_submit triggers as they launch, go to Reports > Realtime Overview.

To view the total number of subscription events for a specific timeframe, go to Reports > View user engagement > Events.

To count subscriptions as conversions, mark the event as a key event in GA4. Go to Admin and select Data display > Events. Find sp_form_submit on the list and turn on the Mark as key event toggle.

To view subscription counts when sp_form_submit is marked as a key event, go to Reports > Generate leads > Traffic acquisition.

Google Analytics metrics can show different data depending on the settings. See Google Analytics 4 documentation to learn how to use the settings.

Last Updated: 07.12.2023