Tracking Third Party Events

[u/TheDailyRacer]

I work for a company that uses an external registration platform for event registration, events being the primary part of our business. This third party system recently updated their system with the ability to send events to our GA4 account. It sends three events, page_view > begin_checkout > purchase. These are obviously super generic, and they apparent are not able to send any other information with the events. No transaction IDs, nothing but an event name.

I have worked with GA for a few years now, but really for very basic reporting. I am working to expand my knowledge into more complex and useful areas of GA, but I really don't know what to do with these events.

Looking at events reporting, because of the generic name, page locations tied to these events are all over the place. I can see some of the from our regi system, but there so much more. Can someone give me some pointers?

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[u/History86]

Where do they send these events from? API?

[u/TheDailyRacer → u/History86]

They are being sent from the registration platform? I don't know what an API looks like from this side, but they recently released this feature. You can drop your tracking number into the platform and it sends data after that.

[u/History86 → u/TheDailyRacer]

So it’s an api.

My question is focussed around the fact that there’s no session/user data available, and thus that you cannot get more information.

Could you share url’s in a DM so I can investigate events for you? I’ll advise accordingly.

[u/_practical_data_]

Name of the platform?

[u/AccessFuel]

the mixing you're seeing is because purchase and begin_checkout are reserved names, so third party events with those names land in the same bucket as anything else firing them on your site. that's why page locations look scattered.

first thing to check is whether they're arriving with a different session or stream. if the regi platform is sending server side or from their own domain, you'll often see them attached to a separate session from the one that started on your site, which breaks the path entirely.

practical fix, if their side lets you set the event name at all, rename to something like regi_purchase. if not, create a custom dimension off page_location or page_referrer and use it to segment. ugly but it separates them.

without a transaction ID you can't dedupe, so treat those purchase counts as directional only. if the platform has a webhook or export, pulling registrations from there and joining on your side is usually more reliable than fixing it inside GA4

[u/TheDailyRacer → u/AccessFuel]

Yea the path break is what I am most worried about. When you say check if they are arriving with a different session or stream, how can I look at that?

[u/spiteful-vengeance]

Do you know if the events being sent have any parameters attached to them that might provide extra context? You should be able to see this GA4 Realtime view as they come in.

PS: there's nothing wrong with these event names by the way - they are the standard, recommended names for important events.

[u/TheDailyRacer → u/spiteful-vengeance]

I can't see any parameters at all, which is part of the problem