Google Analytics 4 Thresholds

“Google Analytics 4 Thresholding Applied”. Google Analytics 4 applies “thresholding” to some reports when there is low activity for actions. You will notice it when you look at the standard Events report and events that happen rarely are not displayed. This comes from the same Google privacy family as removing search keywords from Google Analytics (many years ago) and Google Ads search queries from Google Analytics (much more recently)

Look out for this indication at the top of your reports.

This can drive you slightly crazy if you don’t know it is happening. You create a new event in Google Tag Manager and see it coming through when you debug your container. You publish the container, load your website and generate the event yourself just to be sure - and you can see the event being sent when you use a Chrome extension such as dataslayer. You can also see it in GA4 Realtime View - in short, everything looks perfect.

You review your event report in GA4 some time later and your new event is nowhere to be seen. But if you build a funnel report, you can find it and add it as a step in your funnel.

Luckily there is a quick fix for the issue - turn off Google Signals. Currently (11 January 2023) the admin of Google Signals can be found here in GA4.

Remember that only future data will not be subjected to thresholding from the time that you disable Google Signals.

You may want to keep Google Signals enabled in order to report on cross-device user journeys and to enable remarketing to signed-in Google users. If you do, then you will have to put up with thresholds being applied to your GA4 reporting.

Please contact me with any Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager queries.