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Is it possible to use GA4 Measurement Protocol to send events to Google Analytics and view and analyze them in the GA dashboard without using gtag.js or any other front-end script? The use case would be that some events are being sent to my server and I will just push these events to GA through the API.

One thing that makes me think is that the official Measurement Protocol API say:

In order for an event to be valid, it must have a client_id that has already been used to send an event from gtag.js. You will need to capture this ID client-side and include it in your call to the measurement protocol. In send an event to your property, we use "client_id" as the client_id. You will need to replace this with a real client_id that comes from gtag.js.

(https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/ga4/verify-implementation?client_type=gtag#client_send)

That suggests that only events that have a valid client_id that originate from gtag.js will be counted. I did some experimenting with randomly generated client_ids and what I discovered was that I was able to see my events in the Realtime section of the GA4 console (the Event count by Event name section), but all the other sections would be empty and the Users in last 30 min section would always show 0.

Can someone please explain to me why it's zero and if such a use case is valid at all? Thanks

8ctopus
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furry12
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4 Answers4

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tl;dr

You can use any value in client_id, as long as it uniquely identifies the user (we use a GUID/UUID), but it seems like you also need to send a value in user_id. We use the same value for both.

Also, you need to add the 'engagement_time_msec' parameter to get any user metrics to register.

Longer answer:

We're trying to do the same, i.e. send all events to the GA4 Measurement Protocol from the server, so that it is not dependent on the current user's GDPR cookie settings.

We currently do this for a Universal Analytics property with no issues, but it seems that Google is trying to prevent this in future, by restricting the scope of the Measurement Protocol in GA4, whilst forcing everyone to move to it by July 1st 2023. See the documentation at https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/ga4#full_server-to-server, where it states:

While it is possible to send events to Google Analytics solely with measurement protocol, only partial reporting may be available. The purpose of measurement protocol is to augment existing events collected via gtag, GTM, or Firebase.

We have something working with GA4, in that the events are being registered on the GA4 property correctly, using a client id that is just a GUID/UUID that we define in our own site cookies. So, any value can be used in the client id, as long as it uniquely identifies the user. The same value is used to populate the user_id parameter.

When sending events, the realtime event details were showing on the GA4 dashboard, but user metrics were not until we also populated the 'engagement_time_msec' parameter, as described in https://stackoverflow.com/a/71482548/7205473

We still have issues with things like getting the user location and the platform details, which previously were automatically populated by passing the IP address and the User Agent, but which seem to no longer work in GA4.

We were also passing page load timing events through the Measurement Protocol, but again, these features seem to have been removed in GA4.

Jon Knight
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    Is there really no way to send the standard events other than the Firebase or gtags SDK? What about desktop apps? We have an http based library for java and .net that works well with UA, we get the full GA feature set. It seems this is impossible with GA4. We can push custom events, but we dont get many of the fancy GA features (maps..), just the data explorer. What exactly is the firebase and gtags SDKs doing? I dug through them and ended up in compiled C which ended the decompiling journey. – craig.tadlock Jun 22 '22 at 06:09
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It is possible to use GA4 directly without gtag.ja or the Firebase SDK. Its not supported, so it takes some work. We have this working in a desktop app reasonably well. There a couple things that need to be done.

  1. As stated elsewhere the "engagement_time_msec" param must be set using the "_et" parameter. This is the number of milliseconds between now and the previous event.

  2. The client id "cid" has a specific format; it should be:

    "randomNumbers(10).unixTimeStamp()"

  3. The session id "sid" format is:

    "randomNumbers(10)"

  4. The "_z" parameter needs to be set. I think this is a cache buster. Looking deep into the gtag.js code it is a url safe base64 encoding of "CCD", which always results in the value "ccd.v9b"

  5. The page hash parameter "_p" can be set to this; not totally sure its correct but it works.

    "randomString(3).randomString(3)"

  6. Set the "User-Agent" HTTP request header in whatever framework/lib you are using. GA4 uses this to determine many things including Operating System. You will need to create a fake user agent based on the local device information. This is what we use for a Windows 11 x64:

    "myco.testapp/4.0.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)"

  7. The IP will be taken fromn the web request which is where the geolocation data comes from.

Since a full working example is worth 1,000 words of documentation; here is a "test" event with a parameter "animal=dog":

https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect?cid=0078745494.1659679529&_et=364&_p=pfJ.Aev&seg=1&sid=2678664821&tid=G-???&ul=en&v=2&_z=ccd.v9b&en=test&ep.animal=dog
craig.tadlock
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  • Using `_et` GET param didn't work for me but setting the "engagement_time_msec" per https://stackoverflow.com/a/71811327/1237135 did work. – Jim W Jan 04 '23 at 01:33
  • Please check `sid` as it appears to be a Unix timestamp – 8ctopus Jul 18 '23 at 14:05
  • `_p` is calculated like this: `var a = 0, b = 2147483647; return Math.floor(Math.random() * (b - a + 1) + a)`, so it's basically a random number which is shared by events sent at the same time. – 8ctopus Jul 18 '23 at 14:08
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It's possible to extract outgoing GA4 request from a GTM container debug/preview view and map any GA4 (automatically collected and custom) event.

Example page_view request URL: https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect?v=2&tid=G-XXXXXXXXXX&gtm=3oes1i1&_p=1545013558&_dbg=1&cid=P%2FdJWyULMwcT21TMrzn7pZdlNt%2FxtttGVqGUmqNYbhc%3D.1669722847&ul=nl-nl&sr=2560x1440&uaa=x86&uab=64&uafvl=Not_A%2520Brand%3B99.0.0.0%7CGoogle%2520Chrome%3B109.0.5414.75%7CChromium%3B109.0.5414.75&uamb=0&uam=&uap=Windows&uapv=10.0.0&uaw=0&_s=1&_uip=XXX.XXX.XXX.X&sid=1674235261&sct=1&dl=https%3A%2F%2FXXXXXXXXXX.com%2F%3Fgtm_debug%3D1674235654105&dr=https%3A%2F%2Ftagassistant.google.com%2F&dt=OM%20test&jscid=XXXXXXXXXX.1669722847&seg=1&en=page_view

Tip: use Postman to analyse and experiment with parameters GTM request

Thomas Beumer
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regardless of the platform used to make a call the Measurement Protocol, you should use a client id generated by gtag.js, or the app ID if using Firebase.

Ilya Kuleshov
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