Tracking an event to Google Analytics using gtag by Jason Ramsey on Thursday, December 17th 2020
I wanted to start adding some event tracking to jaseowns.com and I was orginally just going to save to a local database but choose to use google instead. I had a bit of a learning curve to the fact that gtag and ga are two seperate methods. If you are using https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag - you'll want to use gtag() instead of ga().gtag.js vs analytics.js
The Google Analytics examples I found online first all used GA, so I thought I needed to use GA as well.
ga('send', 'event', ACTION, CATEGORY, LABEL);What was confusing is the fact ga() did not throw an errors, however no events were fired.
gtag('event', ACTION, {'event_category' : CATEGORY, 'event_label' : LABEL});Once I moved to gtag('event') things showed up in the RealTime section of Google Analytics.
Hopefully this helps someone else!