[ga4 investigation] Unknown event triggers

[maureenlholland]

Description

GA4 defines what it thinks are events automatically but we have a number of strange events recorded (these might be triggering a limit in our service level causing a pause in data export). We should investigate if we can identify what triggers GA4 to record these events or if there is a way to ignore them as a group

if you look at the Events section in Admin, we are collecting a huge number of garbage "Events", so that we're collecting almost 200 Events total. The number of instances of each "Event" is very low, but maybe it's a problem because there are all of these individual "Events"?

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Success Criteria

• [ ] Better understanding of GA4 event triggers
• [ ] Ability to identify and ignore unwanted events

[alexgibson]

The first one in this list almost looks like an attempted XSS

[alexgibson]

Some of these are almost certainly user/script generated. A few very suspect examples:

• javascript:/*</script><img/onerror='-/"/
• /etc/passwd
• '"><svg/onload=fetch'//ds9l21gne4bmfa3lq

[maureenlholland]

I'm unable to recreate this, unfortunately. I can mess around with the dataLayer values but I don't know how to get those triggered to become event data that appears in GA4.

[maureenlholland]

Worth noting there are a few strange Event Actions recorded in UA: Event Action: Non-Interactionst71yt;//';//";//%>?>o8e71'/"<qi5ze but not nearly as many as in GA4

[stephaniehobson]

I found a few few references to event tracking spam, so it seems like this is not just an us thing.

There are also lots of articles on referrer spam and how to filter it.

But none of these tools are available in GA4 yet.