I am wondering why there is no events or key events for video plays
How can i see how many times my youtube videos or website embedded videos have been viewed or clicked.
The short answer is:
The reason you don’t see video events by default is that you must enable Video Engagement in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Enhanced Measurement.
For embedded YouTube videos with the JavaScript API enabled, GA4 will automatically collect events like video_start, video_progress (at 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%), and video_complete.
If this built-in feature is insufficient, you can use Google Tag Manager (GTM) with a YouTube Video Trigger to send custom events to GA4 via the standard Google Tag or the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol.
For deep, unaggregated analysis, you should leverage the native BigQuery Export from GA4 and then query the raw event data using the BigQuery API, which is extremely cost-effective for large-scale, custom reporting and correlation with other business data.
The long answer is:
To properly measure video engagement, particularly for embedded YouTube content, you need a robust data collection mechanism, which in the GA4 ecosystem is handled primarily through Enhanced Measurement.
When enabled within your GA4 web data stream settings, the system listens for interactions with compatible video players, automatically generating the video_start, video_progress, and video_complete events, along with rich parameters like video_title, video_url, and video_provider.
This automatic setup is the most cost-effective and least technical solution, requiring only a few clicks in the GA4 interface, eliminating the need for complex custom code deployment.
For more granular control or for videos not supported by Enhanced Measurement, the combination of Google Tag Manager (GTM) and a custom GA4 Event Tag is the definitive technical solution.
You would configure a YouTube Video Trigger in GTM, which uses the YouTube iFrame Player API to track play, pause, progress percentages, and completion, and then fire a custom GA4 event with the necessary parameters.
This is also highly cost-effective as it reuses your existing GA4 infrastructure and GTM container. For truly in-depth analysis, such as correlating video completion rates with user lifetime value or off-site conversion data, you must move beyond the summarized reports in the GA4 UI.
The best approach here is to activate the GA4 BigQuery Export.
This feature pipes all your raw, unaggregated event data into Google BigQuery, a powerful, serverless data warehouse on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Once the data is in BigQuery, you can use the BigQuery API to programmatically access and query the raw event tables using standard SQL.
This allows you to join video events with other business data, build custom models for video performance, or push curated datasets into BI tools like Looker Studio for powerful visualizations, providing a level of analytic depth and flexibility that is impossible to achieve with standard reporting alone, proving to be the most comprehensive and scalable solution.
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