google analytics 4 - GA4 Events Not Appearing in BigQuery

Question

We are using GTM to track a custom GA4 event when the user clicks on in-house ads on a website. The events are showing up in the GA4 event reports but they are not showing up when querying the analytics events_intraday tables using BigQuery.

This is the query we are using:

select *
from `XXX.XXX.events_intraday_*` Analytics
where Analytics.event_name = 'ad_click'

However, events named ad_click are showing in the Engagement > Events report in GA4.

All other events are showing up in the BigQuery data such as page_view, scroll, session_start, etc. using similar queries:

select *
from `XXX.XXX.events_intraday_*` Analytics
where Analytics.event_name = 'page_view'

Is there something specific in GA4 that prevents certain events from being sent to the BigQuery data sources?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65932193/ga4-events-not-appearing-in-bigquery

Answer 1

I finally figured out that the ad_click event is a predefined/reserved event that is used by GA4 for "Publisher events coming from AdMob via the Google Mobile Ads SDK".

I changed to using click_ad instead and it now flows through to BigQuery correctly.