Validating events

Note: This is a Beta API. While no breaking changes are expected in this phase, products may have limited support before general availability. See limitations for known issues that will be addressed before a general availability launch.

Overview

The Google Analytics Measurement Protocol for Google Analytics 4 does not return HTTP error codes, even if an event is malformed or missing required parameters. To ensure your events are valid, you should test them against the Measurement Protocol Validation Server before deploying them to production. After you have validated that your events are structured properly, you should verify your implementation to make sure you're using the correct keys.

You can either call the Validation Server directly, or use the GA4 Event Builder. The GA4 Event Builder allows you to interactively construct events, and uses the Measurement Protocol Validation Server to validate them.

This guide describes how to send events to the Measurement Protocol for Google Analytics 4 Validation Server and interpret the response.

Important: Events sent to the Validation Server will not show up in reports.

Sending events for validation

The only difference in the request for events sent to the Measurement Protocol and the Measurement Protocol Validation Server is the URL.

Server	URL
Measurement Protocol	/mp/collect
Measurement Protocol Validation Server	/debug/mp/collect

All other request fields are the same. See the protocol reference for full details on constructing a valid request.

The following code shows an invalid event being sent to the Measurement Protocol Validation Server:

Firebase gtag.js

Validation response

The Validation Server's response to the previous event is below:

{
  "validationMessages": [
    {
      "fieldPath": "events",
      "description": "Event at index: [0] has invalid name [_badEventName]. Names must start with an alphabetic character.",
      "validationCode": "NAME_INVALID"
    }
  ]
}

Response

Key	Type	Description
validationMessages	Array<ValidationMessage>	An array of validation messages.

ValidationMessage

Key	Type	Description
fieldPath	string	The path to the field that was invalid.
description	string	A description of the error.
validationCode	ValidationCode	A ValidationCode that corresponds to the error.

ValidationCode

Value	Description
VALUE_INVALID	The value provided for a fieldPath was invalid. See limitations.
VALUE_REQUIRED	A required value for a fieldPath was not provided.
NAME_INVALID	The name provided was invalid. See limitations.
NAME_RESERVED	The name provided was one of the reserved names. See reserved names.
VALUE_OUT_OF_BOUNDS	The value provided was too large. See limitations.
EXCEEDED_MAX_ENTITIES	There were too many parameters in the request. See limitations.
NAME_DUPLICATED	The same name was provided more than once in the request.