I’ll get straight to the point. I had a situation that was driving me mad trying to understand. I had set up website events in GTM (Google Tag Manager) and tested that the flowed through to GA4 properly in debug view, and in real-time view. The tests were successful. But some of the events were not appearing in the GA4 Existing Events list.
Normally, if you wait overnight, you’ll see the events appear in your GA4 reports. This was fine – I could run an exploration on event name and event count and see them all.
However, you’d normally also see all the events in the Existing Events list – this list appears in the Admin Settings / Property Settings. The list is really useful because you can flick a switch next to each one to “Mark as Conversion”, which then makes for easy import into Google Ads, so no worries about spelling errors or setup.
My problem was that only one of the new events was appearing. To solve it, I (eventually) turned off Google Signals, and the events all appeared the next day.
Over the previous week, I had tried refiring all the events in a private browsing window, but ultimately this was futile because, as mentioned, they events were all there in reports, just not in the Existing Events list. I figured it had to be something to do with data privacy weirdness, so turned off Signals and that worked.
I was then able to mark the events as conversions, ready for import to Google Ads.
Hopefully this will work for you too.
