Meta has officially started rolling out the long-anticipated integration between GA4 and Meta Events Manager. While it’s not entirely clear what benefit the integration provides, this post walks through how to set it up and what we know (and don’t know) about what this might actually do.
If you have access, you’re likely to get a notification that looks like this…
The good news is that the integration isn’t particularly difficult, though the process can take a while depending on how complete and accurate your GA4 events currently are.
The main thing this integration does is allow advertisers to map GA4 events to Meta events. The question, as I write this, is what benefit that provides. I address this and other questions at the end of this post. Before you set this up yourself, you should work through the uncertainty of risks and benefits first.
Once you’re ready to set up your GA4 integration with Meta Events Manager, continue reading below…
Get Started
You could click the button to “Connect Google Analytics” from the alert shown in the screenshot above. Otherwise, go to Partner Integrations within Events Manager.
Under “Analytics,” you should see Google Analytics.
You’ll then see this…
Click “Get Started.”
Set-up will take six steps.
Connect to Google
To connect your Meta ads account to Google, you’ll first see this…
You will have the option of connecting all ad accounts within your Business Portfolio. Only do this if all pixels within your ad account have corresponding GA4 events that are ready to map.
Once you’ve thoroughly read Meta’s terms and your legal team has approved them (!!??), click “Next.”
Log in with the Google account that corresponds to the GA4 events that you’ll want to map.
Click “Continue.”
Check the box for the Google Analytics account and properties you’ll want to connect to Meta.
Then click “Next.”
Map Events
Now that you’ve selected the GA4 property, you’ll need to select the Meta dataset to map to it. I’ve selected a pixel.
Next, you’ll need to define your sharing preferences. Select which traffic sources to allow Meta to access in Google Analytics. The options are “All traffic sources” and “Only traffic coming from Meta.”
I have selected “All,” though it is unclear to me what the risks and benefits are of selecting either one. I’ll address that later.
Next, Meta will automatically choose conversion events that you can map with GA4 events. I haven’t seen any documentation on this, but my theory is that events you’ve used for optimization are eligible. I’m not at all clear on why you can’t manually select from any event, but I’ll address that later.
If you’re lucky, Meta will automatically find the GA4 event that maps to your Meta conversion event. This assumes that you’ve set up your GA4 events to report on the exact same conversions as your Meta events. You can also manually select the GA4 events if Meta hasn’t automatically found them.
In a perfect world, all of this will happen cleanly in your first try. The Meta events you care about most will appear and will map perfectly to the corresponding GA4 events. If not, scroll down to the “Errors” section in this post.
Otherwise, click “Submit” and you’ll get this whimsical confirmation.
Validation
Next, you need to wait for validation. Meta says that this process can take between two and seven days to complete (or in rare cases, up to 14 days).
Initially, it will look like this with a “Pending” label.
If your process is anything like mine, that should quickly switch to “Active” with a green dot. But there’s no sign of anything else going on. Just be patient. Validation is still happening in the background.
Eventually, you should see “Connection Quality: Pending” in the upper right corner.
Once validation is complete and everything is in order, you should see that connection quality is “High.”
If it’s “Low,” I address that in the “Errors” section below.
Errors
Hopefully, everything works cleanly. But there are plenty of reasons you may run into issues. If you don’t have GA4 events set up to capture the exact same conversions as your Meta events, that will need to happen first. Meta will then need several days of data to validate.
If you run into problems, it may be related to one of the following…
1. Mapping Error.
If data is coming through that shows your GA4 and Meta events are happening on different pages, you won’t be able to map them. If you’ve set up either of these events recently (that day, for example), be patient. It could take several days.
2. No Meta Event.
This isn’t so much an error as an annoyance. Meta automatically selects the events that you can map to corresponding GA4 events. You may have only two or three available, even though you may have dozens of Meta conversion events firing on your website.
While I haven’t seen this addressed in any of Meta’s documentation, I believe that only events you’ve used for optimization purposes within the ad set are considered eligible.
Based on experience, it appears that events need to be used for optimization during the past two months. I found that once an event falls outside of that window, it disappears (or maybe my experience was completely random).
3. Select Only One Event.
Let’s consider a scenario. Maybe you haven’t created a standard event for generate_lead in GA4. But you’ve created individual events for every instance of lead generation on your website. It may not follow best practices, but that’s what you’ve done.
Since you don’t have the single event to map to your Lead event in Meta, you could otherwise select all of the various GA4 events that represent a lead. Meta even lets you do it with checkboxes.
But when you do that, you’ll get a soft error that it’s “typically best to map 1 Google Analytics event type to 1 Meta event type.”
It looks like you can still technically submit a setup that attempts to map a single Meta event to multiple GA4 events, but you’d probably want to avoid that based on this language.
4. Traffic From Meta Option Grayed Out.
During the Sharing Preferences step, advertisers have the option of sharing “all traffic sources” or “only traffic coming from Meta.” Or, at least, you might have both options. I originally did when I shared the screenshot about this.
But now the “Traffic from Meta” option is grayed out…
When I hover over where I’d select that option, I get this message:
This option is unavailable because you have more than 50 utm_source parameters. To select this option, go to Ads Manager and ensure there are fewer than 50 utm_source parameters and that at least utm_source=facebook or utm_source=meta is included as one of the URL parameters for the ads in this account.
This makes no sense. I can’t imagine I’ve used 50 different utm_source parameters for ads in Ads Manager. And I certainly don’t have that many active now.
If you are getting this error, I have no information for you. It’s just as mysterious to me.
5. Low Connection Quality.
Meta recommends coming back to the GA4 integration page regularly to check on connection quality. If it displays “Low,” hover over the error for details.
My connection was initially “High” and I have a theory why it then switched to “Low.” When I clicked to review my setup, I noticed that Meta was displaying three events for mapping. I had submitted only two.
As I mentioned earlier, only events you’ve used for optimization during the past two months appear to be eligible. The Podcast Play custom event is why I think that. When I initially started this process, Podcast Play was one of the events I could map. It then disappeared. After digging around, I realized that I just hit two months since an ad set last run optimized for that event.
Once it disappeared, I created a new ad set that I ran for a few days. I hadn’t thought anything of it, but now it’s appearing again. Is it a coincidence? Maybe. But this explanation is at least an educated guess.
It’s possible, if not likely, that my connection status switched to “Low” when this new, unmapped event appeared. When that happens, you may simply need to resubmit with the corresponding Meta and GA4 Podcast Play events.
There obviously could be other explanations for a low quality connection if your GA4 events and Meta events aren’t all firing for the same actions. I hope that the “Low connection” message would share those details if this is the case.
Open Questions
I have several questions related to the setup process of this integration. Meta’s official documentation is lacking, to put it mildly. But these questions all had me scratching my head…
1. Why aren’t all events eligible?
The fact that Meta only surfaces some events for mapping (presumably those you’ve optimized for recently) makes this entire process far more complicated than it needs to be. In my example, I couldn’t map Podcast Play initially, so once I started an ad set optimized for that event, my connection quality switched to Low. I could have avoided this by simply mapping all of my events from the beginning.
It also doesn’t make sense from a data completeness point of view. Let’s say that this integration helps improve conversion attribution for my mapped events (more on that in “Unknown Risks and Benefits”). That’s great for those events. But just because I don’t optimize for an event doesn’t mean that I don’t care about it.
I add columns for a couple dozen conversion events, and I want all of them to get any potential benefit from this integration.
2. Why is it “better” to map one GA4 event to one Meta event?
It makes sense, in theory, why mapping a single GA4 event to a single Meta event could be cleaner. But it wouldn’t necessarily be better or different if you thoroughly selected all of the GA4 events that represent that single Meta event. If it is better, it would be helpful if Meta explained exactly why that’s the case.
Otherwise, Meta should just remove the ability to select multiple events in the first place.
3. When would you select “only traffic coming from Meta”?
Granted, my confusion here could be eliminated if I had a clearer idea of why we’re doing this in the first place (more on that in a minute). But I’m sure I’m not the only one who struggles with what to do with this.
Unknown Risks and Benefits
I was initially hesitant to set this up because Meta’s done such a bad job of communicating the risks and benefits of doing so.
1. Benefits?
You may recall the screenshot of the initial alert about this integration at the beginning of this post:
Advertisers who maintain a high-quality connection will get early access to new ad system updates that provided an additional 5% average increase in conversions driven by Meta in their analytics tools, in a 2025 experiment.
Wow. That is one incredibly convoluted and confusing message. Let’s attempt to break this down…
WHAT new ad system updates?
Advertisers who maintain a high-quality connection will get access to these updates. But what does this even mean?
An additional 5% average increase in conversions?
So much to unpack here. It was the “new ad system updates” that provided this increase. How?
In their analytics tools?
Wait, so the 5% increase was in attributed conversions in Ads Manager or in GA4? This makes it seem like it would be in GA4 — or other analytics tools.
Overall, Meta has done a very bad job communicating why we should set up this integration. It would seem to me that there are three primary potential benefits:
1. It improves Ads Manager attribution. Presumably, this would be because GA4 has some events that Meta did not. It’s unclear how GA4 would give Meta visibility into conversions it couldn’t already see from other data sources and the API.
2. It improves Meta-attributed attribution in GA4 and other reporting tools. This would only be possible if this integration means that advertisers are sending data to Google, which it’s not entirely clear if that’s the case. But this could make sense since GA4 notoriously underreports Facebook and Instagram-driven conversions relying on traffic sources.
3. Both. Maybe?
It’s simply not clear why someone should implement this integration. And once set up, you’d think it would then become more obvious, but it’s not. No charts, graphs, statistics, nothing.
Once implemented, the advertiser is also expected to refer back regularly to the Google Analytics page in Events Manager to check the connection quality. Why can’t we be notified when there’s a problem? And what is the impact of a “high” or “low” quality connection?
As I write this, there is only a single page of official documentation on this integration. It’s a simple step-by-step on getting it set up. But there’s nothing about “why” this is a good idea or what the potential positive and negative impact may be.
In terms of results, I can’t say that I’ve seen a noticeable increase or decrease in performance. But I don’t know that anyone should expect that, regardless of what this integration actually does.
2. Risks?
I’ve seen speculation that this implementation hands off attribution to Google, thereby prioritizing different rules for attribution. The result could be far fewer reported conversions.
This makes little sense to me. I won’t even go into the reasons because it all feels nonsensical.
I don’t see a significant risk since it’s very easy to disconnect the connection, but I may be missing something.
3. Educated guess
The main question I have, even after implementing this integration, is What does this do?? My educated guess is that this is complementary. It won’t hurt your results. It might help your results. Or you may not see any difference.
Personally, I wouldn’t go through the effort of implementing this for a client without the risks and benefits being clear. Meta should eventually make that far more obvious.
If you’re like me and you’re curious and willing to take what I believe is a low risk, go ahead and set it up for yourself.
Your Turn
Have you implemented this integration? What do you think?
Let me know in the comments below!
