When running the Debugger via Google Tag Manager and checking the Debug view in Google Analytics 4, everything looks fine... and then all of the sudden, multiples of every event show up. Sometimes there are 2 instances of events, sometimes 3, sometimes more if I stay on the page long enough. And then, sometimes if you reload the page, it will look like they went away. But then it will come back once it reloads again. I was made aware of the issue because a Conversion we have set up to fire on a page_view event (via a GTM trigger) has fired many times, when we only had 1 actual entry. I want to also note, this is happening for both built-in automatic events, and custom events I'm sending via GTM.
Other details:
- We have Google Ads connected directly to Google Analytics 4 via the "Google Ads Links"
- We have Google Search Console connected to Google Analytics 4 via the "Search Console Links"
- The setup is fairly basic/standard - nothing crazy with the setup.
- I have GA4 installed via Google Tag Manager.
- All the parameters in the duplicated events are the same as each other
Here's a screenshot:
Duplicate events in GA4
Here's what I've tried:
- Swept the site for multiple installations of GA4 and GTM code
- Installed Google Analytics 4 directly into the site
- Tried with and without all filters (I had a debugging filter, and Internal filter blocking IP set up)
- I've tried installing GTM using a Plugin, and hard coded it into the header.php file (with and without GA4 installed directly.
- When I pause the Google Analytics 4 configuration tag in Google Tag Manager, the Google Analytics pageview doesn't fire, but the automatic & custom events do. The issue still persists - all events that do fire, fire multiple times.
- I made sure there are NO events that were created in Google Analytics 4 manually - all events are created in Google Tag Manager
- GA4: "Collect Universal Analytics events" is toggled OFF
- When selecting the Google Tag from the GA4 interface, the GA4 property AND the Google Ads account are set as "Destinations". And "Ignore duplicate instances of on-page configuration (recommended)" is toggled ON.
Refresh the debug view page in analytics and see if the duplicates persist.
I have the same issue; the older the event the more copies there are. When I refresh the page everything looks as expected. Then, after some time, they start to duplicate again, including events fired 25 mins ago.
