Retail Campaign Studio (RCS) can send shopper activity from your campaign landing pages directly to your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property. This article explains which events Locally sends, how they appear in GA4, and how to use them in your reporting.

Before You Start

To enable GA4 tracking for your RCS campaigns, your Locally account team needs two things from your Google Analytics account:

Your GA4 Measurement ID (starts with "G-") — found in GA4 under Admin > Data Streams > your web stream
A Measurement Protocol API secret — created in the same Data Stream screen under Measurement Protocol API secrets

Once both are configured, tracking is active for all of your RCS campaign landing pages. No code changes are needed on your side.

Events We Send

Locally sends events through two channels: the Google tag (fires in the shopper's browser on your campaign landing page) and the Measurement Protocol (sent server-to-server from Locally's platform).

Browser Events (Google Tag)

Event	Type	When It Fires
page_view	Standard	A shopper loads your campaign landing page
store_click	Custom	A shopper selects a retail store on your landing page
add_to_cart	Standard	A shopper adds a product to their cart
purchase	Standard	A shopper completes a purchase on your landing page

Browser events are sent in real time. The add_to_cart and purchase events use GA4's standard ecommerce format, including item details (product name, ID, and price), so they flow into GA4's built-in ecommerce reports.

Server Events (Measurement Protocol)

Event	Affiliation	When It Fires
purchase	Online	An online order is placed through one of your retail partners that fulfills orders through their own website
purchase	In-Store	An in-store sale is attributed to your campaign

Unlike browser events, server events are sent in daily batches, so they can appear in GA4 up to 24–48 hours after the sale occurs. Use the affiliation dimension to tell the two apart in reports.

How Online Orders Stay Connected to Your Campaign

When a shopper first lands on your campaign page, Locally captures their GA4 session identifiers. If that shopper later completes an order through a retail partner's website, the server-side purchase event is sent with those same identifiers — so the purchase is credited to the shopper's original session and your campaign's traffic source, rather than showing up as unattributed traffic.

In-store purchase events cannot be tied to an individual browsing session, so they will appear without campaign source attribution. They are identified by the In-Store affiliation.

How Events Appear in GA4

Realtime report — browser events appear within seconds of shopper activity on your landing page. This is the quickest way to confirm tracking is working.
Events report (Reports > Engagement > Events) — all events appear here by name, including the custom store_click event, typically within 24 hours.
Ecommerce reports (Reports > Monetization) — add_to_cart and purchase events populate the standard ecommerce reports, including item-level detail and revenue.

Using RCS Events in Your Reporting

Mark purchase as a key event (Admin > Events > toggle "Mark as key event") to include RCS conversions in your conversion reporting and advertising integrations.
store_click is a custom event, so it won't appear in standard ecommerce reports — view it in the Events report, or use Explorations to break it down by the store_id and store_name parameters it carries.
Segment by affiliation in Explorations to separate landing-page purchases and online partner orders ("Online") from attributed in-store sales ("In-Store").
Use UTM parameters on your campaign URLs. Because online partner orders are stitched back to the shopper's original session, purchases will attribute to the source, medium, and campaign from your UTMs — making your RCS campaign performance visible in standard Traffic Acquisition reports.

Questions about your setup? Contact your Locally account team.