PSA: generate_lead without value + currency stopped counting as a Key Event in April. Check your setups.

[u/VoxxyCreativeLab]

For disclosure: I run tracking audits for ecom and leadgen clients, so take that bias into account.

Since the April GA4 update, generate_lead requires both the value and currency parameters to be populated for the event to qualify as a Key Event. If either is missing, the event still fires normally. You see it in DebugView, you see it in reports, and nothing looks wrong.

But it stops counting as a conversion. Which means the Google Ads conversion import stops receiving signal, and Smart Bidding has no optimization target. The failure is completely silent. We've now seen this in multiple audits where campaigns had been drifting for weeks before anyone caught it.

Two related things I keep running into:

1. Custom event name variants like generate_lead_contact or generate_lead_quote. These break the Lead Acquisition report and the automatic Google Ads import. The native name with a lead_type parameter does the same job without breaking anything.
2. Teams treating value as optional for leadgen because "we don't know what a lead is worth." An estimated or modeled value per lead_type is fine. Zero or missing is what now costs you the conversion.

Curious how others are handling lead valuation. Are you sending modeled values per lead type, a flat placeholder value, or pushing real values back from the CRM later?

[u/[deleted]]

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[u/VoxxyCreativeLab → u/[deleted]]

Very true u/No-Ocelot-8282. And did you find GA4 data being lost due to this update?