How-to · Updated October 11, 2026
Turn on user-provided data collection in GA4, and make it actually send something
Updated October 11, 2026
30 minutes
Turn on User-provided data collection in GA4 Admin under Data collection, and allow it in the Google tag settings. Then add a user_data parameter to the GA4 event tag that fires on each lead. The switch alone sends nothing, and a Google Ads tag that sends the email and phone reaches Google Ads only.
Before you start
- Editor access to the GA4 property, which Google requires to turn the feature on.
- GA4 linked to Google Ads. Google says the property must be linked to your Google Ads account before it sends user-provided data from a website.
- Publish access in Tag Manager, and a GA4 event tag that already fires when a lead form is submitted.
- A property outside the Health industry category. Google does not offer the feature to those properties.
Turn on both switches
This part turns on the property setting and the Google tag setting, which Google says must both be on before any data flows.
- In GA4, click Admin. Under Data collection and modification, click Data collection.
- In User-provided data collection, click Turn on. Leave Collect automatically detected user-provided data unticked for now; the next part sends the data from the form itself, which Google calls more precise.
- Review the User-provided data policy, then click Turn on. Google says accepting the policy is permanent, though the collection itself can be switched off later.
- Go back to Admin, click Data streams and your web stream. Under Google tag, click Configure tag settings, then Allow user-provided data capabilities, turn it on and click Save. Google says that with this off, no product or account that uses this Google tag receives user-provided data from it.
Make the lead event carry the data
GA4 receives an email or phone only on an event that carries it, so this part adds it to the event that fires on a lead.
- In Tag Manager, open Tags and click the Google Analytics: Google Analytics Event tag that fires when a lead form is submitted, often named for generate_lead.
- Expand Event Parameters and click Add parameter. In the Event Parameter field, enter user_data.
- In the Value field, select a User-Provided Data variable. If your Google Ads conversion tag for the same form already uses one, pick that same variable. A common failure is that only the Google Ads tag carries it, which reaches Google Ads and not GA4.
- If no such variable exists, create one and choose Manual configuration. For email and phone, select a variable that holds the visitor's entry: a data layer variable your developer fills on submission, or a DOM Element variable pointing at the form field's CSS selector, with Attribute Name left blank. Skip Format Values in both variables, as Google advises. Phone numbers must be in E.164 format, such as +15555550123.
- Click Save, then Submit and Publish. Until the container is published, the site keeps running the old version.
Keep the email, phone and name out of ordinary event parameters. They belong only inside user_data, which Google normalizes and hashes before storing.
Check it worked
Submit a test lead in Chrome with Developer Tools open on the Network tab. Search for google, click the collect request for your lead event, and open Payload. A parameter named em starting with tv.1~em and followed by a long string means the data is hashed and sent.
If em shows only tv.1~em with nothing after it, the parameter is sent empty; Google says this may happen when the data is not available when the event fires, for example when the form clears its fields before the event fires. Google says improvements to modeling and attribution can take up to a month to appear in reports.
Automatic detection instead of a variable
Google can scan your pages for text that looks like an email, phone or address. It needs no user_data parameter on the event tags, but it has to be enabled both in GA4 and in the Google tag, and the container then published. Google calls selectors more precise than automatic detection, and a code snippet more reliable than selectors. Use it only when the form's fields cannot be reached any other way.
Turning it off later
Unticking User-provided data collection in GA4 stops the property processing the data, while the Google tag may still collect it. Turning off Allow user-provided data capabilities in the tag settings stops the tag sending it to every product and account that uses that Google tag. If your Google Ads account is a destination of the same tag, that can include its enhanced conversions.