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Why Google Analytics can't see inside a 3D scene

Google Analytics measures pages and the events you send it, and everything in a 3D scene happens inside one <canvas> element. GA4 can tell you that someone opened your 3D page and how long they stayed. It can’t tell you what they looked at, which object they tried to click, or whether the scene ran at 12 frames per second on their phone.

This isn’t a flaw in GA4. It was built for pages, and it remains a good tool for measuring them.

Why the canvas is a blind spot

Section titled “Why the canvas is a blind spot”

A page-based tool learns about a page from its links, buttons and URLs. A WebGL or WebGPU scene has none of those inside the canvas: the browser only sees a rectangle of pixels. Meshes, cameras and materials exist in your engine, not in the page. So anything GA4 reports about the inside of your scene has to be sent there by your own code.

Can you send 3D events to GA4 anyway?

Section titled “Can you send 3D events to GA4 anyway?”

Yes. GA4 accepts custom events, so you can report meaningful moments:

gtag("event", "object_click", { object_name: "product-hero" });

This works well for discrete actions such as “selected the walnut finish” or “finished level 3”. It stops working well when the data is spatial or continuous:

  • Camera direction needs regular samples, and turning those samples into a heatmap needs spatial binning that GA4 reports don’t provide.
  • Hit positions are coordinates. You can send them as parameters, but you can’t plot them over your scene in GA4.
  • Frame rate needs percentiles across sessions and devices rather than a count of events.
  • Limits apply. GA4 allows 25 parameters per event on the standard tier, which leaves little room for structured scene data.

What each tool answers

Section titled “What each tool answers”
Question GA4 3D analytics
How did visitors find this page? Yes No
Which pages do they view? Yes No
Did they complete a purchase? If you send the event If you send the event
Which object did they click? If you send the event Yes
Where did they look? No Yes
What did they never notice? No Yes
Where in the scene does FPS drop? No Yes
Can I replay what happened in the scene? No Yes

Use both

Section titled “Use both”

You don’t have to replace GA4. Keep it for acquisition, page traffic and conversions, and add a 3D tool for what happens in the canvas. The two don’t conflict: Uptimizr runs alongside GA4 and reports to your own self-hosted collector.

If you also want the two to tell one story, report key scene moments to both:

function onAddToCart(sku: string) {
  gtag("event", "add_to_cart", { item_id: sku });
  client.track("add_to_cart", { sku });
}

Privacy differences

Section titled “Privacy differences”

GA4 uses first-party cookies by default, so many sites need consent before it can run. Uptimizr’s default setup writes no cookies and no persistent identifiers: the sessionId is held in memory and visitors are counted with a server-side hash that rotates daily. See Privacy & configuration for details. Whether you need a consent banner still depends on your jurisdiction and what you capture.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”