Null Events in BigQuery

Question

I am experiencing a strange behaviour, when GA is exporting data to BigQuery I see lots of hits with type EVENT but their corresponding Event Category, Label and Action are null. I've reached support and all they told me is it is as its send (advising that tagging solution sends null or undefined event type hits) and that in GA portal such events are filtered out.

I tried sending such hits (type=event, event category==null) using GTM or manually from page code and these events are never to be found in BigQuery, meaning that those null events are something different.

Any ideas guys?

Query: SELECT fullVisitorId, visitId, hits.type, hits.eventInfo.eventCategory, hits.eventInfo.eventAction, hits.eventInfo.eventLabel, hits.eventInfo.eventValue FROM [XXXXXXX.ga_sessions_20160316] where hits.type='EVENT' and hits.eventInfo.eventCategory is null

Answer 1

As no answers so far, I will share my findings on this, may be this will help somebody.

So it is perfectly normal to see NULL events in your BigQuery. An easiest way to reproduce would be to construct a hit using measurement protocol omiting the category, action and label parameters but specifying custom dimensions and metrics. Also, hits from older versions of GA might record in BQ as nullable events. Hope this helps