GA4, page_path, and page_location – switch to GTM?

GA4 is taking a long time to get used to.

Suppose I would like to create a custom conversion event that fires when people view a particular page. With Universal, this was trivial based by setting it up based on the page path.

With GA4, I can create an event that fires when event_name = page_view and page_location = …

but page_location is the entire URL, including the domain and query parameters, which is very annoying. There is no way of accessing the stripped down page path anymore.

Everything I can find suggests others are using Google Tag Manager and passing through their own custom page_path variable. Switching to GTM of course means no longer using your plugin. But everyone is recommending GTM over your plugin.

What is your recommendation here? I guess it may be possible to create a custom dimension through the paid version of MonsterInsights, but if this is a major flaw of GA4, it’s probably something the core plugin should be doing. Or maybe you have a better suggestion.