My Analytics Dashboard Said "0" for Everything That Mattered

Three weeks ago I added event tracking (attempt/complete pairs) across
16 of my 138 tools, specifically to answer one question: which tools
do people actually finish using, not just visit.

Pulled up the GA4 report expecting real numbers. Instead, every single
custom event showed up under "Key events" as flat 0.00.

The events were firing. I could see them in Realtime. The Events
report showed real counts , video_download_complete: 34,
pdf_merge_attempt: 12, all genuinely tracking. But the "Key events"
column, which is what most of GA4's higher-level reports actually
surface, was empty for every one of them.

Turns out GA4 doesn't automatically treat a custom event as a "key
event" (what used to be called a conversion) just because it exists
and fires correctly. You have to explicitly mark each event name as a
key event in the GA4 admin settings. Until you do, the event data is
real and collected, but it's effectively invisible in any report that
filters by key events, conversion-focused dashboards, or audience
building based on conversions.

Nothing was broken. I just hadn't told GA4 which of my events actually
mattered to me, and GA4 doesn't guess.

Small lesson, but the kind that costs you weeks if you don't catch it:
collecting data and that data being usable in your reporting tool are
two different configuration steps, and the second one is easy to
assume happens automatically when it doesn't.

Fixed now. Curious if anyone else has hit a similar "the data exists,
the dashboard just isn't showing it" gap in analytics tooling, feels
like a common trap with any event-based system.