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Episode 5: Wrapping Your Head Around Google Analytics (GA4) · The Same Side: A Digital Marketing Podcast Rooted in Human Connection

• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Hey there.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the same side, a digital marketing podcast rooted in human connection.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Jonathan Dans, Director of AdOps and Analytics at Digital Relativity, a full service marketing agency.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: This week's episode is all about Google Analytics 4, but before we dig into that, I just want to say that I'm recording this early because this coming week I'll be at our that's Digital Relativities second all-team meeting of the year, and I won't have the bandwidth to do this in the middle of the week.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: I say this because we do the bulk of our work remotely, and this is always a good time to connect a little deeper with everyone and re-energize by looking at the company at a high level.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it's all about the human connection.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: So this time around, we're working with Drew McClellan from the Agency Management Institute to dig into the organizational workings and to find ways to improve.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Here at DR, we're always trying to figure out how to be better, both for our partners but also for ourselves.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Given Drew and AMI's work supporting agencies, I expect to leave the meeting with confidence and inspiration as we head into Q4.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: If you work for an agency, especially in a leadership position, and you're not familiar with AMI, check out agency managementinstitute.com to get an idea of what the organization does, as well as to peruse their vast library of resources for agency leadership.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I say this not as a promotion just because I believe in what AMI does, and uh I've been going to their annual Build a Better Agency Summit for about, I guess maybe three years now, and I just find not only is the information that they provide valuable, but it's also very real.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: They're very much all about the human connection.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: All right, GA4, Google Analytics 4.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in marketing, there's a non-zero chance that you've encountered Google Analytics.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: You might be neck deep in the platform on a daily basis, like I am, or you might encounter GA4 metrics in passing in slides or dashboards from those monthly calls, periodic status calls, campaign reports, any of that kind of stuff.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: With that in mind, what follows is a high-level overview of Google Analytics.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: There may be future episodes on some of the finer points, but think of this more as an introduction and broad characterization of the platform to help those who are either unfamiliar with it or are on the outside looking in and are just trying to understand it better.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, in a nutshell, GA4, and I'll just continue to use GA4 instead of Google Analytics, it's what makes it possible to measure actions taken on your website and or your app.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: From clicks to pages viewed to where your website traffic comes from, both geographically and digitally, GA4 covers a lot of ground.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, on its own, the platform is insightful, or at least it can be, and you don't have to know how everything works to get value.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: So just wrapping your head around the basics will give you a leg up.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: However, looking at it in the context of all of your marketing efforts makes it much more valuable.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: As I mentioned in the last episode, we often pair ad platform data with our GA4 data to provide a more comprehensive picture of campaign effectiveness.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then a third data set for Microsoft Clarity, which is a free heat mapping tool, which really should be on your website if it's not already.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Using that in addition to the campaign data and the GA4 data can enrich your understanding even further.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: So as I always say, the more context, the better.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're new to website analytics or digital marketing metrics in general, GA4 is a great place to start.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And this podcast, if I may be so bold, let me give you a little background or a scenario that kind of helps cement my thinking about GA4.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Not that long ago, we decided to change our approach to ad ops and analytics by wrapping it up with our dev department, given how intertwined our website work is with our campaigns.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: So again, there's there's that context in play.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: To get everyone up to speed on the analytics side of things, we started with a landing page that the dev team had built because they were already familiar with it.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so building from that familiarity, we looked at how GA4 metrics translate into what users were doing on the landing page.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I offer that up because working in GA4 without context can be challenging.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's not unusual to dig into a Google Skills shop course on GA4, for example, only to find that the examples from the course either don't translate into the kind of work you do, or it just doesn't make any sense because you've not been in there and you're not doing the technical work that would give you the lay of the land.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: The training is actually much more beneficial after already having a frame of reference.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: So a little history just to get our feet under us.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: GA4 was officially introduced in 2020 and it ran alongside Universal Analytics, the previous version of Analytics, for a few years.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: I guess some people call it GA3.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: I never did, just called it UA.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, Universal Analytics.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then GA4 became the sole Google Analytics platform in 2024.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: The biggest change was that everything Google Analytics was recording is now considered an event.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: So the old model was session/slash page view model, and that stuff is still in there.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's just framed differently.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: The reasons for this are many.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: One of the main ones was to future-proof analytics against the cookie list future that we've been hearing about for gosh, it must be at least six to seven years.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then moving to track everything as events also makes for easier cross-platform tracking because apps don't have page views and sessions, but they do track user behavior as events.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: So now you can start comparing apples to apples if you have an app and a website.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps most importantly, the focus is now squarely on the user journey.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Really understanding what people are doing when they're on your site is the most important thing.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: GA4 is great as a part of a suite of tools, sitting downstream of digital ads, email marketing, referrals, and search engines, pretty much anything that sends traffic to a website or an app.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then GA4 sits upstream of BI platforms like Tableau or Power BI, digital visualization platforms like Data Studio, and data warehouses such as BigQuery.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I just give you that to provide context of where it sits in the flow of information.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk events.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's all everything in GA4 is, there are a ton of tracking events that come right out of the box, and with caveats, of course.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's never as simple as you would hope, but it's also not that terribly complicated.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that some of the events that come out of the box, like clicks, need a little help to be even more effective.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: If you're measuring clicks and you get a number of a thousand clicks, it's like great, well, what were they clicking?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, here's a quick breakdown of events and where they sit in the GA universe.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: So those that are automatically collected are your basic events like page view, session start, the aforementioned clicks without further context.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then those don't need any setup.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then like enhanced measurement, which is a switch you can toggle in the back of GA4, are things like scroll, file downloads, video start.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: But again, you don't have to do any special coding or set up any events.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then some of the recommended events that you can set up within GA4 are events like login or purchase, but those don't track automatically.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Again, that's just looking at the documentation.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: I usually go online when I'm stuck on how to implement something, and then working through the process there.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then custom events, that's anything else.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Events you can name yourself to track unique interactions.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's super powerful, but that's not what we're talking about today necessarily.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: There are some solid resources online for GA4 Basics or even for getting into the weeds in this kind of stuff.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Two that I rely on are Analytics Mania and Loves Data, both have websites, analyticsmania.com and lovesdata.com, and they also have YouTube channels.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's talk conversions.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: The bottom line is that spending time to get your conversions set up and firing correctly is because these are the most reliable way to measure success, especially as AI and zero-click search results have disrupted user behavior in the past couple of years.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, gone are the days when we can look at organic traffic as a measure of website success.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: For more on this, I have a blog post at digitalrelativity.com forward slash ideas.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it's basically talking about how those things, AI, AI search specifically, and zero-click search results have eaten significantly into our organic traffic because people are getting their information through these search results without having to go onto your website.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so you still might be getting your information out there to people, but you'll never know exactly how that's happening.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, there are now AI sources in GA4 that you can use, which is great, but the chances of them grabbing everything are probably pretty slim.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: So conversions are events.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, right, everything's an event in GA4.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're actions that are meaningful to your business.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Those events that help you define success, whether general website success or campaign success, are people doing what you want them to do once they reach your website.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: As you might expect, conversions vary depending on what industry you're in.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: For example, in the travel and tourism space, guide requests and newsletter signups are common.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: In the C store space, reward signups and coupon redemptions are popular, and in education, application submissions and information requests.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: One thing to note in GA4 is that in keeping with the idea that everything that happens on the website is an event, conversions aren't called conversions.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: They're called key events.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Usually setting up conversions requires patience and testing, although this has gotten much easier in recent years.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you're not comfortable poking around in the back of GA4, ideally you have a webmaster or technical person who can help.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: If not, there are great resources online, especially if you're a one-person marketing crew.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: You might find yourself going in loops and round and round, but the information is out there.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I'll reference Analytics Mania and Love's Data as two solid resources.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can get into Reddit, but I usually find Reddit is just a giant rabbit hole of people telling you what their opinions are versus giving you the real technical expertise.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: So when I'm looking for this stuff out online, I lean on the idea that simpler is better.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: If what's being presented is complex and overwhelming, I just figure there's no reason to put myself through that.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Another approach is to break down your tasks into manageable logical chunks, and Analytics Mania does a really good job of that.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Just a quick note there are conversions you set up on your website, which is what I'm talking about today, things that get tracked when the GA4 tag fires.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then there are conversions you set up on your ad platforms so that those ad platforms can optimize for those conversions.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's a totally different episode if it's an episode at all.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it probably is.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: But just be aware of that distinction.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: So today we're just talking about GA4 analytics.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I can confuse the issue and say, well, you can actually take your GA4 analytics conversions and bring them into other ad platforms.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a thing.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: But again, that's not for today.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: But what is for today is talking about behavior.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: Although GA4 tracks the results of user behavior, it's only as good as, say, like a video camera, a security camera.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: It can only show patterns, what actions were taken, but it can't show why people decided to do what they did.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: In addition to that, it's not 100% accurate due to a number of factors like ad blockers, private browsing sessions, and privacy settings.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: GA4 uses modeling to fill in gaps created by those situations where the user is obscured.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why using GA4 with other analytical tools is important because it can fill in some of those gaps as far as user intention goes.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Despite these limitations, GA4, when used in conjunction with the platforms I mentioned before, ad platform data in Data Studio, and Microsoft Clarity Heat Maps, we get a more complete picture of user behavior, viewing and identifying trends from first ad click to website conversions.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: So you get a more complete user journey.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's helpful, especially if things are breaking down, you can see where that's happening.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: I've mentioned this in previous podcasts, but you might see where your ads are getting a lot of clicks, your website's getting a lot of traffic, but users aren't converting, or your ads are getting a lot of clicks, but then people don't stay on the website.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: So there's something going on with your landing page.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then one other super helpful tool that happens outside of GA but makes the information you gather in GA4 more meaningful are campaign URLs.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: And these don't have to be just for paid media, they can be for anything.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you're slapping QR codes all over the city and you want to track what people are doing when they're scanning those QR codes, you can use campaign URLs.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: You can use it for print media, where you can have a vanity URL that you can see how many times that gets used to get an idea if your print media is working.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, what these are, they're just landing page URLs from your campaigns that are appended with campaign data.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: And usually this consists of three pieces of information at a minimum.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you've ever copied and pasted a URL and it was super long, there's a pretty good chance that's a campaign URL and it's passing that data along to the GA4 of whoever's website you're being sent to.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Going back to the three pieces of information that you should have at a minimum in your campaign URL is campaign name, the source of the traffic.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're running ads, you could have Facebook or Google or TikTok or Reddit.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you're sending through email, that's a source.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Wherever that traffic is coming from.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then the third piece is your medium.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that is exactly what it sounds like.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: What's the medium you're using to attract people and get them to the website?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: That could be display ads, video, page search, and that list can go on and on.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: And one other thing, this is a bonus tip.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: When you're using a URL, make sure it's the URL that people are actually going to.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you send people to your website through a vanity URL or to a page that redirects, if you don't set these up properly, you will lose all of your attribution.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it'll come in probably as direct none or possibly referral traffic if Google can identify the platform it came from.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so I know I'm getting a little bit in the weeds here, but just remember that when you're using a landing page URL, use the actual landing page URLs.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's probably the best practice and the simplest way to go.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And this way there are no redirects.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: So if you've got these URLs set up, that data gets passed into GA4.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: So when you look into GA4, you can say, oh, this campaign, say my citywide QR code campaign, sent 100 people to my website.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then from there, depending on what events you have set up for conversions, you can see how many conversions that source created on your website.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: The easiest way to do this is to go to what Google has, and it's got a very clever name.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's called the campaign URL builder, and you can build your own campaign URLs right there.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: There are probably more fields than you need, but they will have campaign source and medium in there.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you're not sure what to put in those, you could use an AI chatbot to describe your situation.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, I've got these ads, I'm putting them on Facebook.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're display ads.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: My campaign is the fall extravaganza.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then you can have your chatbot just probably even create these for you, but I would use the Google URL builder, the campaign URL builder if you haven't before, because then it cements in your head how these are put together.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, to recap, that's GA4 in a nutshell.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's event-based, and on its own, it shows patterns, not motives.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you pair it with ad platform data and heat mapping tools like Clarity, and if you tag your campaign URLs with UTMs, that's what those little bits of data are called, UTM parameters.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Using a tool like Campaign URL builder, your paid traffic will get proper credit.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Or your non-paid traffic that you want to know where it's coming from.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: That combination gives you the cleanest view from add click to conversion.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Alrighty, that's it for this week's episode on GA4.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully this episode leaves you with more confidence than when you started, or at least more curiosity, and it inspires you to dig in and explore GA4 more.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in an analytics meeting and you're not sure about something, just remember that the people presenting are invested in you understanding what they're presenting.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: And they're on your side.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening.