Beyond Page Views: How To Decode GA4

GA4, or Google Analytics 4. Now, we’ve known about this for years, and since April 2022, Google gave us a warning that Universal Analytics was sunsetting in July 2023, so this July. However, 19 million websites still supposedly haven’t made the switch, which makes me think that a lot of marketers and business owners still don’t actually know how or why they should be using GA4. So today we’re going to explain what Google Analytics 4 is, how you can use it and how it differs from its predecessor of Universal Analytics.

Hi, my name is Jordan McFadyen. Welcome to the Marketing Mindset podcast, where this podcast is really a challenge for both you and I to always be reassessing and looking at our marketing strategies. I want to share some new thoughts and new ideas on how you can be moving away from random acts of marketing and start helping you build and sustain the long-term marketing strategy.

And that’s a big thing about what we want to chat about today, is in terms of your marketing strategy, you kind of need to know if it’s working or not. And one of those tools that we use to help see whether we are actually hitting some of our KPIs and some of our goals is by using tools like Analytics. And one of the big ones that we’ve been using over the many years has been what’s called Universal Analytics. So Google Universal Analytics. But that’s all changing. And I don’t think enough business owners or marketers are adapting to the change as quickly as probably what they should.

Google Analytics 4, or GA4 often, and we’ll refer to it as GA4 throughout this podcast, is essentially what we are going to be chatting about today. It’s been a bit of a minefield, this one as well. And this podcast today really is a bit of a reminder that as a marketer or a business owner, if you haven’t yet had a play in GA4, really, here’s your sign. Here’s your sign really to get into it and start having a bit of a play.

I’m trying to make this as much of a straightforward guide as possible, answering some of those big questions that I know a lot of people have about the platform GA4. We’re going to explain what it even is in the first place and how, of course, it is differing from its predecessor of Universal Analytics. So that’s what we want to discuss today.

Now, if you can listen to this in front of a computer, if you can log into GA4, that would be ideal, because you can have a bit of a click around as we talk. But otherwise, even just having a bit of a listen, taking down some notes and then having a play in the platform, I think that’s going to be really handy for you as well, as you start to learn a bit more about GA4 as it compares to, as we know it, the standard Google Analytics.

So as I mentioned at the start of this podcast, as of July 2023, Google’s older platform, the Universal Analytics, is going to stop recording your data. And so what you need to be doing is you need to transition to GA4. Now, if you haven’t done this already, that’s actually your first job. Your first job is actually to go in there. If you go into your Universal Analytics, your old analytics, your current analytics, if you haven’t upgraded, then you’re going to be greeted by this massive pop-up with a countdown telling you how long you’ve got to migrate over to GA4 before your analytics and your website’s data will stop recording.

So that’s the first thing you need to do, is actually turn GA4 on. It can be pretty complex as well. So either follow the tutorials to be able to transfer your existing analytics across to GA4, or if you do have some complexities to your analytics or complexities to some of the data that you’re actually tracking, I would definitely recommend actually getting a developer involved and making sure it is set up properly. Using Google Tag Manager can be really good, and making sure that the data that you are getting out of the platform is actually what you need.

GA4 really isn’t a replacement for Universal Analytics. I’m actually seeing it more as a major upgrade, really. Where Universal Analytics, it was fantastic at actually being able to tell us who was visiting our websites and where they’re actually coming from, what GA4 is actually going to do is it’s taking it a little step further as well. So what we can do in GA4 is we can actually track more along the lines of the what and the how and the why of some of those user interactions on your website. It’s going to give you far more detailed understanding of a user’s behaviour at the end of the day.

So you’ll be able to work out, are they clicking on call-to-action buttons? Are they scrolling down your pages? Are they watching the videos that are on your website as well? GA4 is going to tell us all of this and more. And it’s really going to help us make more informed decisions about your website, about your marketing strategy, and making sure, that big one, that we’re actually hitting those goals. We’re actually getting those KPIs, those tactics, and those pieces of marketing and content that we have out that’s supporting our strategy. It’s actually doing something. It’s actually hitting those goals, and that’s what we want to be evaluating, and that’s what we want to be using GA4 for as well.

Obviously, a new platform comes, new features, there’s new reports, and of course, there has been some big challenges as well. And I think that’s been one of the big things for a lot of marketers and a lot of business owners that I’ve spoken to around analytics, and they’re just getting confused. So many emails in my inbox this week, because Google have just done another push, talking about GA4 and making that switch. I’ve got so many emails in the inbox asking for advice and asking for a bit of support and making sure that everyone’s analytics is up to date. So hopefully, today’s podcast is going to give you just a little bit of direction around what GA4 is and how you can be using it.

So we’re going to have a look at GA4 versus Universal Analytics, kind of like the old analytics, the analytics that you’re probably used to using in Google right now. And as I kind of said before, while Universal Analytics is going to excel in providing the who, the where, and the when data about your user behaviour, remember, GA4 is going to track that what, the how, and the why user interactions of the site.

So with Universal Analytics, it was really page view based in nature. So people would come into a page, you’d see that page view data, but you wouldn’t actually see much about what they’re actually doing on that page. So now you can see that they’re scrolling, that they’re clicking on stuff, that they’re downloading. It’s very event-based in GA4.

And as a bit of an example of some of the events that you can be tracking, it’s things like, are people clicking on a call-to-action button? Are they even scrolling down the page in the first place? Are they downloading something? Are they pressing play on a video? Are they loading a new page? Are they submitting a form? Are they, I don’t know, viewing an image in a lightbox for you? All of those different events are things that you can actually be tracking within GA4.

So there is a lot that you can do. So again, you’re not looking at who’s come to my page and where have they come from, which is still great information to know. But on top of that, you’re actually learning about, okay, what are they actually doing on my page? Are they actually staying on? Are they engaging? What are the engagement stats like?

So the question there for marketers and for business owners is really thinking about what events are you actually going to track and which should you track? And I guess it’s going to come back to your strategy. And I know I say this a lot, but everything comes back to that strategy in the first place, those KPIs. What are you actually trying to achieve out of your marketing?

And this is where you can start to ask yourself some of those big questions like, which parts of my website don’t seem to be working as well as what they should be? Are there parts of my site now that I need to talk a lot about with stakeholders? Are there certain pages that stakeholders always ask me about? How’s this page converting? Are people interacting with this content? And I guess that’s really important data that we can put in there.

So taking my website and examples from how we’ve set up GA4, we track things like plays of our videos on our site. So if you go to our website, donebynine.com, you’ll be greeted by a video of me kind of talking about us. And we have that on our service page as well. We actually measure user engagement, assessing its value and performance in terms of people actually watching that video. And that can be really helpful.

The other thing that I find really helpful is actually measuring scroll-downs on informative pages across the site. So one of our key pages is talking around our marketing strategy package. And that’s essentially how clients first come to us. It’s a really informative page. And being able to track the data on a page like that indicates whether users perceive the copy on that page to be relevant or compelling, and they can actually do something with it. So measuring the scrolls can also be really, really beneficial. And that’s two examples of where we use event-based goals in GA4, essentially.

And then we come to reporting. Reporting is an interesting one. There are core reports. And these tell us where your traffic’s coming from, what pages are people looking at. And there’s a few other things that Universal Analytics would kind of report on as well. And Universal Analytics, the old analytics, you could quite easily jump into a report. Let’s say, where’s my acquisition coming from? Where’s the traffic coming from? You could jump in really easily and go to the acquisition report and then drill down to organic search or paid search or social media, so on. And make that distinction really, really simply. You could simply click on a few links and drill into it from there.

But it’s not really the case anymore. It’s definitely a little bit more complex. And you do have to think a little bit more about it. But I think the main thing I want to get across is that you’re never going to be good at something unless you actually jump in and have a play and have a real go. And that’s probably the best way that I’ve been able to learn over the past 12 months, as we’ve been playing with it, is actually getting in there and testing out different reports and playing with the different reports.

So instead, what you need to do now is you actually need to have a play with what’s called the filter. So again, if you’re sitting in front of your computer now and you’re having a listen, I’d suggest that you go into GA4 and have a look for those filters. You can put in a search word. Let’s say you’re wanting to drill down on social media from the acquisition report. So you might actually use that keyword of “social”. It’s going to help you filter it down. And you’ll be able to get more granular detail as you start to add filters to those core reports. So filters is the way to go to really try and bring that data down.

So it’s definitely not as easy to go into the level of detail as what you used to be able to do in the old analytics. But there are ways for you to be able to achieve the same results. And in these reports, what you can also do, and we’ll talk about this shortly as well, you can actually then save them into your library and essentially build mini dashboards so that you can always go back to it really quickly. And I guess that goes back to what I was saying at the start, just making sure you’ve actually got those key things that you’re wanting to find out from your analytics. And that’s going to really help you build out your account for you and your team so you can really start to see some of those key reports that you’re asked about a lot.

So in these reports as well, there’s just a few things I just wanted to point out, a few things to note. So again, if you’re in front of your screen now, you’ll see there’s this word there, “comparisons”. So comparisons is kind of new. You’re going to see this at the top of each report, the top of each page. Now, comparisons is essentially what we used to call segments within the old analytics. So comparisons equals segments.

So let’s say that maybe you just want to have a look at mobile users. Maybe I want to go in and look at people from a particular region or something along those lines as well. Comparisons is going to allow you to do that, essentially. Like you would with segments, you can build a comparison instead. And then you can actually customise those reports and those comparisons. And again, as I said before, you can actually then save them to your library.

So your library, you’re going to see this at the bottom left-hand side of your page. That’s where all your collections, all your reports are all organised in one place. And then you can customise them and create a few more as well. And this is where, also down in that library section, you can create reporting for your team and your management. Or if you are a business owner and you’ve got some core reports that you need to be looking at day in, day out, those key metrics that you’re tracking, just create them and save them down in your library. And that’s going to be the best way, because if you set it up once in your account, then your team, whenever they jump in there as well, they’re going to see those reports that you’ve saved as well. So everyone can get the same data that aligns with those marketing goals.

So that’s the first thing. So the library thing’s actually quite cool. And then custom reports. When you’re starting out, firstly, I would recommend that you have a play around with custom reports. And this is going to be down in that library section again. And using this report builder is really where the power is. Now, you’ve got a couple of options. When you go down to the library, you’re going to be able to see that you can create some reports. There’s a big blue button there. So you can start from scratch. But I’ve got to say, from experience, it can be pretty overwhelming.

So what I would recommend, and especially if you’re just getting into GA4, the best way of learning is to use some of the templates that they provide. So again, you want to click on that big create new report button. It’s pretty clear where you need to go. And then from there, you can use some of the templates that Google suggests. There’s heaps of different templates around acquisition and engagement. For example, path exploration. So you can even have a look at how people have travelled through your website. There’s one that’s going to allow you to segment overlaps. So you can actually see, for example, how many people on mobile and how many people on desktop and what’s the overlap of that data as well.

So that’s one of the keys. I reckon if there’s one thing you should be playing with, it’s really trying to understand how to build custom reports and how to play with custom reports and saving those custom reports as well. So again, it’s pretty simple. Once you log into GA4, go down to the bottom left-hand side. You’re going to see the word “library”. You’re going to go into the library. There may be some reports sitting in there, but you want to click create new report. Have a look through that list of reports that are there and think about the ones that are best going to align to your goals and your KPIs.

And then you’re going to add those filters on top to make sure that it’s really going to drill down and get that data that you need to be able to be confident that you’re producing the content that you need to justify your marketing strategy at the end of the day.

So I want to go through some common problems as well that we’re seeing and a lot of questions that we’re getting through my inbox as well. Because there does seem to be, obviously, a little bit of confusion with GA4 that hopefully we can give just a little bit of clarity around.

The first thing we get asked a lot around is sessions versus visitors. And essentially these are completely different. It’s kind of like two different lenses. So here’s how to break it down and here’s one way to kind of look at it. So visitors, this is looking at a visitor over all time. It’s like a multi-attribution model, essentially. So as an example, a visitor is someone, they have visited your site 15 times, or the last visit that they’ve actually bought your product. So that’s what a visitor is. And we want to know, okay, so they visited 15 times, the last visit they bought. I want to know how we acquired that visitor in the first place. So that’s the visitor.

When we look at sessions, it’s actually got a really different lens, because with sessions we’re actually zooming in on that particular session on when they converted. And not just that overall journey as a visitor, but it’s just on that particular session at the time as well. So this is actually really handy when we are building these reports and describing it to clients as well.

You need to think really clearly about whether we’re looking at the visitor as a whole. So where did they come from? How many times did they come to the site? How often were they spending on the site at any one time? What page did they finally convert on? So that’s the visitor’s journey. Or a particular session. So whether a user actually went to a page, they scrolled to a particular point, they clicked on a particular button, they performed a specific action.

So you do have to be really careful when looking at reports, just to make sure if you’re focusing on a single session as opposed to a visitor report, because obviously you’re going to get completely different data based on the type of report you’re looking at.

I guess a good way to think of it is sessions and visitors are kind of like the macro and the micro. So visitors, kind of having a look at that holistic multi-attribution. How many times does a visitor come to your site? Over what period of time? Where did they come from? What page did they convert on? Versus the micro, drilling right down and actually having a look at a particular session and how they interacted with your website. What elements did they click on and what events did they click on? So that’s just one thing to be really important to think about as you’re going through these reports. Sessions versus visitors.

Now, the other big one which was interesting was bounce rate. Now, this was funny. The removal of bounce rate really put marketers up in arms back when GA4 kind of first came to light and we were all kind of playing around with it. The removal of the bounce rate. How could we do that?

So bounce rate, if you don’t know, it’s having a look at how many people enter a page and how many people exit on that same page. So, for example, they go to a page and literally you can imagine them bouncing back off. They read something that’s on the page but it doesn’t quite resonate with them, and then they bounce back off. So that doesn’t really exist. You can’t really just look at a bounce rate on GA4 to give you that type of measurement. And there’s a couple of reasons why as well.

So now how it happens is it’s more having a look at the direct measure of how many people enter a page, then having a look at how many people exited that page, but it’s also having a look at how many people were engaged on that page as well. The standard engagement is set for around 10 seconds. So you can still get kind of a feel for what the bounce rate is. So, again, you just have to look at it in a different light. So you look at how many people enter a page, how many people exit on that page, and how many people were engaged on that page. Like I say, the standard set at about the 10 second. And then you’ll be able to work out that bounce rate.

If that’s important to you to understand, and if that’s a measure that your management team or you as a business owner like to see, that’s the best way to do it. Okay? So people that enter a page, people that exit a page, and were they engaged on that page as well? Making sure they were on that page for a standard around that 10 seconds.

And also, just another thing just to be mindful of is the data retention. So in GA4, the data retention is set for only 14 months. So essentially, in 14 months and one day from today, your data is going to disappear. Okay? So it’s just something just to think about. And honestly, there are, again, a lot of marketing teams a bit up in arms about that. But I just don’t see it as a massive deal, as the way that attributions work and the way that cookies work and everything like that. Getting accurate year-on-year data has always been really difficult.

So it’s just starting to have a bit of a think about that. If someone in your organisation is looking for reports from two years ago or anything like that, you can’t actually do it from within GA4. I believe you can build out custom reports in Looker Studio, which is the old Data Studio. You do have to pay for storage on that. But that’s getting into a whole other podcast, to be fair. So just be mindful: 14-month retention on GA4 as well.

So look, I know that was a bit of a quick run-through. A quick look at how GA4 works. Some of the common problems that I see. Some of the things that I would suggest you do. And I just think that you need to think about it, that GA4 is not just a new platform. It’s actually more of a powerful tool that’s going to allow you to track the whats and the hows and the whys of all those user interactions on your website.

And eventually what this is going to do is it is going to lead to more informed decisions, and especially to align against your strategic marketing actions as well, which, of course, aligns to that marketing strategy that you’ve built as well. Because at the end of the day, if you’re not monitoring the strategy, does it even exist? And I guess that’s just a thing to think about.

But look, if you do have any questions or you want to share any of your GA4 experiences, I do really want to hear from you. Like I say, we’ve been getting a lot of emails this week around GA4 in general. Please drop us a line. You can find us on social media, donebynine.digital. Or you can email Jordan at Done By Nine as well. More than happy to chat to you about it and see if there’s any common questions that are kind of coming through. We can do a bit of a follow-up on the podcast as well, as we’re always kind of trying to think about this podcast as a way to learn together. So your input’s obviously really valuable to us and obviously everyone else as well.

And look, I do hope that you’ve been able to get some tangible advice out of this. And again, I think the big thing to take away is if you don’t have GA4 ready to go, do it. That’s your first job this morning. So get in and get that done. Second one is if you’ve got GA4 working but you have no idea how to use it, play with it. Get in there. And there’s some pretty good tutorials online as well. Even Google Analytics themselves, when you’re actually in there, it gives you the option to take an introduction tool when you first set up the account. Take it, have a play, play with those custom reports, save them to your library.

So hopefully you’ve been able to get a few ideas about how you can use GA4. It’s not a massive change from how you have been doing things with the Universal Analytics. But I think it’s just really important to get in there and play and make sure that the data is still coming through in the way that you’re able to then report it to the rest of your team as well.

And look, thanks so much for joining us on today’s podcast. If you want to have a look at any of our other resources or any of the other articles that we have, you can, of course, get them all on our website, donebynine.com. Just click Podcast at the top and you’ll get access to all our previous episodes and previous resources there as well.

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