Google Analytics 4 for PPC: Everything you need to know

Episode Description

Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics that we all know and used on July 1, 2023, and is moving to #GoogleAnalytics4. This is a mandatory migration; hence, it’s a significant shift for #PPC marketers.

Google added some, changed some, and even removed some features in Google Analytics 4 that you used in Universal Analytics. This means the way you collect and analyze data will need to change.

To help you understand more about it and make this migration successful, we spoke to two of the best experts in the analytics space, Janet Driscoll Miller and Charles Farina.

Tune into this episode to learn:

- How is Google Analytics 4 different from Universal Analytics?

- The dos and don’ts during the migration to #GA4

- How can PPC marketers get the best out of GA4?

and more.

Episode Resources

• GA4 Migration checklist: https://bit.ly/ppctownhall
• GA4 vs UA comparison: https://support.google.com/analytics/… and https://support.google.com/analytics/… and https://support.google.com/analytics/…
• GA4 events info to ensure both UA and GA4 events are tracking correctly: https://support.google.com/analytics/…
• Data-First Marketing book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Data-First-Mar…

Episode Takeaways

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) vs. Universal Analytics:

• Differences in Data Models: GA4 uses an event-based data model which is more flexible than the session-based model used in Universal Analytics, allowing for more customized and granular tracking.
• Privacy and Data Control: GA4 offers improved privacy features and data controls in line with current regulations, giving users more control over data collection and retention.
• Cross-Platform Tracking: GA4 supports cross-platform tracking natively, enabling seamless tracking across websites and apps to provide a more comprehensive view of the user journey.

Dos and Don’ts During Migration to GA4:

• Do Start Early: Begin the migration process well before Universal Analytics is phased out to ensure you have sufficient time to adjust to the new system.
• Do Maintain Dual Tagging: Run GA4 in parallel with Universal Analytics to ensure data continuity and compare data sets for discrepancies.
• Don’t Rush the Setup: Take the time to understand GA4’s new features and settings. Customize your event tracking and parameters to suit your specific needs.
• Don’t Ignore Training: Utilize available resources and training materials to educate yourself and your team on the new features and best practices for GA4.

Optimizing PPC with GA4:

• Leverage Enhanced Measurement: Utilize GA4’s enhanced automatic tracking features for clicks, site search, video engagement, and file downloads to gain deeper insights without additional coding.
• Utilize the Analysis Hub: Take advantage of GA4’s Analysis Hub for more complex analysis, such as user pathing and funnel analysis, to optimize the PPC campaigns based on user behavior.
• Implement Conversion Modeling: Use GA4’s conversion modeling through machine learning to fill in gaps where data may be missing, ensuring more complete performance reports.

Additional Key Takeaways:

• Integration with Google Ads: Link GA4 with Google Ads to improve ad targeting and retargeting capabilities based on enriched data from GA4.
• Continuous Learning and Adaptation: As GA4 evolves, continuously adapt strategies and stay updated with new features and best practices to fully leverage GA4’s capabilities for PPC marketing.

Episode Transcript

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host and I’m also the co founder and CEO at Optmyzr. So today we wanted to switch it up a little bit and talk about a topic we don’t often really talk about, which is Google Analytics. So there’s this whole shift happening to GA4.

It’s a shift away from universal analytics and it’s kind of a big deal because a lot of us in PPC and digital marketing, we rely. On Google analytics as one of the platforms to tell us what’s happening, where clicks are coming from, where conversions are happening, how people get from the click to the conversion.

Now with this migration to GA4, which Google is going to force us all to, to, to make the old analytics is going to go away at some point, it is probably time to think about that a little bit. So to talk about that, I brought in two amazing guests Janet Driscoll And Charles Farina, they’re both well known in the GA space much smarter than myself when it comes to anything analytics related.

So we got a great episode for you today. So let’s get rolling with PPC Town Hall.

All right, and welcome to my guest house. Charles and Janet. Charles, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you know about GA.

CHARLES FARINA: Thanks so much for having me. So I’ve been working with Google Analytics for over 10 years. Primarily I’ve been focusing on the GA 360 or the enterprise version of Google Analytics.

And I’ve worked with agencies like Adswerve helping many of Google’s largest customers Use Google analytics kind of throughout their entire ecosystem. So I have a very deep background and I’ve been working with more than 200 of our customers on helping them move from the old version of Google analytics to this new GA4 and excited to share a little bit about that process with you all.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Nice. You’ve worked with hundreds of customers to do the migration. So I’m sure we’re going to learn a lot from you today. And I hear you’ve also given hundreds of talks at industry events. So I’m sure people are going to love what you have to share before we talk to Janet and get her introduction.

Charles, we always ask people where they’re joining us from and everyone watching put it in the comments where you are watching us from today.

CHARLES FARINA: Yeah. I’m, I’m joining today from Seattle, Washington.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Nice. On the West coast, like myself, that’s right. Can you see the space needle from where you are?

CHARLES FARINA: Close.

Almost. It’s just over a hill.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay. Nice. All right. Then the other amazing expert we have today is Janet. So Janet, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: Thank you. My name is Janet Driscoll Miller, and I am the CEO and president of a company called Marketing Mojo, which is a SEO and PPC agency primarily and we’ve been in business for 17 years.

So I have been working in Google Analytics since the very beginning and I will say that this is probably the most challenging migration I’ve ever seen. So it does, I’m glad you’re doing this topic because it’s very important. I’m also the author of a book called There’s another one called data first marketing, how to compete and win in the age of analytics, which talks a lot about how to connect all of your analytics to make sure that all of your marketing efforts are connected and tracking as best as you can to a very important metrics like revenue and your KPIs.

And so that’s a little bit about me and I’ve been working in GA, like I said, for, for many, many years, probably you know, 15, 16, 17 years now. So it’s been a long time.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I love it though. How you’re saying like, Hey, we should pay attention to metrics, like revenue. You know, we’re in the PPC space and it’s like, Oh my God.

And all the analysts are talking about Google’s average CPCs are going up. Like, Ooh, the world is imploding or the world, like who cares? Like revenue conversions, actual sales, right. Good leads, bad leads. And analytics is such a fundamental part of figuring that all out. Hey, a fun little fact, and I like to brag a little bit sometimes myself, but.

I was actually one of the people who did the acquisition of a company called Urchin, which is now Analytics. And the whole deal, kind of what you guys were both alluding to, Is it’s about understanding what’s happening, right? So Google had this PPC engine 20 years ago, and we just needed to prove to customers that the money they were spending was being spent the right way.

Because we believe that if we were able to prove that they would spend more and more and more money. Right. So we, we looked at a company that was able to support those measurements and get through some like basic levels of attribution, but things have gotten much more complicated now. Right. And I think that’s a little bit the story that we’re seeing with this migration to GA4.

So, so can one of you explain a little bit why Google is forcing us to make this move to GA4? What’s, what’s better about it? What’s different about it?

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: I will say there are a lot of differences. In fact, if you were to start a GA4 property today. And you’re used to universal analytics, you’re going to go in and probably be stunned at how different the navigation is.

Everything’s in a different place. Some things are very difficult to find. So I do get asked a lot, what is the benefit of this migration? The benefit is you’re going to be closer to actually measuring the revenue and KPIs, which I think is a positive thing. However, I don’t think most companies are ready for this migration.

And to move that far down the measurement funnel. And I talked to lots of companies from very small companies to global corporations, and many of them have a lot of discrepancies in their data. And so while Google’s ready to move us all forward and measure better, not everyone is at that point where they’re ready to make that type of move.

And so this, of course, as you know, is being sort of forced on us. We have some deadlines we have to meet. And That’s making it even more challenging because I don’t think that most people even realize that there’s a deadline to get this integrated. So I don’t know if Charles wants to speak to a little bit more about why they chose to do this.

I have my own theories, but go ahead.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And then if you know the current deadlines do share those as well. I don’t know exactly what they are, but love to hear about them.

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: Go ahead, Charles. Sorry.

CHARLES FARINA: I was

Urchin was really amazing because it was 15 years ago around that, that Google acquired that company and then turned it from like a server side processing engine to this JavaScript analytic solution that’s extremely easy to use and. Everyone can kind of figure their way around without a whole lot of training and that all started with the acquisition 15 years ago.

And what’s kind of fascinating, at least to me, is you can still use the original JavaScript, the urchin. js version from 15 years ago. And it still works today. And that shows how long the core of Google analytics has been the same. And, and I can’t really think of any other SaaS based platforms that still work with 15 year old code bases.

So that is a big reason behind why Google is doing this move to GA4 in that it’s the first time ever. That Google is truly replatforming. They’re building everything kind of from the ground up. It’s a new data model. It’s a new schema. It’s new capabilities. So they’re trying to really design a platform that’s going to work for the next 15 years.

And this is the first time in its history. It’s, it’s ever kind of doing this massive move. And then for your timeline question the timelines are that the free version of Google analytics will no longer accept new data. As of July of next year, and then if you are a 360 or enterprise customer, you get an additional three months.

So till October, and that just simply means that at that date, you’ll no longer be able to collect new data. Google will still allow you to log in and access your own historical data. And then Google said they would be sharing plans on when they might remove access to the platform at a future date. So those are the dates to watch out for, which is mainly that July date of when you can no longer collect new data.

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: And just to clarify too, really quickly on Charles’s point when he talks about the free, Version he means universal analytics. You’ll still have a free version of ga4 It’s just that the free version of universal analytics is going to stop collecting data as of july 1 next year 2023 the other challenge in this so when we talk about migration, there’s going to be a two phase migration process as charles mentioned you can log in and get access to your data after july 1st of next year for your universal analytics You But it will no longer be collecting data, but you can get your historical data until January 1st of 2024.

Google has said that they’re going to delete, this is very frustrating, they’re going to delete all of your historical information. And this is part of my theory as to why they’re moving to GA4. Is that they’re trying to get away from some cookie based tracking, first of all. And second, a lot of it has to do, I think, with privacy issues.

And so they’re trying to get ahead of the game and deal with some of the privacy issues that exist before they’re told what they have to do with the platform. So they’re trying to get ahead of it. And that I think is also why they’re deleting the data, unfortunately. Also just as a, as a side note, GA4 at most is going to contain only 14 months worth of data.

So, and that’s even, I believe, the 360 paid version. So, as I mentioned, this has got to be a two phase migration approach for every, everyone. One is do the migration, and two is archiving data.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. And so, to clarify what you’re saying there about the 14 months, this is not just if I installed it today, I’d be limited into how much data I would have by the time they deprecate the older systems.

They’re literally, Keeping a 14 month running window of data and everything that’s older just gets deleted is what you’re saying.

CHARLES FARINA: It’s a bit more complicated. So in, in Google analytics for there’s two kind of key separate areas of the product, there’s the standard reports. And then there’s a separate area called explorations where you can basically do ad hoc or advanced analytics.

It’s kind of a little bit similar to data studio and kind of that freeform custom nature. So that’s the important part. There’s two areas. There’s standard reports, and then there’s explorations where you do all of your analysis. There is a data retention setting that in the free version, the maximum amount is 14 months.

But it’s important to note that the data retention setting only affects the exploration reports where you do that advanced analysis. The standard reports where you get like a simple pages report or you can see your top events or your top traffic sources, the data retention setting won’t affect or impact the standard reports.

So those will collect forever because they’re not again, connected to that. So it’s definitely a lot more confusing than the universal version, at least for me. But it kind of gives you a flavor of how that retention setting works.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: That makes sense. And then, and then Janet, so with all of this, obviously step number one is start getting the new data into the new platform because the old one’s going to go away, right?

So we want to have as much data in there as possible for when we actually have to use it. Do you have any tips as far as what that migration looks like?

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: Yes. And in fact, if, if listeners have not started that GA4 migration or that started that property, they should do so immediately. That would be step one.

Because like all things Google Analytics, it only starts tracking from that day forward. It’s not going to look back, to have a look back window. So you need to go ahead and make sure you at least have the property up and running. And then you can tweak it with all of the pieces you need, like your conversions and your events and, and so forth.

But you’ve got to get that thing up and running because the challenge is if you use year over year data we’re doing this recording and we’re you know, and talking today in, it’s really essentially the fall, right? And next year, July 1, we’ve already passed July 1 of this year. So to have effective and comparable data year over year, You’re not going to have that even at this point, because the way that GA4 tracks its data and, and the metrics it looks at are different than universal analytics.

I mean, just as an example one difference between the two platforms, it’s just a really simple one, especially if you’re a global company, this would affect you In current universal analytics, if a user is on having a session and it’s, it turns to be midnight at whatever time zone you’ve set your analytics to, if they are still on your site at when it turns to 1201 or 12 o’clock a.

m. the next day they are considered to have a new session. So they basically would have two sessions. Whereas in GA4, it’s a continuous session. It does not start a new session at midnight. So in other words, your sessions that you’re counting currently in UA are not going to match up with what you have in GA4.

by default, just the way it’s counted. And so trying to compare universal analytics data to GA4 data is going to be very difficult. It’s not going to really be accurate. And so as soon as you can get your GA4 up and operating, the sooner you’re going to have accurate year over year data to rely on. Yeah,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: that’s that’s really fascinating.

That actually was broken in the past, I didn’t realize that. I

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: know, I know.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: But so, as far as, you’re saying it’s going to be really hard to compare the old data to the new data, but that said, you still recommend saving the old data. And so talk a little bit about the the exporting, or is there any way to get that historical data out of Universal Analytics before it all gets deleted at some future point?

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: There is, and, you know, we highly recommend that everyone, obviously, archive what they have. So, Google has a couple of different recommendations. I mean, the top one, though, I would say, I know a lot of folks just go into the interface and download CSVs. That is cumbersome and time consuming. Don’t do that.

Instead, you can use the Google API. If you’re not a savvy programmer, don’t know how to use the API, don’t have access to a web developer, no problem. There’s a great plugin for Google Sheets called Google Analytics. I think it’s called Google Analytics for Sheets. And you can very easily access the API through that Google Sheets plugin and extension.

And create all sorts of great reports and pull that down in whatever dimensions you want. So for instance, think about the cadence in which you do your reporting and how often you access information. Like I, for instance, like many people access it monthly. So if I’m going to be looking at month over month data, I might want to pull down all of, let’s say my source medium reports on a month over month basis for the past Several years, and I do recommend that people do pull down as much as they can, maybe 3 to 5 years of data minimum, simply because with covid, I know with a lot of my clients, it just really threw off what normalcy look like in analytics, because

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: that no longer makes sense right now, we have, yeah.

Exactly. Non COVID year or now versus a COVID year, like.

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: I know. Yeah. And now we’re kind of getting back to somewhat normalcy, but what did normal look like? And so for many clients, we’ve been going back two or three years to do that comparison to really look at what normal used to look like. So I definitely would say, think about.

the ranges you need and the cadence at which you want to pull reports and what type of reports you access regularly. And, but it’s a really great tool. That’s the way I recommend doing it. Just use the Google Sheets extension because it’s really simple. Anyone can use it and you don’t need web development help to, to make it happen.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And Charles, I’d love to hear your advice on that as well, but, but I think one point I’m thinking from you, Janet, is you can either Access all the raw data. But the problem with raw data is you often then don’t do anything with it because it’s so hard to like process. So your advice is more like, Hey, think about what you’ve been doing historically, make that still accessible and forget about all of these like other nuances that you may be giving out.

Because if you haven’t thought about them for the last two years, chances are you won’t think of them next year either. Right.

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: It’s a, and it’s a big job. I mean, you really need to prioritize your time with this. And so I would just prioritize it where I spend my time. Like, for instance, if I’m an international company and I need to do country data, I would focus on that.

So really put some serious thought into the strategy about how you want to download that data. But the problem will be, of course, once it’s gone, it’s gone. So you’ve got to really be thoughtful about what you need access to, so you can pull down the raw data and then you can do whatever you want with it in Google Sheets or Data Studio.

But you’ve at least got the raw data.

CHARLES FARINA: Yeah, and I, I would just add, I like the prioritizing your time and the way I think about it is, I could make a strong case that for many of you, you might not want to spend any time downloading your historical data because I feel like for most of us, It’s kind of rare that we ever need data that’s over that year over year time period.

So sure, there are certain situations where it might be helpful for like historical trends, but the vast majority of your analysis needs to be on that kind of most recent 13 month time period. And because of that, if you don’t have a GA4 implementation already in place, It is substantially more important and beneficial for you to be spending time on getting your implementation finished and correct than it is worrying about how you’re going to get your data that you captured from five years ago that you never used before you realized that you were going to lose access to it.

So maybe a little bit of a differing kind of recommendation, at least from that perspective. But for a lot of you, I don’t think actually losing your historical data that’s going to be, you know, two to three years out is really going to impact you that much. And it’s going to be much better for your time to just focus on this new kind of integration and making sure that’s dialed in.

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: I would just add on that real quickly that As I mentioned, it’s a two phased approach. Absolutely get the GA4 up and running correctly first. You have more time to do the archiving. You have until January 1, if you’re in the free version, January 1 of 2024 to get your UA data downloaded. So you have more time.

So definitely what Charles is saying, prioritize the GA4 implementation itself first, then go back and think about archiving. So make sure you prioritize your time. Appropriately, because you’ve got to get that data collecting as quickly as possible as correctly as possible. As, as soon as you can.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And that makes a lot of sense to me.

I mean, so we have almost a year and a half of becoming deleted or inaccessible. We’ll get onto GA4 now. Let’s see what it can do for us. Maybe it raises some new questions. So we want these insights historically. So now we might say, hey, that’s actually something we do want to archive and have access to going forward.

And so let’s shift from this then a little bit into. What are some of these cool things that GA4 can do? Is doing better, right? So it’s fixing some things around what’s considered a session. But from a PPC advertiser’s perspective and thinking about revenue and thinking about attribution two weeks ago, we had an episode and Kasim Aslam, he was saying that basically the next, he said, trillion dollar opportunity is the company that figures out how to do attribution better.

And I know data driven attribution is one of the elements that’s really prioritized in GA4. But let’s talk just broadly. What, what, what, and let’s start with you, Charles. GA4, like, why is it exciting for a PPC advertiser?

CHARLES FARINA: Yeah, so I’m gonna actually show you an example in the platform. So, as we kind of talked about earlier, Google Analytics is about 15 years old.

And some of the ways it works hasn’t changed in 15 years. And an example of that is conversion tracking. So conversions are what we call the goals in universal analytics are, I guess, pretty dumb. They’re a sessionized metric that, which means they can only count once per session. So if you have something like an e commerce purchase and you mark that as a goal and someone purchased twice in a visit.

it would only count once. In addition, you only got 20 of them. So if you implemented Google analytics 15 years ago, you probably long ago ran out of conversion slots because Google doesn’t give you more. You can’t delete them. They’re not flexible. So in GA4, one of my favorite features is simply that Google’s completely rebuilt conversion tracking.

So your conversions that you set up are now flexible. So first of all, you get 30. In addition, you can archive them. So what that means is for the first time we can do like seasonal or campaign based goals or conversions. So if you have like a back to school campaign and you have a unique kind of form or Action based on that, you can set that as a conversion temporarily, and then when the campaign’s over, you can archive it, and the data all still stays there, and it frees up a new conversion window.

And then I would say the other biggest part, which is really my favorite part, is that we can create conversions that were never possible before. In the old version of Google Analytics, so these conversions were again, pretty basic or dumb, like you could only set them up off of a page or a particular event, you couldn’t combine different conditions together.

So to show you a quick example, I have a conversion here, and if we look at what this conversion is based off of. It’s based off of an audience. So I have an audience in Google analytics and this particular audience is looking at anyone who viewed my blog and within 10 minutes, they got to my contact page.

And what you can do in GA4 is you can actually take any audience you create and you can actually have the audience trigger an event and therefore a conversion. So what that means is we have audience based conversions. So if you’re an e commerce customer, you can create conversions for someone who purchased more than 50 a product.

Or her, her purchase more than two products, or if you’re a B2B type company, you can create conversions for someone that viewed your blog and then your contact form or viewed a video and downloaded a white paper or spent more than five minutes from the U S you can combine all these different conditions to create these advanced conversion logic, which then if you connect Google ads can then be hooked up to do all sorts of kind of advanced conversion Bidding or audience based augmentation.

So that’s one of my favorite examples of where there’s a huge improvement with GA4.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: That’s really cool. But let me, let me maybe play devil’s advocate here for a moment. So the example that you showed, someone comes to the blog or is in that audience and then within 10 minutes goes to the contact us page, like in universal analytics, I probably would have set up a conversion that said someone who used the contact page.

And then I think I could have segmented that to see who came in through the blog. So there’s

CHARLES FARINA: two things you could, you couldn’t do with universal. First is this concept of time. So time and universal analytics is a horrible metric because universal can only measure time really between pages. It can’t measure time between interactions.

So if you wanted to ask me a question, how long did it take someone to start filling out a form and finish filling out the form? There’s no good way to do that in universal. Because it can only measure the time between pages, where in GA4, as was mentioned earlier, we have this new event based kind of model.

So we can measure time between any two events or any two interactions. So this concept of time is not something you can replicate in Universal. And then the other part is sure you could go out and do an audience and segment it. Right. And you could do analysis on the conversion itself. But the key here is that you’re inserting audience conditions in the conversion.

So let’s say you’re a company that only operates in the U S and you want a qualified. Set of conversions. So you really only want conversions that are happening in the U S region. You can’t really scope that in the conversion itself in universal, where in GA4, because you’re doing it at an audience layer, you can actually have it define the conversion itself, which then is automatically imported into Google ads.

So it just makes it more seamless where in your, your devil’s advocate example, it was kind of a workaround or he had to go off and do six different things after. Here you’re just defining it at the core of the conversion itself,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: right? And I think what’s important or what I’m thinking of as like the inside is it’s the fact that you’re now sharing this back to Google ads and now Google ads can find you potentially more of those types of users who will have similar behaviors of quickly converting from reading the blog to being interested in getting a contact form.

Whereas what I was describing was, I could still figure out who those people might’ve been that get to that conversion. But once I knew, what do I do with that, right? Exactly.

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: The other thing I’ll just add onto what Charles said, you know, when you can make things into a conversion, it’s, it helps you do a lot more optimization.

Both with your ads, but also with things like landing pages for instance, with Google Optimize, you can now optimize a conversion like Charles is mentioning and a very specific audience combined with time and, and so all sorts of things. So you can do a lot more when it’s a conversion versus just an event.

And so that’s 1 of the real benefits of this, because as Charles mentioned in universal analytics, we had a lot of things like, and really. The one I see most prevalent when I look at analytics implementations are destination goals in universal analytics. Those are gone away completely. There are no destination goals anymore.

You have to do it as an event. And so it really does force you to think about it a little bit differently. But in the long run, it’s going to be such a beneficial move to being able to do things just like what Charles was mentioning, because you can use it in multiple ways. And as you mentioned, Fred, with the Google AI and In AdWords, it’s gonna be able to optimize to the specific audiences a lot better using that information that you have set up in analytics.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So really cool example there makes sense how you integrate it with Google ads from a technical perspective. Once you set up your GA4 profile, is it automatically connected to your Google ads account? What do people have to do to start importing these conversions and feed it into the machine?

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: Once you set up your GA4, And you have it set to the way that you’d like you can connect your google ads to multiple analytics accounts And so you can go ahead and connect your ga4 whenever you’re ready.

One of the things and import not just conversions, but also audiences any audiences that you created in universal analytics will not survive this migration So you’re going to have to recreate those in ga4 if you have audiences in your analytics that you’re importing but that also being said Think about when you want to make the official switch.

I call it the single source of truth. When is GA4 going to become your single source of truth? It can be before July 1 of next year, or it can start on July 1 of next year, but at some point you’re going to need to decide as an organization when you’re going to rely on GA4 data. And I would also recommend that folks go ahead and build this GA4.

property now and get their audiences collecting data. So depending on how specific their audiences are, it may take some time to accumulate an audience that’s large enough to be able to run ads for. Because remember, if UA is going to stop collecting data as of July 1 of next year, eventually those audiences are going to die off.

And not be able to be used because there’s an expiration period. So think about that. You will have to reconnect through product links. You’ll have to reconnect your GA4 to Google ads, and you can do that at any time. You don’t have to import the conversions and the audiences yet, but you may want to go ahead and at least set up the product link and then decide on what date you want to go ahead and, and change out which ones are conversions.

And I would annotate that in, in Google ads. Because annotations is going away in GA4. There are no annotations, which stinks. So make sure that you annotate it in Google Ads when you did that change, so you know that your conversion types and so forth changed over.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay, Google team feature request.

Bring annotations back. I know.

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: It’s so simple. I don’t understand when they get rid of it. One

CHARLES FARINA: of the really nice things, if you’re kind of a more advanced, you know, PPC user and you’re over in Google ads, having fun with audiences is that experience. Wasn’t very fun with universal because the way it worked is every time you wanted to use an audience from Google analytics and use it in Google ads, you had to go in and manually share it.

And if you are working with a lot of different audiences. You would always have to do it one at a time. So it’s just a very manual process that isn’t automated and doesn’t really scale. So one nice thing in GA4 is, as was mentioned, you can connect it at any time, but automatically it will share all of the audiences in the account over to Google ads.

And that for me is a huge advantage because if you’re kind of a larger user who has multiple users who is using GA4. That means all of that work that you’re doing together can be shared. And again, it’s automated. And then over in Google ads one, one thing that I really love is that it’s very easy to work with multiple audiences.

So you have your lookalikes, you can build combined audiences. You can work with those audiences with traditional remarketing tags. So it just ends up being super flexible by just porting all the audiences and then letting you manage the final audience over in Google ads. With any sort of combination or configuration in between.

So it should improve kind of that workflow. I think pretty significantly.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: It’s more fun to use. That’s always good. Hey, let’s get really specific here. So what is a tactic that you love when it comes to audiences?

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: There’s so many great ones. I always, by default, you know, you can create audiences, of course, in Google ads as well. I, and my firm, we, as a best practice, always create them in analytics because there’s so much more information in analytics that you can work from. And so, I don’t have a favorite in particular.

I just really would prefer using that platform as opposed to Google ads to create the audiences because you have a lot more flexibility. And to what Charles was mentioning with the conversion possibilities, there’s just so many ways you can combine things now that you just can’t always do in Google ads and Google ads has its limitations.

You know, like for instance, I could say I can create an audience in Google analytics for people who came from LinkedIn. You know and and so forth and say if they came from this source, but now show them this I mean, There’s so much richness to the audience building already in google analytics But I think it’s going to get even better

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: right and all of these things become signals then to the the machine learning system and the bidding mechanism and actually and then charles i’m going to go to you next but based on the time example that you gave like one problem that we’re seeing right now is People take longer to convert in the current economic environment.

And so in your example of someone who makes a quick decision to reach out and maybe take that next step, I’d want to prioritize that as an audience. And so that sounds like it’s, it’s a new thing that we probably haven’t been doing. A lot of companies probably haven’t been doing it because it hasn’t been easy with GA4.

Like I could literally build an audience of customers. They’re both desirable audiences. They’re both going to convert, but I want to focus more on the people who convert quickly, who make a decision quickly. And then a little bit secondary focus on the people who take a little bit longer. They’re still going to become customers.

They’re still good, but it helps my sales team. It helps my team sort of focus the effort on where it’s going to pay off the quickest. So that’s an example that I’m thinking could be interesting.

CHARLES FARINA: No, it’s huge. And the prioritization I guess would be my feature that I’ll talk about. So. I mentioned earlier that in GA4 there’s these two areas, so I’m going to show my screen again.

So we have the standard reports, and then we have this explore module. So one fun fact about GA4 is this explore module used to only be in GA360, or the enterprise paid version. And in GA4, now all users have access to it for free. And one reason this is important is because when we’re talking about audiences and we’re talking about remarketing, your audience is only going to be as effective as the size of the audience and how many users you can reach and obviously the budget and how it performs.

But one of the biggest challenges to start off with audience or remarketing strategies around audiences is audience sizes, right? So if you talk about building an audience of users that come from LinkedIn. If your particular property that’s only four users per month, there’s probably going to be some challenges on doing anything with our audience.

And we have to talk about match rates and all these other things with Google ads. So first and foremost, one of the most important things that I work with my customers on is trying to identify, you know, the low hanging fruit. And when we talk about doing this, we’re going to talk about, okay, well, what are the size of the audiences?

How unique are they? And then kind of what’s the overlap between them? Because if you create two separate audiences, but they end up being the same set of users, then you’re just showing ads to the same user potentially in two different places. And that might not be what you want if you’re doing kind of brand awareness or other type of campaigns.

So anyways, in this Explorer, what’s really cool is you can simply create audiences on the fly. Of any conditions you want, and then you can drag these into your canvas. And then as you’re doing this, Google’s going to show you not only how big is your audience, but what sort of overlap do you have within the audiences themselves?

So I just drew, dragged over three different audiences. I can now look at my canvas. I can see what are the sizes of each. Where’s, are they overlapping? And if I want to get super advanced, I can even click on these and I can create combined audiences directly from this particular widget. So this is another huge part of GA4.

So kind of related to your audience. Is it’s going to allow you to do a lot of kind of the exploration to figure out what are audiences that might even be worth trying, or when are you getting too granular and it’s going to end up being kind of too small of a, of an audience to really do anything with.

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: It’s great learnings for targeting to prefer their targeting. If you pull that in and take a look at it, I love the Venn diagram. I have never found a Venn diagram tool. that can do it as accurately as that. I think that is so great the way they have the accuracy of The overlap because I’ve never found a tool that can do that.

Well,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: is there still data sampling happening in GA4?

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: I believe there is, but it’s more it’s more with your specific reports similar to UA, where you get sampling when you get more specific in your parameters that you’re putting into. For dimensions and metrics, it’s

CHARLES FARINA: going to depend on where you’re at in GA4.

So there’s these two key areas, and this is like the most important part to start wrapping your head around. There’s the standard reports and then there’s explorations. So in the standard reports, which are just the default reports you see when you log into GA4. There is no sampling. You can send 10 billion events per month and those reports will always be unsampled.

The ad hoc or the kind of advanced analytics area of GA4 where we create the custom, we do those funnels, we do pathing, everything we’ve kind of been talking about. In Explore, sampling does happen, and that happens anytime you’re analyzing more than 10 million events within your date range. So if you do have a large volume of events, sampling is something you do need to be aware of, and that’s primarily going to impact you in that Explorations module.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Sometimes blows my mind how good the engineers at Google are at handling huge amounts of data and making it very usable. So that’s very cool. Jen, I don’t know if I actually asked you, but what’s your favorite new thing in GA for especially if, if you have one for an advertiser’s perspective or.

For anyone else, if you will.

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: Well, I think we’ve touched a little bit on it with the conversions. I think the way the conversions are set up, I think we had talked a little bit about this in some notes, that some people are complaining that conversions are cumbersome to set up. I find it to be the opposite.

I think conversion setup is much easier because you can just create an event and then toggle it on. It’s very simple to set up for

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: a second, right? Because I think.

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: Yeah,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: when you look at universal analytics, setting up an event actually involved going into your javascript and doing a lot of page requires engineers.

And by the way, you just said, hey, just use the API to download all the data. So we may be talking about someone like super advanced to you. So, but what does it take to set up an event for the average?

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: So you still have code that you have to put on the page, just like you did with to track events, but you know, you can easily do that through Google tag manager, which if you’re not using Google tag manager should be, it makes it so much easier to implement not only GA4, but so many things like with Google ads, even but with universal analytics to create an event, you had to put code on and there were two steps code and interface right you had to put some data into the interface in ga4 you can just set up an event and then basically with the code and in the interface as an event but then you can just toggle it to be a conversion so you can take your existing events and make them conversions very quickly versus in the past you sort of had to do Set it up in events and then set it up in, in conversions anyway.

And so it’s a little more cumbersome to do. But as I mentioned, the one thing that I think is a little bit challenging for people is that so many people use destination URLs right now. Destination goals, that, that’s probably the most common goals type I see in universal analytics. That we’ve got to rethink how we’re doing it.

doing destination goals and make them all event goals instead. And so it requires a little bit of rethinking. So instead of, as an example, you have a receipt page or a thank you page, maybe it’s the form submitted and that was the event. So it’s not actually they reached this thank you page, this form submitted successfully.

So there is a little bit more complication in setting up events like that. If you’re not savvy with The code, but there are lots of things to help you along the way. And if you have existing events you can look, there’s actually a document, which I can send you a link to Fred after this, that Google walks you through how to compare your UA events and your GA4 events and make sure they’re both tracking properly, especially in the short term, while you might be tracking to both properties in the short term.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay, yeah, and we’ll put that in the show notes, so anyone watching this just look in the notes, and we’ll probably also put it up you’ve already seen the URL by this point so a couple of the concerns that we’ve seen on on the forums have to do with the ease of access of the data, so I think we kind of covered that, maybe the setup of conversion, so what you just described, People just have to shift their minds.

The third category of concern that we hear about, I’d love to hear your perspectives, is e commerce integration with third parties. So I know in the past there were some integration with Shopify and other card systems. Is that? Up to par yet or are we still waiting there or what’s that looking like?

I

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: shopify stores and my understanding from them has been that Shopify sent out a notification saying we’re not going to upgrade to ga4 at this time Now, I don’t know if they’re planning to later. I’ve been meaning to reach out to someone at shopify and find out Because clearly that’s really important data to all of those folks, and it’s going to expire.

You know, what they’re using today is going to expire. So I’m not sure if they’re planning on doing their own analytics for Shopify separately, but there is not currently, to my knowledge, any kind of, Special integration. And that’s another reason why I feel like some of the rollouts a bit premature.

It seems a bit rushed because that’s very critical data, obviously, to shop owners, and there’s no simple integration at this time. And some of the platforms are not ready.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So what you just said about Shopify is really interesting, right? So I think all of these big platforms or big companies, they want to own the data.

They want to keep people in the platform. But one of the reasons we need. Systems like Google Analytics is that you need to look cross channel, have a proper attribution model, right? Everybody understands this who’s watching, but I’ll just restate it anyway. Google Ads is going to take credit for any conversion that had any touchpoint with Google Ads.

Facebook is going to take credit for that same conversion if there was any touchpoint at any time. with Facebook. And so now you’re double counting systems like Google Analytics can actually go up one level and say, well, we can see all of these things happening. And so that one conversion is not going to be attributed partially to these channels.

And we’re going to give you maybe data driven attribution model. Is there. This is Shopify saying we’re not going to integrate with GA4. Are there other systems that are better now that you are using within your companies? And where does GA4 fit within all of this? Is it just one of the many tools or is it your source of truth like you said, Janet?

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: I’m going to say it’s a source of truth. And for most of the companies I work with, You know, they, they rely on typically one analytics package. They do not, for instance, they do not put multiple analytics platforms necessarily on their sites. Some do, I’m sure there are some out there, but I work with a lot of different companies of many different sizes and, you know, really Google analytics has been the default go to and a very trusted source.

So. As I’ve been giving this talk around the country and talking about this migration, I’ve asked folks, you know, have you done this migration yet? And people have asked me, is there an alternative? But very few people ask that question. They, they see Google analytics as their source of truth and they can, they are going to continue with it regardless of the challenges that they’re facing in the short term.

So very few people I’ve talked to have said, you know what, I’m throwing my hands up. This GA4 stuff is frustrating. I’m just going to change platforms. I really am not seeing that from people and

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: right,

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: right. So they’re willing to do it, you know but they realize it’s very difficult and it’s going to take some time.

CHARLES FARINA: So I have a lot of clients that use Shopify and other platforms and for almost all of them, there are integrations that are available. They just not, they just might not be from the provider themself, like Shopify. So for Shopify particularly there’s Elevar and some other, I think paid plugins they’re not that expensive but that’s all relative.

So that’s one option. If you do have a need right now. There’s lots of plugins that are mostly through Google Tag Manager to help fill in the gaps while we wait for hopefully some free officially supported plugins. So those are available now, so you can definitely implement GA4 on Shopify and other platforms.

I would also add that from my experience, I do find something in GA4 to be a bit challenging right now. There’s some missing functionality, like we don’t have product scoped custom dimensions. There’s not standard e commerce funnels. And just some of the out of the box reporting can be a little bit challenging to work with.

So my hope is, is that kind of in the next 12 months that the Google team themselves is going to be hopefully making GA4 a lot easier to use. And I think that’s not just an e commerce challenge. It’s a challenge for a lot of kind of new users to the platform. But again, my hope is, is that we start to see a lot of updates for kind of the default experience and some of the features and functionality that we expect to, to have when we kind of use that platform.

So. There are options there for e commerce, for sure. Can I

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: add one more thing to you about attribution before we go? I want to let everybody know that the channel groupings that you see in default reports right now organic traffic counts. Everything that comes from a Google domain, except for ads.

So if you have a link from Google docs, it counts as organic traffic in GA4. It does not in, in in UA. So you need to take a deeper look at some, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t rely on the default channel groupings. When you look at these default reports that they have, they have not cleaned up the data and attributed it as correctly as they should have, I think, to the default channel groupings.

So use source medium. As, as your source of truth and look there and do some comparisons because depending on what industry you’re in, that can really have an impact on you.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Hey, lots of great information. I feel like we could certainly continue talking many, many hours, which is what both of you do. You’ve written a book, you give these sessions around the country.

So there’s a lot of stuff here to learn. A lot of stuff is still evolving. So let’s tell people how they can follow you, how they can learn more about what you do. So Charles, why don’t we start with you?

CHARLES FARINA: Yeah, so right now I’m pretty much on Twitter talking about GA4 every day, so that’s the best place to find me, or LinkedIn.

I also, my favorite kind of community, if anyone’s looking for help or advice, is Measureslack. There’s a free Slack community where a lot of us are talking about GA4, so I’m also very active there.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Thank you for being on the show today. And now, Janet tell people again about the book. And I think you also have a checklist you wanted to share, right?

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: Yes. So the book, again, is Data First Marketing, How to Compete and Win in the Age of Analytics. Talks a lot about attribution and measuring all of your information from the start of a campaign to the end and throughout. And that’s available on Amazon. And I do have a checklist I developed because I found a lot of people were having these challenges.

It’s again, a two phase approach. You can download the checklist for free at bit. ly bit. ly slash 2022 dash ppc. Well, wait, what was PPC

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: on the screen? We got the URL on the screen. So I’ll

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: do. Okay. Yeah. At the URL on the screen. So I was like town hall. That’s what it was. PV. I was like, I lost it for a second.

PPC dash

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: PPC town hall.

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: That’s it. And it’s a Bentley and you can download it for free and do again, do it as soon as possible. Get that property set up as soon as possible.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And download that checklist because I’m sure Janet will be dropping a cookie. Hey, you’ll become part of that audience. Yeah. And then I’ll be

JANET DRISCOLL MILLER: following you and giving you advice on GA4, whether you want it or not.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: We need the advice on GA4. So you know, take advantage of these free resources from some really smart people. So thanks everyone for watching. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe. You can also find us on all of the major podcast platforms and we’ll be back with a new episode in two weeks.

See you for the next one.