Google Analytics 4 for PPC: Step-by-step setup process, tips, tricks, & features

Episode Description

It’s crunch time — the June 30 deadline for the Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 migration is quickly approaching.

But we’re here to help you make this migration (if you haven’t already) successful and hopefully relieve the fear surrounding it.

In this episode of PPC Town Hall, Navah Hopkins spoke to Brie Anderson and Timothy Jensen to talk about all things GA4: from setting up the account to getting the most out of the reporting and measurement features of GA4 plus a lot more.

Tune in to learn:

- GA4 features for PPC marketers

- Attribution modeling on GA4

- A step-by-step walkthrough of GA4 account setup

Episode Takeaways

GA4 Features for PPC Marketers

• GA4 enhances audience building capabilities, allowing marketers to refine ad targeting based on specific user actions. The platform simplifies conversion tracking and offers the ability to easily toggle events as conversions. For larger businesses, predictive analytics identify potential buyers, enhancing targeted advertising efforts.

Attribution Modeling on GA4

• Smaller businesses may struggle with GA4’s data-driven attribution due to limited data, affecting attribution accuracy. GA4 offers tools like ‘conversion paths report’ for insights into multi-touch attribution, helping to understand the influence of different channels in the customer journey.

Step-by-Step Walkthrough of GA4 Account Setup

• Setting up data streams is crucial for integrating website and app data. Proper configuration, including cross-domain tracking, is essential for accurate data collection. GA4 allows for extensive customization of events, conversions, reports, and navigation to suit specific PPC needs.

Additional Takeaways:

• Integration with Other Google Services: Linking GA4 with other Google services like Google Ads, BigQuery, and Google Optimize can enhance data analysis and campaign management capabilities.
• Handling Legacy Data: With the transition from Universal Analytics to GA4, it’s crucial to plan for data migration and retention, ensuring historical data remains accessible and useful for trend analysis and benchmarking.
• Learning and Adaptation: Embrace the learning curve associated with GA4 by experimenting with its new features and configurations to discover the most effective ways to leverage the platform for PPC marketing.

Episode Resources

Check out Brie’s course on GA4 here: https://www.beastanalyticsco.com/

Check out Tim’s GA4 resources on Search Engine Land: https://searchengineland.com/event-tr… , https://searchengineland.com/how-to-s…

Episode Transcript

TIMOTHY JENSEN: But I think it is a concern, especially for smaller businesses that don’t have much data built up and every conversion counts toward making decisions. It does make it more difficult for them.

BRIE ANDERSON: The big thing under this data settings though is this data retention. So by default, the data retention is for two months.

You more than likely want to change this to 14 months. And

NAVAH HOPKINS: it’s worth noting that you can do this for other types of reports as well. So it’s not just limited to Google ads. But this is one of those things that if you need that quality of life, a hundred percent, it’s worth investing the five minutes at the onset, then the several hours that you’ll invest over time, being frustrated and trying to find it like where to go.

Hey everybody. Welcome to one of the most anticipated PPC town halls, GA4 discussion before the sunset. We are joined by two of the most brilliant minds when it comes to GA4, Brie Anderson and Timothy Jensen. I’m Navah Hopkins of Optmyzr, and you are in for a power hour of insights, tips, tricks, and frankly, a little bit of calm before the storm.

Let’s get to it.

Welcome to PPC Town Hall. I am delighted to be joined by the absolutely brilliant Brie Anderson and Tim Jensen. Do you guys want to introduce yourself real quick?

BRIE ANDERSON: Yes. No, I’m super excited to be here. I’m Brie Anderson. I have a consultancy called Beast Analytics, you know, always dropping the brand here.

And in that analytics kind of consultancy world here what we really focus on is empowering people. To use their numbers, right? So really putting analytics into action, right? I’ve been working in GA4 since it came out in 2020. Fun fact, I was actually teaching a class on analytics at the time the day before I was like going through because we were using like dummy sites.

I was having people create dummy sites and stuff. And I went through the entire analytic setup and I was like, and then I got to the lecture. And I started creating the analytics property and it was like a G like G dash. And I was like, isn’t that usually UA and GA4 had rolled out that day. And so ever since then, I’ve been in the platform and yeah, now I, I help people set it up and educate them and all that.

So I’ve been well immersed in the GA4 world, despite everyone else hating it. I’ve kind of had to remind myself that just because they hate the platform doesn’t mean that they hate me. They just don’t like the platform, but that’s okay. I totally get it. And I’m excited to talk with both of you today about kind of the good things about it.

The things that people can do to make the transition a little bit easier and all that fun stuff.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Fun fact, I met Brie giving an amazing session at Brightness, you know, last year on GA4. And I have to say what’s really spooky is how predictive some of your insights are. So I’m, I’m really excited to get your take on a lot of the things.

Tim how about you? What’s, what’s your affinity affiliation with GA4?

TIMOTHY JENSEN: Sure. Tim Jensen, I’m a senior search marketing strategist at M& T bank. So I’ve been. In house for a little over a year now, after 11, 12 years on the agency side. So kind of seeing both sides of the world there. I’ve always been one to kind of geek out in the analytics end of the PPC world.

Always been big on GA. The, has been pretty timely as we’ve been working internally and have a build out of GA4 in process of transitioning away from Adobe analytics. So kind of helping build a GA4 instance from the, from the ground up here as well as, having worked through kind of at the beginning and the agency side when it first started switching over.

The big fan of the integrations with GTM, Google Tag Manager as well, and the customizations you can do through there. So yeah, excited to chat.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Well, that leads into one of our first questions and one of, and I will just say, Tim, I am in love with your perspective. I often see on PPC, PPC chat. So thank you always for all that you share.

Let’s start with you. What do you do? Do you love about GA4 and why, like what are some of the things that you’re super excited about?

TIMOTHY JENSEN: Sure. I know it’s, it’s definitely been an adjustment for people to get used to how everything’s kind of based on events in there. But I do love just how much customization you can use to build out events for anything and everything.

And the ease in which you can turn those into conversions, turn those into. An audience based on people that completed an event, like if they clicked a button on your site or completed a certain stage of the signup process, whatever that might be

NAVAH HOPKINS: and just in case folks aren’t aware, event means,

TIMOTHY JENSEN: So event being basically, and.

Action that’s taking place that can fire into the system. So that could be anything from, they land on the site, it’s a session. It could be a button, click a form fill. So some, some are tracked by default. Some you can manually set up to trigger in there. And that kind of leads to, you know, Google Tag Manager kind of goes hand in hand with Google Analytics.

Or there’s other tag managing platforms out there, but Tag Manager is obviously the free solution that a lot of people are using. So there’s a lot of capability in there to be able to customize what you set up. See what else I did appreciate when they got rid of bounce rate, although they kind of sneakily added that back in, but they are kind of pushing towards focusing on engagement, having what’s called engagement rate where that’s kind of based on a mix of youth.

Been on the site for a certain amount of time or looked at a certain amount of pages. Another thing that’s cool is some of the built in event tracking, again, circling back to events. You know, there’s certainly, you can go down the rabbit hole of customizing and making it better, but there’s some built in events for everything from external link clicks to like downloading a PDF scroll activity, video views things like that.

So it’s nice to be able to set up some of that. Out of the box again, you know, there’s a lot more you can do as you delve into it. The last thing. It was nice when they finally rolled out custom channel groupings again, which again, we did have before. It’s nice to have that. But even like default, they actually added a paid social channel grouping that we didn’t have before.

So again, there’s, there’s some areas where. No, the interface has taken some getting used to, but it’s nice that they do seem to be listening to users on some level and adding more ability to make it your own.

NAVAH HOPKINS: How about you, Brie? What, what are you loving and why?

BRIE ANDERSON: Yeah. That, that was a pretty good.

Roundup there the, the event set up just to hit on that a little bit more, I know that we talk about it a lot, but the events, everything’s an event. You know, with that, yeah, I don’t know if people remember, but you used to have to go and put another piece of code on your website and then you had to, you know, Come in and say, Yes, you have to look for this specific thing happening analytics.

And once that happens, then you can say it’s an event. And by the way, if you want it to be a goal, then we have to go describe it again so that you know what it is. And it comes out of the box with enhanced measurement for yeah, link clicks, file downloads form Submissions that one’s still a little finicky, but if you use like a an out of the box like WordPress forms or something like that like it it’s going to work Video engagement those kinds of things that the majority of sites are going to have to an extent right like Out of the box.

You have that. You can also create events in the platform based on dimensions and parameters. And then, yeah, you can kind of toggle conversions on literally with the click of a button. So all of that’s really cool. The nerdy side of me loves the fact that there is built in anomaly detection that you can control in certain aspects, like in certain places of the platform.

Which like. Is it statistically significant? I don’t know. Well, Google knows and they built it into the platform and you don’t even have to worry about it now. They’ll tell you if there’s an anomaly, which is awesome. The customization is really, really cool. I will say though, that is one of the like best and worst things about the platform because it is so customizable.

A lot of times you do have to go in and do some of the customizations in order for it to work for You or your clients, et cetera. I also just like. You know how there’s definitely debate about this. But I like how in depth you can get with your data and how like granular. I don’t know. I just like the fact that it is a little bit more advanced, honestly, a little bit more advanced than universal analytics.

I do understand that that. Puts up some roadblocks. But I think when you think about analytics platforms in general and their capabilities, right? Universal analytics was still relatively basic. We’re getting access to a lot of tools for free that anomaly detection, machine learning for predictive analytics that we can pull into Google ads, by the way, which is awesome that there’s just a lot of capabilities that we’re getting for free that we couldn’t have dreamed of getting 10 years ago.

NAVAH HOPKINS: So you, you said something that, that’s very interesting. And then I’ll, I’ll get to a couple of points on what I’m excited about. But the idea that GA4 is more advanced than universal analytics. And I, I think that’s worth addressing. One of the reasons I think people have been so slow to adopt GA4 that we are even having this conversation when in theory people should already be on GA4 and have everything backed up, but there are still going to be people that don’t have it when this airs.

Is that it’s, it feels scary. And I think there are a lot of resources that even though it’s more advanced, it’s not scary because really the only reason why GA4 seems hard is just that it’s different. The advanced things are not actually advanced coding or advanced Like you doing something advanced.

It’s just that it’s you have more at your disposal. And it’s, it’s definitely not harder than it was before. And I think the people that maybe have, have held back, it’s either one of two reasons. Either they’re scared, and that’s, you know, Fair. And that’s what this is for. And we’re here to kind of lift, lift the curtain a little bit and make you feel empowered.

Or, and frankly, I think this is a valid reason to you actually didn’t care about your data as much as you thought you did, and you weren’t using your data in such a meaningful way. And I think this is going to be a really big accountability moment for a lot of folks that let’s actually see what data we care about, what data we’re funneling in versus what did we want the data just because we wanted the data.

One little thing I’ll say that I love about GA4 is that it is fostering a lot more love and collaboration between PPC and SEO. I think during the universal analytics era we kind of got comfortable living some, somewhat separate lives that, and just, oh, universal analytics is just going to be different data.

It’s just going to be different. It’s going to be different. GA4 is really, Forcing us to come together, particularly with the attribution piece that Google ads is now allowing that conversion data to come through even if you are on Last Click and the Last Click wasn’t a Google ad. It’s still at least getting fed into the system.

But that also means that we have to check which conversion events we are importing in to Google. And that leads me to, do we not like? And we’ll start with Brie, because we started with Tim last time. Bri, go ahead.

BRIE ANDERSON: Yeah, I mean, I started to kind of hit on it is that, you know, because it is so customizable, you’re almost forced to customize things.

And by custom, I don’t mean like, again, it’s not like going in and coding, it’s like hitting a button and saying, actually, I want to include this metric, or actually, I want this report to live in the navigation, which, by the way, you can do in Google Analytics for that badass, frankly. Is you can really customize it to yourself but I think you’re right.

I think what it does is it makes people That maybe didn’t care enough to go in and actually do the work It makes you have to go and do the that work and dig just maybe a little bit deeper So there’s definitely a lot more I will say there’s definitely a lot more going on on the front end One thing I did miss When talking about things I like is that it was it is a clean slate, right?

So that part does stink We’re losing a lot of data We’re starting from zero right in case you guys didn’t know that and you’re still dragging your feet on ga4 You start from zero, so you will have no data. So it starts from zero and that that’s really a bummer but what it does is it does force you to take a look at what were we tracking?

What did we actually need to track? You And, you know, now you have to set all of that again. So I think really it’s just like the front end work as far as now we have to get everything set up. Now we have to troubleshoot everything, make sure it works. Now we have to set all of our events up for Google Analytics 4 and customize some things so that we can get to the data that we actually need.

I think that’s the part that I don’t like. And the fact that there’s just, they didn’t come out with a ton of. Really, they didn’t come out with a ton of useful resources for people right away. And I think that was also a big turnoff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that was a big turnoff for people too. And, and forced change with no explanation is really hard to get people on board with really hard and then to not give them resources is just kind of another kick them while they’re down kind of situation.

NAVAH HOPKINS: What about you, Tim? And then we, before this, we were talking about like, I have a bullet list.

TIMOTHY JENSEN: Yeah, I’d agree with a lot of the sentiments Brie brought up, you know, even to the last point of not providing resources. I can’t tell you how many times, like in the first few weeks, or honestly, even months of going to the GA4, like, I want to look at this report, like, how do I do this?

And immediately. Googling or turn into social media and finding someone else who’s figured it out. But yeah, usually it’s not an official Google resource. It’s someone else in the industry. So yeah, I think they did a poor job of carrying over cues in the user interface. I think they could have done a better job of, you know, even if they wanted to rebuild everything from the ground up, like, Hey, we’re going to rename all your reports, we’re going to rename metrics.

We’re going to have everything organized differently. And especially when analytics can be a tool that you want to put in front of, like, your stakeholders, like a marketing director or someone who’s not necessarily in the weeds every day obviously. Someone who knows what they’re doing in GA can build out a report in there or Looker slash Data Studio.

But it definitely takes a little more work there. Another issue that annoys me and I’m sure anyone trying to just poke around and get data from the default reports is what they call thresholding, where what’ll happen when you’re trying to add like a segment or a dimension, like let’s say, okay, I’m looking at my landing pages.

I want to throw on a segment of Everyone that came from paid and all of a sudden they, they don’t show you anything because it’s deemed not significant enough data. So there are some ways around that by making like custom explorations reports. But it’s something I feel like I run into more frequently than I should.

So that’s definitely a pain point.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Quick shout out for Optmyzr customers. We have a shareable dashboard that does pull in some of those, those reports and data bits. If you put out the scripts that you can share and export to have pretty reports, but you said something really interesting around the thresholding and this is actually something that’s.

A grind my gears moment, and it’s been a grind my gears moment since data driven attribution became available to everybody. It seems like there, it’s a, we’re living in a world of, of two stories. One story is, modeling works for everybody. Jump on board with modeling. Just, just go, just believe, just do it.

And then there’s another world of, well, Actually, you don’t have enough data or this isn’t really going to work because you’re too small. You don’t get enough impressions. You don’t spend enough. Well, whatever the case might be. I’m really curious on both of your takes. How do you feel this kind of new world of attribution where we’re asked to lean into modeling were asked to lean into kind of that black box and while still getting hit with thresholding and kind of having to Jerry rigged those solutions.

Are there one of you can take it?

TIMOTHY JENSEN: Yeah, I can jump in. I mean, it’s definitely more of a black box, especially since they announced they’re kind of forcing data driven attribution. Like, I’m You know, honestly, we’ve been running data driven attribution for a little while, even like in Google ads. So when you have larger subsets of data I’ve seen it work well for like ad optimization, but it still annoys me.

Like I, I like being able to compare the, the various models. So I think it is a concern, especially for smaller businesses that don’t have. Much data built up and every conversion counts toward making decisions. It does make it more difficult for them. There are some reports kind of tucked away.

There’s like a conversion paths report under the advertising section. And GA4, where you can kind of see like the source fit in early on this one fit on in later on that can be. somewhat helpful. But yeah, it is. It is definitely a concern and you know, I don’t know one that’s gonna be fully solved.

I think another thing to be aware of, though, is You know, our attribution, or even knowing what source any particular visit came from, even in one session, that’s not always accurate. Like you know, the source gets stripped out. So I think sometimes when we do have like a super high level of attribution, that can also become a pain point where we start trusting the data 100%.

So I don’t know, maybe there, there’s a balance somewhere, somewhere in between.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Bree, any thoughts on that?

BRIE ANDERSON: Yeah, I mean, I think you, you covered a big thing there at the end. No analytics platform is a hundred percent correct. You’re never going to get one to one data ever. So let’s just put that out there.

All analytics platforms are just estimated. You know, kind of to an extent modeled. The big thing though, that we haven’t addressed is that Google analytics for had to come out because of legislation period. Universal analytics collected IP addresses. That is not okay. You were not supposed to be able to get access to that information.

And you could The modeling comes out of need because we are entering an era. Everything ebbs and flows. We are entering an era where people are relying on cookie list browsing. Devices come with cookie list browsing out of the box. We saw a huge hit from iOS 14. 5, right? That modeling is necessary.

Otherwise you’re just. Getting, then you have even less data because now we’re having, you know, well, we couldn’t quite figure this one out. So we’re just going to scrap it altogether. Well, if we do that, we’re losing like 50 percent of all of our traffic because, you know, you start thinking of Mac users.

That’s a big portion. Safari users, iPhone, I mean, anybody that uses an Apple product, then we just don’t get that. And we don’t even want to try and kind of put those pieces together. And thresholding is kind of the same way. So along the lines of thresholding, I know that PPC You know, when I did PPC, I, I really enjoyed using like my interest in age and gender, all of those things for targeting, right.

It was really, really useful. If you turn on Google signals in Google analytics for one, it is no longer to my knowledge, I’m not a privacy expert. I’m not a lawyer, but to GDPR compliant. And two It, you are going to have threshold holding out of the wazoo, because what Google is trying to make sure that you don’t do is track certain events back to certain people.

Right. Or just something where you could narrow it down enough. Right. So, so this is,

NAVAH HOPKINS: this is a really interesting topic that I think a lot of folks are going to want to hear both of your takes on so there’s a question of. is something ethical versus legal versus profitable to do. And Google Signals, I think a lot of people kind of take on board as it is a best practice to turn it on because then I get, I get that data to come through.

I would really love both of your takes on how do you move forward with Google Signals? What advice do you give to folks when they ask you?

BRIE ANDERSON: I always tell people to consult a privacy expert. And really think about who is coming to their site, who like, and what you’re going to use that information for.

Because let’s also be honest, they’re putting people into boxes, like it’s a very stereotypical, like, to some extent, yeah, maybe they have your birthday, and they can put that in there and say, like, oh, you’re between 18 and 35. But like, I created my Google account when I was in middle school, and I used my dad’s birthday.

So it’s like, I have very, like, masculine features about me and stuff. So for all I know, they could be like, That’s a 40 year old male. You know what I mean? Like, it’s all very stereotypical anyway. And the interest things, I mean, everyone’s interested in dogs and business to an extent. You know what I mean?

Like so for me, I always tell people, if you actually think that you need it and you’re going to use it, you need to consult a privacy expert. I’m not one by any means. And just from a data standpoint, I’m like, if we can do without it, let’s please do without it because we don’t need any more thresholding to happen on these reports.

Tim, what about you?

TIMOTHY JENSEN: Yeah, I think again, Brie’s answer kind of hit it on the head or, you know, consider your situation and obviously legal counsel and such there. Interesting, you point out some of the inaccuracies of interest. I do always find it entertaining looking at various Google profiles I have set up and just how horribly inaccurate sometimes especially when I was agency side, working with a bunch of different industries, I’d have interests lining up with every industry I was researching.

But yeah, I mean, there are. Some useful aspects to it, like supposedly stitching together cross device better, but it’s definitely a give and take, but yeah, it really, really comes down to working at legal counsel on your end. I know there have been a couple of high profile articles, like in the last year, one organization in particular that actually did get in trouble because.

of Google Analytics being on their site and what it was tracking. So yeah, just, just something to be mindful of. Not sure I have a firm answer for any.

NAVAH HOPKINS: I’m going to give a shout out to Rowena Fielding. She is one of the most brilliant privacy experts. Absolutely. Go check her out. We’ll link a couple of resources on her part and then just one little Bit of advice from me and then we’ll, we’ll move on.

I actually have been leaning more and more into native ad platform audiences and targeting and less into analytics with all of these changes. There’s a lot that you can do with custom segments. There’s a lot that you can do with creative UTM parameters. content targeting. So just because we can’t do it with analytics doesn’t mean we can’t be the PPC rock stars that we know that we can be.

And we also can be above board ethically and profitably. Like it doesn’t have to be an if this or that. Cool. So there was a really good question that actually came from Joey Binder that I would love both of your takes on what are the features of GA4 that you’re using for PPC? I guess we’ll start with Tim.

TIMOTHY JENSEN: Sure. I think the biggest and most useful immediate feature that comes to mind is the audience capabilities. Obviously we’ve had the ability to create audiences to sync to Google ads for quite a while in universal analytics. But just, How, how much more advanced that is when you can tie it to, okay, I’ve created an event for people that click a button to find a, find a location or reach this stage of the signup process.

And then you can literally just it’s like, but I want to make this an audience. So just playing around with various combinations, you can tie together. Like this person took the step, they went to this page and completed this action afterwards, and then bucket them. And an audience after that. So yeah, I would say that would be the, the biggest use case.

And again, besides that, like, you know, the typical conversion import and that sort of thing.

BRIE ANDERSON: Yeah. That the audiences is a big one. Especially if you have a, you know, if you have a bigger business. Specifically like our Econ folks they, you get access to predictive analytics and predictive audiences as well.

So it can say seven day likely Turner, seven day likely buyers, 14 day and 28 day as well. So that’s big. You can pull that straight into a Google ads. Yeah. And then you can also create like a list of events, like people that abandoned cart. You can create an audience for that and start targeting them.

But also I think there are some really cool metrics that we get access to for our google ads reports in google analytics for first time purchasers You know like average Average daily purchase, like, like a whole bunch of new metrics. And you can put up to 15 of them in your report. Your Google ads report.

I think that’s for like, personally to me, that’s really cool. So yeah, but I think really the biggest thing with Googling analytics for those audiences, man, like that’s, that’s pretty awesome.

NAVAH HOPKINS: The audiences are fantastic as is Being able to see the events and kind of almost mapping out what your primary and secondary conversion actions should be in Google.

I mean, Microsoft ads, meta ads. LinkedIn ads, all the ad channels, like this is, GA4 has utility too, and I know that we’re focusing quite a bit on Google. And that actually leads to my next question before we dive into kind of the walkthrough of the GA4 setup. It was a really good question from Ivan Votvic.

I apologize if I mispronounced that. What are your thoughts on Google shifting the strategy to making GA4 a sort of central hub for web marketers? So, attribution changes, integration for Google Optimize. It’s like, what do you call

BRIE ANDERSON: it? Like, what is it? I’m like, oh, I, I guess it’s, you know, you know, an on demand product.

So you’re trying to get the best, you know, down there, but you’re not getting what you want. So that sucks. It sucks to be trying to get the best. It’s not like you’re trying to do a good job. You know what I mean? You’re trying to get the best thing, which is outside of, you know, like the website But they’re

You kind of want to have one platform where you can go to and say, all right. on average, where, where do these things land? And I think we hit on a little bit under the advertising section, which why did they call it advertising instead of attribution? Don’t know. But in that advertising section, you do get those conversion paths and you see how many touch points it takes and what are the early touch points and what are the late touch points.

And I think that’s so important and it’s been overlooked for so long. We did have that capability in universally analytics with multi touch. Funnels people just didn’t really use it that much, but it’s so important to get a full understanding because your overall marketing strategy is made up of a lot of different tactics and puzzle pieces and taking one puzzle piece out can ruin the rest of your, like, you might say, well, we’re not seeing Facebook as a convert, like last touch conversion.

There’s none of those. Right, but if everybody goes to our Facebook page to validate that we are indeed real and see all of the you know, social proof, and we take that out, then now we’re not getting conversions, right? So I, I think that’s It’s just showing people like, Hey, we need to be looking at the full picture.

And I think that’s really important. All right.

NAVAH HOPKINS: And

BRIE ANDERSON: Tim.

TIMOTHY JENSEN: Yeah, I would again, basically everything that was said there as yeah, it does have capabilities to kind of serve as that front and center place to look at everything there is. Maybe sometimes a tiny bit of a skeptic in me like, okay, Google owns ads.

They also own analytics. So maybe I have other sources to compare, but again, always comparing ad platform versus their I do like, you know, they have. Metrics, like even being able to see like first session activity versus the current session to kind of track that path through. And it, you know, would just also add just making sure that your UTM parameter approach follows a.

consistent scheme cause that’s really going to help you make sure that everything’s bucketed properly and that you can actually compare sources properly in the interface.

NAVAH HOPKINS: And I think that what we will see in GA4 and then we’ll, we’ll transition to Bree’s beautiful walkthrough of GA4 setup is we’ll actually probably see a lot of what happened in Google ads where If a thing wasn’t highly utilized, it will get deprecated.

And I think that the things that we’re going to have access to now, kind of, During still that rollout before everyone’s fully on it. We might start to see some of those things go away and be replaced. We might start to see some of them consolidated because at the end of the day, Google is really, really good at doing a few things exceptionally well, or a lot of things averagely.

And typically we’re happier when it’s the few things done really well. So I, I would expect. eventually more plugins for some of their other ad tools like local service ads, but I’d also probably expect quite a more integrations to pull in other ad platforms, but maybe deprecate some other functionality.

So we’ll, we’ll see what happens. But yeah, it’s, it’s definitely an exciting time now as we go through oh yes, one last question. And we can actually talk about this as we go through the setup of what should people do with their old data. Is this data that just gets stored? Is it something that you just kind of hold on to like your third grade projects in your mom’s house?

Like what, what do we do with, with our old data?

BRIE ANDERSON: Yeah. So Google actually announced yesterday. So today is the 28th. Google announced yesterday that July 1st, 2024 is when we will lose our universal analytics data. data. That being said, it won’t be like my college notebooks that are still in my closet for what reason?

Because I think that I’m going to go back and learn marketing. Definitely. Absolutely not. I didn’t enjoy it while I was doing it, but alas So, so we’ll only get it for a year. That being said, if you were someone that used Universal Analytics for 10 years, right, because it’s been around for that long if, if you were someone that used Universal Analytics and you used it well for 10 years, and you’re like, wow, this data is really important and really useful, I would suggest going ahead and, and just dumping all the, exporting all that data and putting it somewhere.

You know, I know a lot of people Any suggestions? I mean, a lot of people are putting it into big, big query, which is nerve wracking for a lot of people. Like I, I don’t really even work in big query all that much. I store stuff there, but. It’s kind of like that closet with my marketing notebooks or, you know, depending on how much data you have, there are Google sheets extensions.

You can dump a bunch of data that way. That’s honestly, that’s how I do it for most of my clients. But if you have 10 years worth of data, you’re good. That’s not going to work because you’re going to need more storage than that. But yeah, I would say just go ahead and dump it, and if you need it, you can use it in Looker Studio in the future, or Power BI, whatever you’re using to visualize your data.

NAVAH HOPKINS: What about you, Tim? Any, any suggestions while, while Brie gets ready to share?

TIMOTHY JENSEN: Yeah, you know, you know, I’ll add the caveat that even the way GA4 measures basic metrics like sessions is different. So it’s never going to be apples to apples comparison if you’re looking at before and after. But yeah, as mentioned, BigQuery is a popular option where you can literally just go to reports and there’s some limitations with amount of data, but you can export Excel files full of data.

So, yeah, you know, maybe looking back a year or two might be more relevant than, you know, several years. Again, there might be some people where that super historical data might be helpful that so much has changed in that time frame.

NAVAH HOPKINS: And I, and I will put one last reminder for calm and kindness to yourself that you do not need to stress about the data.

At the end of the day, it was. A tool to work through what was going on. We now will have a different tool to work through what’s going on. If you truly need that data, you didn’t, you wouldn’t find the session valuable because you’ve already backed it up. You already have your plan set for everyone who’s watching that hasn’t sorted this yet.

Honestly, that data, you probably weren’t even using it. So it’s, it’s not worth stressing over. It’s not worth crying over. Let’s Marie Kondo it and just choose what sparks joy. And with that Breen do you want to kick us off on the most crucial things to think about with setting up that GA4 account?

BRIE ANDERSON: Absolutely. I am going to quote one of my favorite bands and the song that I always walk out to is All the Small Things by Blink 182. In this section, so your admin section, when you set up Google Analytics 4, it is all about all the small things here. Because there are a lot, there’s a lot of nitty gritty that happens in here.

There are a lot of things to touch and I encourage you. Because there, there are a lot of well, you’ll see a lot of hidden gems, one might say. So, this setup assistant you can go through it if you want. Some of it’s not really, I don’t, I don’t use it. Some people, do you guys use it? Do you use the setup assistant?

It’s kind of just like a checklist.

NAVAH HOPKINS: I use it now for my more SMB clients, just to help them kind of visualize what we’re doing. It’s for, for the more enterprise level folks now, but I actually find that this is a very helpful kind of sanity check of, okay, this is the step, we’ve completed it, it’s the step, we’ve completed it, but it’s not like you have to, as you say.

TIMOTHY JENSEN: Yeah, same for me. I, there’s a couple of places when we were transitioning through where, okay, that’s kind of useful. They called this out, but yeah, not a make it or break it.

BRIE ANDERSON: Yeah. I will say like, you know, this says, Hey, by the way, go ahead and turn Google signals on for me. It’s just, this is a very risky place for people to be sometimes.

So just something to, to take into consideration. If you’re like, what do I do? This is a good place. But just kind of take it with a grain of salt. It’s more just a checklist in case you guys were wondering. The property settings, this is important. Make sure your time zone is correct. Because if you have meta reporting on one time zone and this reporting on another, it’s gonna even be, be even more off.

So that’s where this happens. And some of this stuff you’re going to see as you set up your first data stream, which we’ll talk about in a second. Actually yeah, we can just skip property management. So yeah, we’ll go into data stream. So your data stream, this is how data gets into Google Analytics for right.

And the cool thing we didn’t talk about is in Universal Analytics, we had web plus app properties. And by default, all GA4 properties are essentially that. So you have your website here, you can add apps, you can even add multiple websites if you want. That, that’s not necessarily Like suggested, but you could do it.

So if you go into this data stream, so this is again, how you’re going to set up your Google analytics for like getting data into it, we use this measurement ID. See, there’s this wonderful G dash, whatever which is new. But, you can also get your there’s like the tag instructions and stuff on here.

This is that enhanced measurement we talked about. So you can see, these are all things that are tracked by default. So, page view, scrolls, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement, and file downloads. By default, now, these form interactions are off. If you wanted to turn them on, you just hit that little setting, and you can turn any of these on or off.

Then you can create events in here if you want. The big thing, though, is to come into this section, the Google Tag, right? A lot of people don’t really ever look at this. If you go into Configure Tag Settings in here it’s gonna show you this stuff. I don’t know, it’s just a pretty graphic. So but under the settings show all these are all things that are really important and people ask about a lot and can never find and that’s because it’s four layers deep, right?

And you have to know which buttons to click to get there. So cross domain tracking Happens right here. Configure your cross domain tracking here.

NAVAH HOPKINS: And then, oh, go ahead. I just want to interject real quick. For those of you in the PPC world that have to deal with subdomains versus main domains, this is really, really critical that you have set up.

Especially if you’re forced to use a vanity domain. Because God forbid that’s not configured and it’s not tracked, you’re going to be very sad explaining that nothing happened that SEO can report, but you, you, you’re showing all this beautiful data. So definitely, definitely this, this is really, really, really important on the PPC side.

Yeah.

BRIE ANDERSON: This is huge. And so many people overlook it because it’s again, buried. But yeah, you’re, you’re cross domain tracking and it’s a lot easier again than it was in universal analytics. So, but definitely make sure you have this. This going on and then another one is your unwanted referrals. So this is especially important for people that are using payment gateways.

So the stripes, the PayPal’s of the world. You, you can list those unwanted referrers here. Some people are still doing the defined internal traffic with IP addresses. Most people are using VPNs or are working at home and in their office. So it’s not overly helpful, but if you have a client ask for it, or if you, you all want it, In general, it is right here that’s one that I get asked about a lot as well.

So this is definitely important. So again, that’s under your, you’re going to come into your data stream, go into configure tag settings, and all of this is under your settings right here. So very important. Your events. So in here, this will show you all the events that are coming through, which is nice.

It’s a really nice, like, quick check. Like, what are all of my events coming through? You can see them right here. You can also create and modify events in here. So again, we were talking about, you can create events based on different parameters. So once I get rid of this, it’ll show you all the parameters you have access to, right?

So for quick things, that’s nice.

NAVAH HOPKINS: I, honestly, Real quick, just as a general shout out for folks, when you’re first setting this up, the data will not populate. So do not stress if you see zeros here. It’s going to take like a day or two. To start flowing. If it’s a week, then yeah, something’s not right.

But a day or two, just give it a moment to populate.

BRIE ANDERSON: Yeah, for some reason, it takes Usually like at least 16 hours. So I don’t know why that happens. Well, I guess I do know how it happens. It has to do with how Google But it’s very technical and boring, so we’re not going to go there. But yes. Give it some time and then your events will come through here.

And then also, we were talking about those conversions, you literally just go, yep, that’s a conversion, turn it on, or no, file downloads aren’t a conversion, you turn it off and now it’s not considered a conversion anymore. Super easy peasy which we love. We love easy peasy. The audiences, so audiences live right here.

You can see I’ve created some but yeah, you even have templates for some, which is Again, great. So like non purchasers or e com people, you don’t even have to create it. It’s just right here. So these are general templates and then you can kind of go through here. There’s predictive, it’ll tell you whether or not they’re eligible, but you can create your audiences in here.

NAVAH HOPKINS: So for folks wondering at home, what is the typical size where you’ll start to see the predictive audiences turn on?

BRIE ANDERSON: Yeah, so you have to have a thousand events

NAVAH HOPKINS: So does that mean people should be forcing the Thousand Events per day? Or does that mean that they should organically reach the Thousand Events per day?

BRIE ANDERSON: That means you should organically reach them. And, and really those to like, it’s, it’s one of those, it’s another Google tool, right? So that’s based off of machine learning and all that stuff, but we can create a lot of the audiences that we want, like people that have added something to a cart, but they didn’t actually purchase.

Like we can create that right here. Super easy. You just click, you know, add to cart. This isn’t an e commerce site, but like add to cart, but exclude the people that have actually purchased in the last 30 days. You can come in and create those. So I don’t want you to feel like the predictive analytics, like you have to have them for the predictive audiences.

You can create just about any audience you want to here. It’s just not going to say based on all these different data points, you know, whatever. And even if they did, you could still in theory, I guess, create it here if you wanted to. I will say this is really nice number of users in the audience because you still do have like, yes, these will go into Google ads, but you still have this same.

You can only market to an audience size that’s big enough, right? You, you kind of have that same limitation with, at least in my under, to my understanding, you still have that same limitation. If you’re pulling through a GA for audience, you still have to hit a certain number of users to be able to run those ads, I believe.

Have you all experienced any pushback on. That like small audiences,

NAVAH HOPKINS: so that’s kind of where my question about the age of an attribution and modeling came from is that there are, I have found that there’s a certain cohort of brands that are almost never going to have a reasonable sized audience.

Like it’s always gonna hit the thresholding issue. Whereas there are other folks that they could come up with a super particular segment and it’ll still be a viable audience. So. Where I would suggest folks maybe brainstorm in the interim, at least on the advertising side. Organically, I’m sorry, this is not going to help you.

But on the paid side using broad match actually layers in audiences. And yes, you, you Trust falling into Google into Microsoft, but you have will have those audiences baked in additionally using smart bidding will be layer in those audiences. The other thing that I find very helpful if you don’t have the actual people is using the custom segments.

And. Going after websites of, say, your competitors along with the terms that you think your ideal persona would search. So even if you can’t have the actual people based off of your site, you can take advantage of your competitors and build audiences that way until you get to the point that you can, yes, build off of that.

But this is, again, using a Google Ads audience to amplify yourself to the point that you can then use a GA4 audience as opposed to importing a GA4 audience into Google Ads.

TIMOTHY JENSEN: Yeah, I’d add that even if you technically can target it, even if it is like a really tiny audience, you’re probably not going to get much traction off of it.

So I definitely want to consider that as well. I think the current threshold is a hundred and Google ads the platform’s mixed up there, but yeah.

BRIE ANDERSON: Yeah, one of them’s a hundred and one of them’s a thousand and I can’t remember which Is what so yeah a thousand people

TIMOTHY JENSEN: to serve Taking a facebook. Yeah.

Yeah.

BRIE ANDERSON: Okay. Yep. Yeah, so this will give you like a an Idea of how many people fall into this bucket So I think that’s really nice too So you can get a little bit of an idea as you create the audiences and then when you come back in and check in On them how they’re doing. So this is that audience builder like tim was talking about You Absolutely phenomenal which is really, and it’s really, really helpful.

Another big one, big, big one. So under this data collection, here is your channel groupings that Tim shouted out. You can create your new one. You can edit this one. Well, no, you can’t. You can copy it and then edit it. But, well, yeah.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Well, this is actually an interesting question. Do you recommend that people copy?

To modify or do you recommend that they start fresh?

BRIE ANDERSON: I think it, personally, I think it depends on how you want to report on channels. And like I have some clients that are just like, we just want to replicate what was over in my universal analytics and they completely changed it. So I’m like, alright, we’re just going to do one from scratch, scratch because it’s a lot easier.

But I mean, I don’t really have a preference, Tim, do you?

TIMOTHY JENSEN: Yeah, no, again, yeah, I would say it would depend on the site. And this is where I’ll come back to what I mentioned earlier, though, about this is where UTM structure matters. Cause you’re going to use like your, your mediums here in particular, most likely to define which buckets your sources fall into.

BRIE ANDERSON: Yeah. So under data settings and data collection. So by default, Google signals is turned off. If you. Do decide that it’s right for your organization to come in and turn it on You can come into this data settings data collection and turn this on it is regional as well So you could always if you’re like, well, I want it at least just for the u.

s You could hit this disallow all and just turn it on for the u. s so that’s always one way you can do it. You’re gonna hit more thresholding problems with that though more than likely so just something to keep in mind In mind, the big thing under this data settings, though, is this data retention.

So by default, the data retention is for two months. You more than likely want to change this to 14 months and what this does. So it’s not saying that after two months, you’re losing all of your data. Nope. That’s not the case. What it’s saying is. You can’t add, like so Tim was saying, if you, if you use any of the reports in the out of the box reporting section, you can see I’ve customized a lot of things in here all weird, but if you use any of the out of Box reports, those are going to be fine after 14 months.

You’re never, you’re not going to run into an issue. It’s when you start adding in secondary dimensions, when you start meshing together user and event data, that you’re going to run into an issue. If you go into explore, you’re not going to be able to create explorations for more than, you know, two months back.

So definitely change this over to 14 months so that you have as much data as you possibly can and a much autonomy over that as you want. Also in here we have our attribution settings. So we’ve talked about attribution a lot. These are the default, cross channel, data driven. You can change them in 7 day and 90 day.

90 days for conversions. Or 30 days for acquisition and 90 days for conversion. And then all of your linking happens in here as well. So, your Google Ads BigQuery, I know we talked about that a little bit. A lot of people aren’t in love with how GA4 is Like what you have access to in GA4 as far as like how you can visualize things.

So a lot of people are dumping everything into big query which Is it terribly hard? I guess like it could be done in theory and done done in like 15 minutes even if you don’t have a big query account yet, it could be done that quickly but honestly, then I just pull things into Just pull things into looker studio, but you also can pull in merchant center optimize until it goes away and Search console 360 ads You know, the gamut is all in here.

So definitely make sure you go in and add all of those as soon as possible. Now this is all the, the setup, right? So this is all, how do I lay my foundation? I do want to go over one more thing that’s really, really important for PPCers, if that’s okay. Oh, please. Okay, so, fun fact, in your reports section, like I said, I, this is can I go to the demo account in here?

Okay, so, in your reports section You’re never going to find like, there’s no Google ads report in here. Like where the heck did it go? I don’t know. And even if you go into acquisition, you can see, you know, your paid search come in here. But you can’t like click into it and see how much you spent or whatever.

The only place you’re going to find that information is under acquisition overview. There’s this little card at the bottom that says sessions by Google ads campaigns. And if you click on the view Google ads campaigns, it’s going to pull open this Google ads report that we were used to seeing. This is the only place you can get to it out of the box.

And this is where you’re seeing your Google ads clicks, cost, cost per conversion, row ads, all that stuff. Which is great. This is all the information that we’re looking for. Now I’m going to go back to this one so you can see if you want to, Remember, Google Analytics 4 is highly customizable. So if you go into your acquisition overview and open that report up, you can hit the pencil in the top right hand corner and just save this as a new report.

Just call it, I’m just going to call it Google Ads, save. And then we’re going to go back and it says it was saved in the library. So once you’re in the reports, Hold on, I have to refresh. I’ve gone back and forth between my accounts too much. Once you’re in that report section, the library is down here.

And I’m not, I’m really not trying to get too like technical, but this is going to make your life so much easier. You can see that this is what makes up your navigation, right? So I would just go into the life cycle, hit edit collection, look for your Google ads here and drop it into your acquisition. And now when you save it, Save to current collection.

Once you go to the navigation, your Google ads report is going to be in the navigation that makes life so much easier for all of our Google ads folks. Because you don’t have to go into overview every single time.

NAVAH HOPKINS: And it’s worth noting that you can do this for other types of reports as well. So it’s not just limited to Google ads.

But this is one of those things that if you need that quality of life. A hundred percent, it’s worth investing the five minutes at the onset than the several hours that you will invest over time being frustrated and trying to find it. Like, where did it go? Yeah, so

BRIE ANDERSON: I did the same thing. I just, because all that is, is there’s just a filter on all that data.

So I did the same thing for Facebook up here. I can see all my Facebook. I just took all these reports and put the filter over them. And now I have all my Facebook reports and their own collection in here. Do I actually use this? No, it was just for a demo, but alas, it is still there. You can still do it.

NAVAH HOPKINS: And one last thing before we, we wrap up cards are kind of how to think about GA4 in terms of visualization. So definitely be empowered to get in and play as Brie mentioned and adjust the settings as you need. I, I will say there are some cards that are probably more useful than others. So for example, the geo card and being able to see that, that change.

Retention one is really, really helpful. If, if If all else fails, just go in and spend maybe an hour acquainting yourself with what’s available out of the box, because it’s definitely going to be very helpful. So we’re now at the bit where everyone gets to share their kind of final thoughts, and then you guys get to hear about where to connect with Bree, where to connect with Tim.

So Tim, do you want to go first on kind of what’s your, your main takeaway for GA4? How, which, what’s one thing people should, should do or think about?

TIMOTHY JENSEN: Sure. I think what I encourage people to do in process of learning to build out GA4 is also to dig into Google Tag Manager because that’s kind of a one stop shop.

You get the. Google tag manager code in your site. It makes a, it makes your life a lot easier and both deploying the GA4 code and being able to fire events for specific actions on your site.

NAVAH HOPKINS: How about you Brie?

BRIE ANDERSON: Yeah, I think my big thing is just like Get messy, be comfortable being uncomfortable, right?

Like, spend the time, even if it’s just like, once a week going, Okay, I’m going to try and find the, how many people landed on this page from Google Ads, right? And give yourself a challenge once a week. Try and figure it out. Find it. Or give yourself a challenge to create a report a week. Whatever that looks like for you.

And then, Just really start getting messy with it and and know that you’re not alone. There are tons of people out there Actually, everyone is going through the exact same thing right now We all have to get to google analytics where we all have pain points And then and then find some people that you can kind of collaborate with.

There are a lot of communities out there, PPC chat you know, that all sorts of places that you can go to kind of get help. Like Tim was saying the the GA4 documentation from Google itself. Is kind of slim still, but there are tons of people out there that are talking about GA4 every single day.

And so find your community and get messy.

NAVAH HOPKINS: And I’ll just add, because that was Fantastic, both of you. GA4, at the end of the day, is just a tool to help us track the things that we care about. So don’t compare yourself to what other people are doing. They have different business needs. I forget who said it, but some someone when talking about GA4 talked about how GA4 basically lets us set up analytics for our business.

Whereas Universal Analytics was very much cookie cutter, turnkey. One size fits all. We can have what we need. I’m going to meet myself,

but this, this is basically a good, a good time to. really takes stock of the data that you need. So we were incredibly blessed to have both Bree and, and Tim. Tim, where, where can folks find you? How can people connect if they want to learn more from you?

TIMOTHY JENSEN: Sure. Either Twitter or LinkedIn are probably the best places.

Timothy J Jensen, or you can search for my name on, on either.

NAVAH HOPKINS: And Bree, how about you?

BRIE ANDERSON: Yeah. So I put out tutorials and stuff on YouTube and Tiktok and Twitter just to, Google free Anderson and all that stuff comes up. I’m also shameless plug here, revamping my Google analytics for course. So that will be available to people too.

But I’m, I’m always happy. Shoot me a tweet, shoot me a message on Tik TOK or wherever you find me. If you have something specific that you’re trying to find because at the end of the day, even if I don’t know how to find it, I am a nerd and will, will be intrigued on figuring out how to figure it out.

So. More than happy to talk to anyone.

NAVAH HOPKINS: And Optmyzr is always happy to have both of you back. This was incredibly, incredibly helpful and useful. So hope you all got a lot of value out of this session. If you have any questions, absolutely hit these two up. They are fantastic. I also strongly encourage you to check out PPC Chat.

Check out Foxwell Founders. Check out the Pagination Association. There’s going to be a number of sessions coming out. This session is, is here to help. We’ll be linking a bunch of resources. So you are not alone. And we thank you for investing this time with us as, as you learn and grow and get better with GA4.