Whether you're reporting to management, clients, or just for yourself, tracking your events and interactions is one of the best ways to demonstrate value. How do you do that?
The first thing you need to do is set your goal. What are you working towards?
Often, you're tasked with increasing website traffic or conversions. To do this, you need a tool that tracks these metrics, as well as your events and interactions, and that's where Google Analytics comes in.
In this guide, we will explain what Google Analytics is, how it works, how to get started, and what information it provides regarding your events and interactions.
At its core, Google Analytics 4 focuses on providing more data across the entire customer journey lifecycle. In other words, more data is available after a customer has been acquired, including their engagement, monetization, and customer retention.
Formerly known as "App + Web," Google Analytics 4 is a new feature that emerged from beta in October 2020. One of the main reasons Google cites for this upgrade in its announcement is shifts in consumer behavior and significant changes to online privacy policies.
These shifts, along with research findings from Forrest Consulting, led Google to conclude that current analytics solutions do not provide a complete view of the customer journey, which is a largely cross-platform experience. As the Forrester survey shows:
More than half of the respondents stated that the sheer volume of data poses a significant challenge. Their data is siloed across different teams, and the analytics tools they have used in the past have been unable to keep up.
To address this, the new Google Analytics offers a machine learning-based approach to uncover cross-platform insights and a privacy-focused approach:
It has machine learning at its core to automatically deliver helpful insights and give you a comprehensive understanding of your customers across devices and platforms.
It is designed with data privacy in mind, so you can still rely on Analytics even when industry changes such as restrictions on cookies and identifiers create gaps in your data.
Although several AI-based insights have been available since 2016, here are some examples of its new capabilities:
Now that we know what Google Analytics 4 is and why it has changed, let's discuss the core features, differences, and benefits of the upgrade in detail.
One of the significant changes that advertisers have requested from Google Analytics is a tool to measure app and web integrations together.
In particular, the integration enables the display of in-app and web conversions for Google Ads, YouTube Ads, other non-Google paid channels such as Facebook, and organic channels such as search, social media, and email.
This integration of mobile and app data helps to measure the overall impact of your entire marketing investments, regardless of the acquisition channel.
Another focus of the upgrade is a customer-centric approach to tracking the customer experience, which typically involves a fragmented experience across multiple devices and platforms.
As Google describes:
It uses multiple identity spaces, including user IDs provided by marketers and unique Google signals from users who have opted in to ad personalization, to give you a complete view of how your customers interact with your business.
This in turn depends on knowing exactly where customers come from and what actions they take throughout their entire interaction lifecycle with a company.
Regarding reporting, Google's goal was to simplify customer tracking through a marketing funnel.
Below you can see, for example, that there is a new section called "Life Cycle" which contains reports for the following:
Google Analytics previously only had the Acquisition report, so these new sections offer much more visibility into the later stages of the customer lifecycle.
In addition to these reports, there is another new reporting feature called "Analysis", which offers several templates for analyzing conversion funnels, user journeys, cohort analysis, and more.
Finally, the new Google Analytics is designed to adapt to the new data privacy landscape by offering granular controls over the collection, storage, and analysis of user data.
Specifically, they are developing a data collection approach that does not use cookies or identifiers. Instead, the new platform will rely more heavily on data modeling to fill gaps in the customer lifecycle where data may be incomplete or inaccessible.
Having covered some of these considerations, we will now discuss how to set up Google Analytics and manually add it to your website.
Your Google Analytics account is where you'll manage and control your Google Analytics activity. However, before you can set one up, you'll first need to sign in to your regular Google account (the one you use to access your Gmail, etc.). If you don't already have a Google account, you'll need to create one.
Once you are logged into your Google account, go to the Google Analytics homepage and select "Get started for free" in the upper right corner.
The first time you access your GA4 dashboard, you will be prompted to set up a data stream. This is essentially a gateway in GA for the data you collect from your website.
Before setting it up, make sure you have selected the correct account in the top left corner and the correct property in the admin dropdown menu.
As mentioned previously, your data stream is the gateway to your GA4 portal. However, to actually collect the data itself from your website and send it there, you need to add an analytics tag – a small snippet of code – to your web pages.
There are several ways to do this, depending on your preferences and the structure of your website.
One of the biggest advantages of Google Analytics is that it allows you to tailor your data collection and analysis to your business goals. For example, many companies will classify a "conversion" as a paid order.
However, you could define a conversion as a user who downloads an ebook, fills out your contact form, or signs up for a free course. This flexibility can significantly improve your analysis and reporting.
To ensure that you have successfully set up GA and correctly placed the Analytics tag on your website, wait 15 to 30 minutes after completing the setup.
Then go to the "Reports" menu in the upper left corner of your GA4 dashboard and open the "Realtime" report.
If everything has been done correctly, the "Users right now" map should be updated every 15 seconds with a new number of users.
It takes between 24 and 48 hours for Google to begin processing the data for all other reports. Therefore, you will not be able to see any information about user behavior or user acquisition before then. If you still don't see any data after this time, please contact Google support.
Once GA has been successfully installed and you start collecting data, it is important to leverage the value of this information.
As mentioned previously, the data collected by GA can be:
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