[AUGUST 2021] GA4, GTM, Data Studio - New Updates & New Features!

howdy howdy welcome back it's another workshop wednesday this week we are doing a what's new edition this is actually kind of nice because it's the first wednesday of the month which happens to be the first of september as we are recording this and we're going to go through the previous month we're looking back at what happened in august to see all the new features and new updates that are available in platforms like tag manager analytics etc now before we go too far into this welcome if this is your first workshop wednesday welcome if you are returning and you're already a workshop wednesday fan of measurement marketing.io my name is chris mercer i am the founder the co-founder of measuremarketing.io i do go by mercer everybody calls him mercer you should as well and maybe you found us through the podcasts and talks we're out there given we share portions of our content with other platforms like cxl institute digital marketer measure summit uh social media examiner maybe you're already a member over at measuremarketing.io whether you're a toolbox member or you are a academy member either way we are happy that you are here it's our job to help people like you learn how to use all these cool tools and these update workshops these what's new workshops are especially important because a lot of times there's an update or feature that has come through that you should be taking advantage of but you can't do that if you don't know that is out there now i want to briefly mention the academy that is our flagship training program for if anybody wants to learn we've kind of created this learning platform for all things digital measurement essentially that we're trying to build out so that is the measurement marketing academy itself we'll talk more about that a little bit later on when it comes to this training just remember one thing and in particular because we're going to cover lots of little one things as far as the updates have happened you want to think about what's the thing that you can actually take action on like oh you might see something that data studio did and you go i'm going to take advantage of that so you can jump in and take that so that's kind of the concept one thing then you practice that make it a skill then come back we watch this pick up another new one thing all right let's go ahead and get started what's new august 2021s new features and new updates all right we're gonna go ahead and dive right in and we're gonna start like we always do with a quick visit to the measure marketing framework remember three key steps you plan you build and you launch so here's how today's workshop is actually going to fit into the framework of course we're all working marketing in the blind when we first start out we are trying to get to a point where our marketing is reliably creating revenue and results right we're lively growing our revenue results how do we do that you work in your plan questions information's the actions you're going to take based upon the answers you get that's your measurement plan in a nutshell now in uh when you're thinking about some of these one things that we go through on the updates that have come out think about how you might use them for your plan what i will say is definitely in the build where results are there's gonna be a big deal with ga4 we're gonna talk about when it comes to the results and how you measure those um traffic not so much but story absolutely with tag manager server side coming in so we're gonna have some updates that affect how you might improve those processes and then your builds will be better and of course the launch like how to actually use your measurement that's where you listen to the results coming through from your users we then forecast based upon what our benchmarks are we know what our near future is going to look like and ultimately we optimize against that right we measure against our forecast we see what's working what's not that's how we know what to adjust so we can get to this whole predictable point all right so let's go ahead and dive right in we're going to start with google analytics four now remember if you're not using ga4 yet absolutely need to get on the ball uh as of this recording which is september 1st 2021 i would say you probably have about six months left until uh you know it really hits the fan and you gotta dive in so take advantage of the time that you have now to get involved in ga4 is my first little public service announcement for that it's not that it's gonna be your production platform but it will in 2022 so make sure you get ahead of it because there's a learning curve speaking of learning curves let's talk about uh a few of the updates that came through with ga4 remember this is also what's all getting the new the new stuff the big one and i'm gonna go into uh let's go into our acquisition reports here uh i'm just going to show kind of the thing that matters and i'm going to show you kind of where this is and then we're going to talk about briefly what it is so when you go into your reports you have your conversions right we all these oops let me i've got to make sure you scroll over g4 is running a little slow but that's okay it's getting a lot of work for us we have our conversions these conversions events now ga4 remember it's the platform of tomorrow it was built for the world of tomorrow it was built for a world where we can't measure every single thing that's going on because of you know the tech with the users or laws so this is this is good right it's built for this but how does what does it mean built for this well what it means is it's gonna model it's gonna model conversions for you it's gonna say well here's what we basically it's creating a representation of what it thinks is a useful truth for you that's what the conversion modeling is going to do it's built with ai and machine learning at its core so it can do this but the update that came out in early august was about how it's going to do that so here's what i would like everybody to do because it's important that you understand this whether it's you're using this or your clients because there's i think there's going to be some confusion so if you go to model con model conversions and then uh ga4 let's just do that so model conversions ga4 let's see if i can get into the right thing uh it is not nope i knew i was going to type in the wrong one for you hang on a second let me make sure i get the right phrase i want you to type something else it's modeled this is kind of unfortunately google's way of doing it but we're going to do modeled conversions that's what we need modeled that's what i'm looking for modeled conversions that's your keyword modeled conversions ga4 okay you must have the ed at the end that pops this up this is what you're looking for about model conversions the reason this is important is because this is how google is explaining to the world how google analytics 4 is going to treat your conversions right now i'm we're not going to go through this in great detail because it's just kind of an updates workshop we'll cover this stuff in a future workshop later but you need to go through here and look at this and think through like okay how you know how is this going to be affecting me now one of those things is this i think this is huge huge so when looking at google analytics reports keep in mind the attributed conversion data for each channel can still be updated for up to seven days after the initial conversion is recorded so that means that we're all used to looking in our charts and seeing conversions and being like cool that's what the conversions was but it will change because analytics needs time it needs time and that's the the issue i think that will happen with machine learning and ais is generally speaking most users now you and i of course are different but most users don't realize that ai is not instant that it is a it's being trained it has to it gets it needs time to actually crunch through these different scenarios and think things through google's telling you it's going to take seven days so it's entirely possible that this is something that's rolling out for everybody so it may not be in your in your setups yet but it is rolling out which is why i wanted you to be aware of it because it's a big deal especially the seven day window because now instead of looking at yesterday's conversions and saying okay here's what we got maybe you can't do that anymore maybe you got to wait seven days to really have a useful truth of what your conversions probably were so just keep that in mind that is a that's a huge update i want to make sure that you were very very aware of that and kind of that that exists and again the key word here is modeled conversions they did not make this easy to find so you have to type modeled conversions if you do conversion modeling doesn't work as well all right next up so in google analytics four we can go through and you can set up actually i'm gonna flip to our account so you can see kind of what an owner's level account would look like because we're using the demo store there so if i go into the metromarketing.io production account it's going to light up a few things for me so i'm going to go into configure and in our configure as i give that a second to catch up we're going to go into custom definitions which is the custom dimensions custom metrics that sort of stuff now we have uh you know you got quotas right so you only have up to 25 user scope you got the 50 event scopes that you can do you got 50 custom metrics and so this is a great way to keep that in mind that's not the update the update is what happens when you archive one of these so they went through you can actually make room because sometimes you need something but you don't need it anymore and they just went through and they explained a little bit more about how the archiving works for that so essentially that the kind of the short story of this is when you archive something is is any list that was built maybe you built a remarketing list or something like that with uh these dimensions or metrics any list that was already built that has data keeps the data but obviously it's not going to continue going forward but you got to think about any explorations you've created any segments in those explorations you've created that sort of stuff might be affected by that so just a little fyi you can archive and they've done a little bit of updates letting you know okay hey you know if you archive that's fine just realize obviously your segments won't apply anymore if you're using them in segments things like that but anything that's already an audience that's built will keep its audience but it just won't accumulate more which again if you think about it kind of makes sense so it's good they clarified that next thing is under explorations we're going to go into an explorations report here i'm just going to bring up some generic ones now i won't have this issue i don't believe for a while and probably you won't either but right up here you will actually see a little percentage mark sometimes that shows up this is uh in fact let me get to a real i think i've got a report that we can show it's got some data back here so we can see this actually light up so this there you go so this is a green check mark means 100 sometimes you'll see a percentage or a little yellow in it and it's basically telling you it's sampled now this is specific very specific to google analytics 360 customers which is the expensive one that's the one that's 150 grand a year but if you're a 360 customer you can actually request unsampled data so it'll sample it when you do your initial exploration then you you'll have an option here that actually that would actually say okay request unsampled it takes up to 30 minutes and then they will produce the report with unsampled data so it still takes a little bit of time but it's available so for those that out there that want it again i think most of us probably won't have that issue uh it's a lot of data and ga4 is a little more open i think than universal analytics was built to handle a little more before it started sampling but pay attention to that little widget because this is how you're gonna know if things are sampled or not uh so again the only real update is that ga360 customers it's a paid level at that point but you can request unsampled but you gotta pay for ga which again is pretty pricey and out of each of most of uh people probably watching this um however just want to make sure that you knew that it was available as well all right next up let's talk about tag manager uh now tag manager in the website of things this actually wasn't released in their updates i think it should have been uh but one one thing was was noticed here uh that they did add this to our tags right so the send to server container obviously this is for server side now in gtm server side uh what you had to do in the past is you would come in this fields to set and you would set it up and you put all the details that you need and the properties blah blah blah you don't have to do that anymore because you click send to server and that pops in the server url that's where you put all of this so if you're using server side there is now an easier way to use server side you just pop this in and and you and you have that in there uh if you need facebook ids and things like that you still want to use the you know the fields to set user properties et cetera advanced settings to push that stuff through but for the server container you no longer have to identify that separately there is an actual place for that now so just a little mental note there especially if you've been using server side already if you're just starting out it's even better because now you know there's a simple little box here you can now check which wasn't the case in june so that they came out with early august sort of the late latter part of um july but they they never told anybody about it it sort of happened so we wanted to point that out for you so if you're using server side it's much easier to do that and the other thing of note when it comes to tag manager right now the only other thing is uh that there is a ability to cross-domain server-side now which i don't really have that uh because we use the same server-side container for everything so there is no cross-domain that we have to worry about but if you have two different servers that you're trying to cross domains on two different measurement servers you set up you can now do that so just a little mental note for those that are do i think it's a lot more complicated of a setup probably not what you're working on right now when it comes to server side they're probably pretty fairly basic setups those that are playing with that so just a mental note that you can now do that so you can actually cross domain different measurement servers as well which is really nice if you happen to have different domains that you are working through next up and this is backward data studio team data studio is for the win they're the ones that have come up with the most updates the most changes so one thing i think is kind of a fun one so they have this gauge this is a gauge that's existed for a while it was one of the original community visualizations that are back here what they have now done is they've added a built-in gauge which is different so if you come down here you see gauge right here and you have two different you know styles of the gauge essentially it's the same thing though so you can see that it actually pops in a completely different gauge so if you like this style gauge great right you have that and you can obviously style it however or you can do this style gauge where there's like a little progress meter coming up so just know that there is a new chart available it's technically in the charts section and it's the first time they've done a new chart in a while uh because tree maps came out ali almost year and a half or two years ago it's been a while since they've updated a new chart but they've done it built in which is pretty cool i would also say side note always check community visualizations and check out what's back here because there's the community building stuff that's back here so what you was here one day you know might you might say oh well some of this stuff's cool but then you come back and you check it again you see even more stuff back to go like oh that card's you maybe i can use that um there's some you know auto play stuff like just pretty some pretty cool stuff that you might be able to use uh to play around with so just be aware of that not quite an update that's always back there but i want to make sure you know about it since you're back here next up um there are new reporting templates as well so if i go back to data studio i'm gonna go back to our sort of home stage our home screen here in data studio you can click where it says templates it'll take you to the gallery and this is your template gallery so there are new templates that have come out uh so now you've got bigquery stuff coming through right we've got google sheets youtube analytics youtube ad search console et cetera et cetera et cetera um so you can take a look at those as well uh especially these bigquery ones those are sort of the newer ones but it's always a good idea to say hey what other people are doing again i am never a fan of taking somebody else's template copying it and then putting in your numbers because i think that template was built to answer their questions not necessarily your questions but i do like using templates for inspiration to say oh how did they do that oh i didn't know you could measure for something like that oh that gives me an idea to do this that's how you use templates so come back here and look at these especially the bigquery stuff because that is going to be increasingly more important i think as a platform in 2022 probably 2023 a lot of users will start going into bigquery because they're going to have to so just a little fyi there all right next up when it comes to data studio is they did a lot of text functions now i'm just going to google for some of this to show you what i'm talking about so we're going to do data studio functions functions if i could spell that there you go and you come to this functions list so there are these uh text ones let me see if i can go to text and what they did is they made these up so a lot of these are new these these weren't back and not all of these were back here so like contains text is new ends with is new uh let's see left text is new right text is new i think regex contains is new so there's a lot of different ones that were back here i think they have a starts with as well so if the text starts with this so this kind of goes back to you know when you're creating your functions in data studio for those that are doing that uh you can you can say if this dimension starts with this then do that right that sort of stuff is how you can sort of logically uh play with these so it's a pretty cool feature that they have they're expanding their functions think about this like in in a spreadsheet you have functions right the kind of formulas you type in the bar with a spreadsheet same basic idea but with data studio and you can have these functions where data studio is doing some pretty cool stuff so i wanted you to be aware of that as well that was a big update uh where they came through there so i wanted to make sure that you knew about that uh as well so the new updated functions for data studio for those that are using functions i think that could be probably pretty useful and with that we bring it to a close see we keep it quick and easy on today's what's new so we've went through all of the different changes what was your one thing i think for me it was uh oddly enough it was the g for me it was the gtm thing certainly that that in the web version you can now enter in your url as a place to put in the server side url i think that's super important for anybody doing server side so much easier than creating a field to set and manually doing it and sort of overriding stuff you don't have to do that anymore it's built in and it definitely shows how everybody's kind of you know google especially is really moving making it easier and easier to get into server side tag manager for those where it makes sense remember that is kind of a paid thing at that point but uh it might make sense for you as well so take a look at that my second thing was the gauge on data studio because i just like different visualizations i think that was a cool one so the new gauge that they built in and the fact that they're continuing to add the charts i wouldn't have thought they were going to do that i would have thought they put they would have put it in community visualizations uh but clearly they think that's a pretty powerful one so play around with the thing that you think is the most important thing build that as a skill get some experience with it come back we watch the workshop pick up another new skill another new thing and that is how you learn this stuff without getting overwhelmed and frustrated as you do now next week's workshop we are switching our edition so every member we switch every week to a different sort of edition this was this week the first wednesday is always a what's new then we follow that with a getting started it's for beginners so getting started we're going to talk about using the advertising reports in ga4 so there's an entire section of reports called advertising we're going to go through those and help you just kind of get some basic understanding of how to use those so that you can use them for yourself or for your clients or both if it happens to be uh that way if you want to make sure you get that workshop please be sure to subscribe we are almost almost at 2500 subscribers so thank you all uh for the for the very kind comments i am i am reading them i i'm i'm fortunate not able to respond to every single one of them do my best to get updated on that um but uh but thank you it is amazing to see the feedback and the kind words everybody's sending through and the people that are sharing this with other people uh we've seen that on on uh you know sharing the youtube stuff on twitter and facebook and everything else so thank you thank you thank you for that linkedin has been another big one people sharing on so if you find this one helpful uh or any of our workshops helpful you know please you know thank you for sharing and uh and appreciate that looking forward to getting that 2 500 as we go through the other way that you can get these workshops of course is by becoming a what we call toolbox member the mental marketing toolbox membership it is completely free so you get access to all of the uh the most current workshop i should say because obviously the rest of them are on youtube but you get the most current workshop that's there just for convenience more importantly it's all of the tools so if you ever see me talk about a certain tool that i'm using in a workshop that is free for you you can you can use that tool i just got to become a toolbox member so we have the traffic tracking toolkit there's a dashboard uh planner out there there's an optimization split test optimization uh planner out there there's lots of stuff there's ones on how to forecast and and particular revenue there's lots of cool things that are back there in the toolbox completely free much more than what's here there's like 40 tools back there so those are all yours for free measure.tips.ww just to name an email it'll create your account and then it'll send you a login you log in you'll see access to it in fact i'll show you that section in just a second so that's it if you want the free membership measure.tips ww otherwise remember i mentioned the academy earlier this is our flagship learning platform this is here to help you understand how to get through this how to get through the framework and go through the better you know how to improve your plan how to improve your builds how to improve your your launches and get more juice from the squeeze right get more from your measurement systems make sure they're really useful getting to the point where instead of just randomly guessing at what needs to happen to move things forward you know what you need to do to move things forward you know what actions you should take and you know what results you're more than likely going to get from those actions that's what met that's the beauty of measurement it makes marketing so much simpler so much simpler when you understand how to measure and that is what the measurement marketing academy is all about so i'm gonna go through a very quick tour just so you can kind of see what that looks like for those that have not seen it yet when you first come in you see the dashboard you got access to these six blocks that are here you've got the win courses uh which are the traditional courses i'll show you those in a moment you've got the on demand workshops which are for a particular topic or an update where it's not big enough for a course but we needed to make sure people were aware of it we'll create workshops for it and we have the toolbox or the resources and then of course we have support winner circle is where you can get support from your peers and ask instructor support is the most popular thing that is back in the academy is kind of why we exist um and this is to get help directly from instructors because i think that's the that's the thing that's hard is you know you can watch a million youtube videos but it's tough when you can't get answers to specific questions that's what the ask instructor support is it is direct access to instructors that can help you get unstuck and on the way so i'll show you all all of these look like as we go through the win courses themselves we organize them by date uh you can see here we just updated win google analytics for basics coming through here in august so that was just recently updated uh probably go through another update in six months i'm sure uh when they as they continue to evolve that platform we did win server side uh in june right so we had that most recently but we do this because a lot of academy members you know they're with us for a while i mean this is one of those those learning platforms it's not something you join for a month and then and then leave but it is something that that people will will sort of stick around with because again the whole concept is we're here to support and help you move through the framework over and over again at whatever level you're at but the idea is that sometimes people will not take a course for a month or two practice other stuff using ask instructor support or asking questions the community then they want to quickly see okay what courses were updated you know or what were the new ones by date that's why we do this but of course we have them organized by topic you know google analytics stuff coming through we've got tag manager stuff coming through all the way to again that server side uh concept and we've got dashboards reporting where your data studio stuff is as well some other platforms like sheets and you know how to track funnels how to think about traffic attribution that sort of stuff and then strategy and this is where i think a lot of other uh you know if there's if there's a course out there there's a lot of people that will teach google analytics or tag manager and they're all great they're incredible instructors uh what we try to focus on is yes we want to teach you the tactical stuff like that like which button to check and how to set up a goal or whatever the thing is but it's really the strategy that is the secret sauce to measurement you have to understand how to think measurement you have to understand how to get a measurement culture in your organization and when you understand measurement this world becomes so much easier and so there's a lot of strategy back here in terms of how to think about things how to optimize and how to actually forecast revenue results optimizing is way beyond split testing it's a whole other thought process back there so we have the strategy courses as well so all of those are included they are unlimited you get access to everything all the updates everything so you'd have that the other thing you have is the workshops of course this is the one we're currently watching so you'd always have access to this but academy members have all of these unlocked so what's the difference between this and the youtube channel these to be fair these are all on youtube as well the difference is the youtube ones have stuff like this in them where these because they're for members they all this sort of stuff is taken out the academy tours are all taken out they're very they're edited down there what we call student editions and their you know zoom effects and things like that are put in there to make them a little easier to watch and easier to get through but they're here for reference because that's what nine times out of ten you need you need a reference for something so sometimes people come back here and say i just want to get caught up in the last three months of whatever the changes were they can quickly do that or i want to go through some getting started topics and just sort of you know see if i want to get caught up and no maybe learn something new about you know utms or visualizations or whatever beyond basics a little more advanced stuff and of course strategy sessions right how to think about it the other big thing on this is that it's searchable so you can go through type whatever you're looking for database spits out here are the workshops that retain that that relate to that topic as well as the courses right the different lessons in the win courses that uh have that as well so you have that and then finally when it comes to content is the toolbox now remember for those of you interested in the free membership this is the stuff that's free we give this out this part uh gets out to everybody so you have all of that um the power planner is all about forecasting stuff the analytics report card the audit ga audit there's all sorts of cool things back here as we create new tools we add them back here so you'll have access to that the difference is with academy members you have unlocked sections like these get it done guides where you can come through and and uh you know this is kind of like little craft kits that will build like now that you know tag manager analytics and data studio here's some cool stuff to do with it and so in this case it was building an eyes on the journey report which is kind of what we were uh very quickly becoming even more famous for day after day uh measuring the conversation it's sort of having on a page and is it the conversation we want to have and if not what do you do with it eisen the journey tells you that so we talk about that it's got a nice little setup video templates everything else again that's exclusive to academy members so that you have those as well and then finally i mentioned the ask instructor support uh there is the community by the way so you can always go back to the community kind of a standard you know community format but the ask instructor support is kind of our claim to fame not kind of it is our claim to fame it is the number one most popular feature you come back here as an academy member you can pop in your question details of your questions screenshots right any of that sort of stuff videos are very very helpful so send us little links to your video kind of giving us an over-the-shoulder view in fact that's how i like i remember thinking about it where it's kind of like hey if you could call me over or an instructor over somebody who knew this stuff and did this every day and said i'm trying to get this goal to work this conversion event to work or i'm trying to figure out how to build a remarketing audience or i'm trying to figure out what's the best way to even measure this customer journey here's what the journey looks like what would you do as a how would you even set up milestones like what was the strategy that you would follow here anything related to measurement strategy or tactics it doesn't matter our instructors can help you out with this because that is what we are here for so you can pop in those explain everything nine times out of ten they're sending them back a video and screenshot as well so you can get unstuck on the way and we both know because we're watching video now how powerful video is it's so much nicer than having a million back and forth text messages um as to try to help people out just show us on the video we show you on a video and it's easy and then and the whole concept is they'll teach you as you go in fact one of the most popular questions if you uh become an academy member the first thing i would ask that you do is come into ask instructor support introduce yourself and say here's my funnel like show us your your website your journey what you have currently set up give us a little tour of your current setup and then ask what would you do with the all the stuff that's in the academy because there's a lot it is a just-in-time learning platform there's a lot of stuff back there we have more content than you could ever watch i promise and we create new content all the time there's new courses every month new uh workshops every week so ask them ask the instructors what would you do what was the next thing that you now you see what all my setup is and they'll build a curriculum for you they'll help guide you along the way another popular thing that we've got asked so ask instructor support is back there as well so all of those just kind of recap this stuff quickly the big four i think are courses the ass instructor support the on-demand workshops and obviously the winner circle community stuff so the courses themselves you get access to everything all the updates you have the ask instructor support that's you know unlimited questions i don't care if you ask 27 questions a day we love that the more questions you ask the better because it shows that you're using and practicing and that's what our job is our job is to make sure that we support you at every step that you need it uh on-demand workshop library of course is there and then the winner circle community all told it's about over 8 500 of value it's probably a little higher than that at this point now but at least at least over 8 500 and even if you cut that in half and said well i don't believe 8 500 but maybe 4 000 maybe 2 000 maybe a thousand it's still a lot that you get access to in trading and support every single month that you're an academy member but of course it is not 8 500 a month or 4 000 or a thousand dollars a month at least not yet so we do uh at this point if you're interested it makes sense go take a look join the metro marketing academy you go to measure.tips get academy it will take you directly to that page again measure dot tips slash get academy and you'll see all the you know basic stuff is there it'll recap some of what we talked about and you can see the current options that are available for you and hopefully we look forward to seeing you in the academy soon so with that we'll go ahead and wrap this one up this has been what's new august 2021 new features new updates thanks again for watching this workshop and we'll see you on the next one

Channel: MeasurementMarketing,io

Views: 243

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: whats new, measurement marketing, measurementmarketing.io, workshop wednesday, digital measurement, google analytics updates, google tag manager updates, google data studio updates, google analytics 4 updates, ga4 updates, analytics updates, tag manager updates, data studio updates, gtm updates, latest updates, august, 2021, august 2021

Id: 1-FSSG33YQM

Length: 27min 58sec (1678 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021