- In this video, we're going to be looking at GA4 enhanced measurement
events and try to figure out why some of the information that we think should be showing up in
the user interface isn't. You're going to learn
why that's happening. You're going to learn how to fix it and you're going to learn it
takes a little bit of patience. Hi, I'm Fred Pike. I'm a Managing Director and
the GA/GTM practice lead at NORTHWOODS a digital agency
in Shorewood, Wisconsin. We're going to be working with
the enhanced measurement events, which we are going to
find in Data Streams. The enhanced measurements
are six different events that are automatically
configured when you set up GA4. And I want to look at two
of those in particular - the Outbound click and
the Video engagement. For our demo today, we
are going to be using the coffee shop. Coffee shop is built on
the Titan CMS platform and everything that is being sent to GA4 is coming from a super
simple GTM container, which is sending data
to both GA4 and to GA3 or Universal Analytics. I have a page on the coffee
shop which has outbound links and videos, which are the two
enhanced measurement events we want to track. We're going to click on the outbound links and start the videos going. What we want to do is start
generating some traffic that'll show up in GA4. So, now let's go look at
the real time view in GA which shows us what's happening right now, as well as in the last 30 minutes. You can see that we have pages
that people have looked at and a number of GA4 events. For example, we can look
at the event video_start that's the event name and look at some of the event parameters associated
with that video start and the one that would be of
most interest to us probably is the video title and
we can see the two videos that we have playing. Another event that may
be of interest to us is video progress, which shows how much of the video people have watched. We would have our video
title, again, the two videos. And in terms of the
video percent we can see that some have gone to
10%, some have gone to 25%, some have gone to 50%. The other event we want
to look at here is clicks because the click is where the
outbound link is going to be. So if we click on, if we click
on click and look at that, we'll see outbound, true we
clicked on nine outbound links in our session so far and if
we wanted to see which links those were we can look at the link URL, those are the analytics mania
blog and the other links that we clicked out to. So, all that information
shows up in real time, which is great. But where else does it show up? Because after 30 minutes,
this information which shows up in real-time will
disappear out of real time. So, how else do we get
to that information? Well normally, it's going to
show up here in the events or that's one place that'll show up. But you can see that we
don't have those events here even though in the real
time, we have way more events than "first visit", "page
view", and "session start". Those don't show up here
yet until the next day. So we're going to pause the
video now, wait a few hours and come back and see this. When I last saw you, it was
eleven o'clock at night. Now it's 11:00 a.m. in
the morning, the next day. I had a great sleep, a good breakfast, my wonderful morning
cappuccino and of course I walked the dog. But all that time I was wondering are the GA4 events going to show up? Let's take a look. There's our coffee shop. Let's dive into analytics,
look at our events and look! The things we're
looking for are now there. We have click, we have video start. So, looks like things are working so far. Let's dive in a little bit more. So let's look at click for
example, and you can see we don't have a lot of
information about the click. If we look at our video start we don't have a lot of
information there either. we don't know the name of the video; we don't know how far they got, we don't know any of that,
as opposed to page view, which is another one of the
enhanced measurement events. Page_view is displaying
some more information like the page title, for example and we could actually change
that to the page path. So, we have more
information with page view which is one of the
enhanced measurement events than we do with click and video start. What's going on there? Let me explain a little bit. If we look at the GA4
enhanced measurement guide these parameters for page
view do show up automatically in the GA4 UI. All these other parameters
pretty much don't show up unless you do something special with them. So, all these things
that we're interested in like the video title or the
video percent or the link that you clicked to when
you did an outbound click, none of those show up by default. You have to create a custom
dimension for each parameter that you're interested in. Another way of saying that is that you have to register the parameters. So, how the heck do you do that? We go back to GA4 we're not
in the admin this time we are in custom definitions. We are going to create a custom
dimension, which as I said is the same thing as
registering a parameter. Let's get the link URL
that the person clicked on. How do I know what that is? One, I could look at the
event in real time or two I can just look at the
documentation and link URL is what we want. Link underscore URL. So link URL is one of
them, the description. And I typically go with the
dimension name, so I'm going to do a link URL for right now. And now the parameter... These are all the parameters
across all the events that have shown up so
far and we want link URL. So there it is. We have our first registered parameter. What else might we want? Let's look at the Google
documentation on the video side we probably want video
title and video percent. So, let's remember those go back to GA, and select the correct parameter and let's do one more. And this time, if I forgot
what I'm looking for I can just grab it here. So, video percent let's
make that really easy. We'll copy that up to here and here. So that's another way to do it. All right, is there
anything else we would want? Yeah, let's track if
that click is outbound. So, we'll have to register
the outbound parameter or create a custom dimension for outbound. So, one more over here. Let's do it the easy
way, Copy that and save. Awesome! we now have our custom dimensions and you can have up to 50
event scoped parameters. You can also have things
about user like whether they're logged in are we
training user, things like that we won't cover that here. But you will want to watch
the quota information and if you're getting close
to that, you might have to back off some of the
parameters that you've registered. Now you may wonder, does anything show up? and you already know the
answer to this because I mentioned earlier that
we have to be patient. So, even though we have
these parameters registered they may not show up until tomorrow. And let's take a look at that. Let's go to our events. Let's look at video_start. We have nothing down here, yet. Same thing with click. We have nothing down here yet. Once again, we're going to
have to be patient and wait we'll follow up again in
a few hours or tomorrow. We're back, we're going to check our registered parameters in GA4. In the meantime, I've
clicked on the outbound links and the videos a bunch of times
so we'd have a lot of data to look at. Let's go to GA4 and jump
down to our events here. We've seen this before the
event names showing up. Let's look at if we've got
the event parameters now, if we scroll down, we do, we
now have those event parameters the ones that we
registered showing up here. So we have the link URLs. First of all, these are all outbound. And the URLs that we linked
to that we clicked on to go outbound are the
four ones that we had here. So that's great let's
take a look at the videos, videos_start, we have
those parameters show up. So we have the two video
titles which correspond to the two videos on our test page. We also have, now this is interesting. So this is the video start,
so the video percent is zero. That makes sense right? If we look at the video
progress, the video percent we now have different
values for the video percent 10, 25, 50 and 75, which is great, which also makes sense that's progress through watching the videos. And if we go to video complete our video percent is a hundred. So, video start, the
video percent is zero, video progress We have those
different demarcations, 10 25, 50, 75% and video complete we
have 100% video percent. Cool that makes sense. So, we have all those parameters
showing up in the reports. We can also grab those same
parameters in the analysis hub. Let's just create a quick analysis. You always get this
invalidate range message or I always get it anyways I don't why. So, we have some dimensions
showing up over here but we want more like, for
example, if we, if we type video the three parameters that we
had registered show up here and those are all
parameters that are part of the video engagement. Again, we just saw those here. We could also do link URL, which is again one of the
parameters on the click event. So, we have everything working now. Well, that was quite a journey. We started off by looking
at the real-time view and seeing that we had
all the information about the event names and
their parameters, cool. But we discovered that those
event names didn't show up in the UI unless we waited
and were patient overnight. But even when we had the
event names showing up we didn't have the event parameters. We had to register those parameters. And finally, after being patient again we got to see the parameters
and the events in the UI and in the analysis hub. Pretty great, I think we learned a lot. I hope you feel much more comfortable in the user interface now, knowing that you have to be patient
and register parameters. Again please feel free to
subscribe to our YouTube channel. I plan on having a lot more GA4 videos. Follow me on LinkedIn and on Twitter. See you at a conference sometime I hope.
