Getting Started with Google Analytics 4

howdy howdy welcome back to another workshop wednesday today we're talking about a getting started topic and we're going to be getting started with google analytics 4 which is kind of the new kid on the block when it comes to google analytics welcome if this is your first workshop wednesday happy to have you here my name is chris mercer everybody calls me mercer you should as well i'm the co-founder of measuremarketing.io and maybe you found us maybe through podcasts and talks that we're doing maybe through some of the platforms that we share some of our content with like cxl institute social media examiner digital marketer or even measure summit maybe you are already a member whether it's a free toolbox member over at metromarketing.io or already a part of the measurement marketing academy that is over at measurementmarketing.io however you found us we're glad that you're here it's our job to help people like you learn how to use all these fun crazy tools in particular today we're going to talk about google analytics 4. we're going to do that of course with our framework in mind always the measurement marketing framework it starts the planning which is the kia process so q is what questions are you trying to answer i what information will you need a what actions will you take based upon the answers right that's planning what questions you want to answer what information will you need to get those answers what actions will you take based upon those answers then there's the build now we're going to see some of that today as well in the build out uh in terms of how to actually set up google analytics 4 how to use tag manager for it we're going to talk about some of the reports that are available in google analytics 4. it's a very quick overview type of tour that this workshop is but at least it'll get you the basics down and then from there you can start to forecast your results and ultimately measure against your forecasts to see if you're right and you'll know where you hit the mark and where you're not that's where the optimize optimizing actually kicks in now with all of these workshops of course one thing is the idea you want to pick up one new thing one new concept if you've never used google analytics for i'm going to warn you i'm going to cover a lot here and i'm going to do it fairly quickly because this is not a how to use tag manager thing or you know that sort of stuff it's just to give you the basic understanding of google analytics for how it's a little different in terms of the setup and what it looks like and how to use tag manager set up so we're gonna go kind of quick and do all of that but that's of course why you can re-watch this workshop so pick up one new thing maybe one new way of looking at it or one new skill that you can practice then rewatch this workshop pick up another move thing and practice practice practice you to make sure that you are we always call it riding the bike here so you can't just watch me do this stuff you got to be able to practice it and that way you are not just exposed to the information but you're actually building skills all right so with that let's officially get underway getting started in this case getting started with google analytics form all right we're going to go ahead and dive right in because that's the best way to do this right so we're going to go ahead and pull up google analytics now again this is not going to be an exhaustive hours long training there's a lot of different details of google analytics for but i wanted to give you kind of an overview and i'm going to go kind of what i'm going to call real time which is like the normal speed that somebody would go through so i will explain a few things here and there for those of you who are already measured marketing academy members we have win google analytics for basics uh soon they will actually win google analytics for beyond basics so you'll get those as well so take that if you haven't that's one of those hours long extensive detailed courses but i know that sometimes you just want to get an overview of what the lay of the land looks like and that's what this workshop is going to be all about so first things first how do we actually create a google analytics for account we go to property and by default now it's going to force you into it so we're just going to put up uh you know this is the workshop wednesday google analytics for test someone's going to call it something like that uh you would obviously make sure you've got your time zone sent to the server you know for us we use eastern times it'll be new york time your currency et cetera now for those that want to create this little pro tip when you want to create a universal analytics account you have to click this and you can turn this on and then i would recommend you do both especially if you're creating a new account so you do want to have both so that's how you actually get a universal analytics account so you still can do it you just gotta click on show advanced options otherwise you'll just create a google analytics four but in this case that's what we're gonna do so i'm gonna click on next at that point it wants to know a little bit about us so we're gonna put in a little bit about us so i don't think they have education here so we're just going to call it business computers electronics let's just do that small we'll kind of put in whatever those things are click on create actually i'm really going to do it for like analyzing online sales let's do that so we're going to create that it gives google a little bit information how we're using google analytics form and with that it asks us to create a data stream so this is the unique difference between ga4 and universal analytics you create data streams you don't have property ids anymore so we don't use an ios app or an android app it's going to be beyond the scope of this training however we are using a website so we're gonna click on says web at that point this is the first time you actually type in your website name so we're gonna go ahead and do that measurementmarketing.io and i'm gonna say this is the dot mm.missionmarketing.io and we specifically is we have a demo site that we're going to install set this up for so this is our demo site so that's what the stream name is and then you have this option of enhanced measurement in the beginning i would keep this on just to see what ga4 looks like especially when you're new i'll say a pro tip you're going to set up google analytics 4 you're going to play around with it you're going to get used to it what i would recommend is you do that for a few months and maybe you delete the whole thing and start over again because you're gonna have better skills so don't don't think like oh i'm just gonna create this and then it's forever gonna stay like that because you in the beginning it's really helpful to have this temporary sort of mindset and that's what i'm doing here i just wanna see especially if this is the first time that i was ever using this platform i just want to see what's back there and what it can do and all the bells and switches so i'm not going to adjust any of these things but know that ga4 does of course you know it'll do page views but it can measure scroll and outbound clicks it can do video you know other stuff it's a pretty cool platform for that so we're going to keep all this on it's all the default settings and we're going to create our stream now once we have our stream created this is the most important part it gives you the measurement id this is the thing that in universal analytics you have the property id that starts with ua dash that's what the new this is the new way of doing it with ga4 you have a measurement id so we're going to copy that because we're going to install this using tag manager i highly recommend you use tag manager you don't have to if you wanted to you can use an existing on-page tag that you might already have uh or you can just use a the regular script global site tag right here just copy this out paste it on your pages you're off to the races that said if you're a measurement marketer you really are using tag manager already let's hope that you are if not you should be you learn tag manager it's an amazing tool and that's what you're going to see today of how we get set up on tag manager so at this point we've got the basics we're not going to worry about anything else right now we just want to get this thing up and running right this is a getting started topic so i have created a google analytics four account and i have created a data stream my my in this case a web data stream and i already know my web my measurement id right here and i'm just going to click this box because it copies it so now that i have that created it doesn't do anything yet because i need to send some information into it so how do we do that enter tag manager now i already have this container uh it's already been pre-published for us i've got it on my demo site already so it's up and running but it doesn't have anything through it yet it's a completely empty container i just published an empty container so i want to go through and we want to set up google analytics for us we're going to go to tags and now i'm going to go to new tags fortunately google analytics 4 is right there now you always start with a configuration that's the first thing you have to do and then the event tags will use that configuration so i'll show you that in just a second we're going to start with configuration though because this is what requires that measurement id remember that measurement id that we copied well now we're just going to paste it in here so i'm just going to right click and paste there's the measurement id right i grabbed that again if you go into data stream in analytics click on here you will see the measurement id right there and then tzz that's what this is and then tzz so there's our data stream then by default it will also not only configure the account and get it ready to receive information it will actually send a page view event coming through in google analytics 4 everything's an event it's kind of a big deal with google x4 everything's an event so that's that's uh you know it's going to send a page event by default again when you're first starting out with google analytics 4 don't get crazy just keep it whatever the defaults are because you just want to sort of turn things on and get used to seeing how things show up so you can get a feel for google analytics 4. you're not going to be an expert in google analytics 4 immediately it is way too different from universal analytics but it is important for you to get it up and running and that's what we're going to do here so we're just going to keep it like that then when do i fire this just like when i do a universal analytics i'm just going to fire it on all pages with tag manager so anytime a page loads google analytics 4 is going to configure itself and send a pay view so i'm going to go ahead and save that and this time we're going to say ga4 page view that's what it's actually doing so i'm going to go ahead and save that tag now what do we do with tag manager we always preview it so we're going to go to preview before we publish and at this point i'm just going to copy this out and i'm going to close this so we can bring it in our preview mode here let me go back to tag assistant so we're going to paste in our page we're going to start it up and running this should connect us open up a new tab which it just did and we've got a little debugger connected here which is awesome so that's up and running now i go back to my tag assistant and i can see tag manager i go to my container loaded and i can see tags fired there's my page view it's firing my data stream for google analytics for but wait this says app and web configuration here's why because google analytics 4 is not new it's been around for 15 16 months at least as of this recording in early january of 2021 and it used to be called app and web configuration so what happened well marketing got a hold of the team over at google analytics and said listen you're calling this thing app and web configuration but everyone's going i don't have an app so i guess i don't have to use it and of course nobody used it so google analytics rightly so renamed it google analytics 4 but you will still see sometimes this app plus web configuration stuff it's the exact same thing don't let it confuse you eventually i'm positive they will switch this to google analytics for configuration tag but for now you know know it's the same thing but if you ever see one it's the same thing as ga4 exactly the same thing ga4 google analytics 4 is the new name so now that we have tag manager saying it's working we have to tbv we have to trust but verify so we're gonna go into google analytics four and we're going to see if it's actually working so how do we do that we go to the home screen and that puts us into our google analytics for setup and then how do we test we go to real time that's what real-time reports are for so we're going to click on real-time reports and don't get too caught up what's back here and everything else all the craziness we just want to kind of see are things working the way that we think they're working so we come down here we can see there's a hit already coming through a little event that's coming through here i can see event count event name there's a page view that's coming through okay so far so good right we know i know for a fact this is me because i literally just created this minutes before this recording started so i know that there's nobody else that has this one however i could go through and i can look at you know click into the page view i can see different details of the event associated page view including the location and when i see the location see this little gtm underscore debug equals x that's how i know it's a debug hit that's coming through which is my debugger so at that point i'm like okay page view seems to be working what do we do now well in tag manager i'm going to go ahead and first exit out of my preview i'm going to stop debugging and we're going to close that out and then now that we've got it officially working i'm going to go ahead and submit and i'm going to say you know this is like you know activated the ga4 page view so we are up and running that's all we needed to do google analytics 4 is officially running and we did that in minutes right again i kind of want reasonably real time that was still with me explaining some stuff so this can go pretty quick now of course what i would still do is come back in i would pull up my site again a demo site in this case that we have i would click through different things as i come through i'm just going to click on random links through here to kind of load up some different pages that we have in our little ninja gym that is our demo site just loading different pages is all i'm doing and then i would want to make sure that now that i've published it did all of those pages you know start coming through with the with the events right that i've that i've got so i can go through you know page view hits and ultimately i would want to make sure that all that stuff is working now that i've officially published my container right so you always want to make sure you trust but verify as you go through for the most part we're going to assume at this point that yep that is working the way we wanted it to work um so we should be good to go okay so now that i've got my my page view up and running i can actually start sending events now events are a little different in google analytics four so there's there's remember i said sort of everything's an event but they have this configuration tag so if i go to new again you see this little configuration tag literally just initializes the google analytics for account to receive data but because it does this this little send pageview event people often just sort of call it a pageview thing because it actually but it's doing both it's configuring the account and then it sends a page view with that configuration that's typical that's normal behavior if you get more advanced at this you can you can turn that off and send a page as a separate hit if you wanted so just know that you can do that but now that we have that configuration set up right this page tag which is what that is ga4 configuration you can see that right here in the tag type i'm going to send an event because i might want to send something else now if i ever wanted to like a lead or a purchase or something like that i can send through that event first thing it wants me to do is set a configuration tag fortunately we just created one so i'm going to go to ga4 pagey which is our configuration tag you don't have to recreate it and this tag is what identifies that measurement id right that tells it where to go and then you would put in whatever your name is so maybe you're using lead or maybe you're using purchase or or some other event name you can put in details we're not going to cover this in today's workshop but this is where you put in different details like oh here's the product name and sku and whatever else or you know type of lead it was or anything like that right you put in all the different details and then you set up a trigger just like you would with tag manager that would fire that probably as some pages trigger on certain pages like when the product purchase happens or something like that you can also set up clicks and scrolls and everything else in tag manager with google analytics for now for now we're not going to do that i just wanted to show you where that stuff was because that's really the next step but at that point there isn't like a cookie cutter way of doing this because you always want to think about your site and the questions that you're trying to answer with your site the information that you need to collect to get the questions that you're asking get the answers to the questions you're asking and then ultimately what actions will you take based upon the answers you get then you plan all that stuff out right you can't just quickly come in here and and put up a ton of events you will plan out all this stuff to make sure you have the specific answers you need then you come in the tag manager set up all your events make sure your details are in there tbv it with a preview once it's working publish it then tb it again trust but verify make sure it's working the way you want it to at that point you'll have an existing google analytics container in tag manager that's firing through google analytics for events including the page you and any other events that you're wanting to collect and then you've got an actual account filled with stuff now i already have one of those set up so i'm going to go through and we're going to take a look at that so that's just this little test one of how fast it is to get an account set up if you're just starting out with google analytics 4 that's all i would do in the beginning is just get it turned on and collecting basic information so that with time you'll have something that looks a little bit more like what we have currently which is our existing google analytics four account that we're playing around with right now we're back here we're learning this like everybody else is and we're we're uh taking a look at it so i've got it set up and this one's been collecting data for a little while notice by the way there are no views i hope one day they come back because i do believe views are super useful uh but for now they are no longer a part of google analytics four and that's okay we will deal but that's how you know you're looking at google x4 account couple of ways you can tell one ua universal analytics all says ua and google analytics four doesn't have ua so that's one way to do it and of course the second way is just no views if you see nothing here you know you're looking at a google analytics four account so now that i've switched over to our actual production google analytics four i'm gonna go back to the home screen you're gonna see a little bit more back here right because this one has been around for a while a number of months now so here's our user account you start to see trend lines right and everything else if i go into real time uh we'll see if anybody's on the site now sometimes yes sometimes no uh there's some real time there we go people on the site from around the world i do like the real-time reports for that to kind of show that everybody's out there even if they show in the middle of the ocean who knows maybe somebody's out there in the middle of the ocean someone's got wi-fi on a cruise um but we have um you know all of these you know different events coming through and this kind of gives you an overview right so real time still is for testing just like with universal analytics you don't use your real time to make any marking decisions it's not for that it's just making sure things are turned on and being collected the way you want now the one thing i like about real time when i'm checking it when i'm testing for stuff is i do like coming down here to the event count because typically you're looking for a specific event that is happening so in this case if i'm testing for scroll i would click on scroll and then it shows the information that's being collected by that scroll event so i can see the session id the session number the page location right page title uh percent scrolled is a detail that's specific to scroll if i click here you will notice percent scroll says 90. because the built-in events that google analytics 4 does on its own just does 90 it doesn't do like 10 25 50 75 and 90 but we use 10 25 50 75 and 90. so this is one of the lessons we learned with google analytics four is like you know what we're not going to use the built-in scroll feature we're going to use tag manager for that right so as we as we iterate our own measurements that's one of the lessons we learned the only reason we learned that is because we turned on all the default features that come with google analytics for we let it collect some data right we knew we weren't going to start using google analytics for for real-world decisions not for a while we want to give it a few months we're going to play with it we're not rushing into this thing google analytics 4 is going to be around for a long long time we don't have to start using it tomorrow and universal analytics will also be around for a long long time so we continue to use universal analytics but we absolutely are taking steps to move into google analytics for it that's why you start collecting the data that's why this workshop is really being created to encourage you to start opening up an account you see how fast it is to create an account to get it running with tag manager get it collecting information so you can get used to what shows up what doesn't where the details are that sort of thing so this little pro tip on real-time reports here now besides testing right besides sort of seeing what comes through and what different details are coming through with different events you can go into these other reports but i save reports lightly because they yes there are reports that are back here but one big change with google analytics four is it's not really based as a reporting platform they don't really want to using it as a reporting platform and universal analytics have these nice like source media reports you can explore a bunch of stuff and everything else and you can kind of do that with these but they really really and by they i mean google really wants you to use google data studio to build reports there and that's what we're going to do we're going to file that signal because we use data studio anyway for everything and it's a fantastic platform and it is built for reporting let's face it google data studio is perfect for that so we're going to continue to use that that said in google analytics 4 you do have access to this engagement report and i'm going to zoom out a little bit so you can see everything that's coming through here so on this report it's very similar to those abc style reports that were in universal analytics so universal analytics had a report that showed acquisition and then behavior and then conversions this is kind of that same style so here it's broken down by whatever the thing is that you're breaking it down right what you used to call the dimension still called that but uh just not as pronounced here so it's the dimension the thing you're sorting by in this case the type of traffic the medium i can switch it to source and this is the different uh sources of traffic that are bringing users in right so we have that then i have number of new users that are coming through from these different traffic sources i see engaged sessions now this is something that's really cool with google analytics four because bounce rates gone finally no more bounce rates that was such a ridiculous metric and it was so easy to twist and adjust and it was you know just hard for people to use engaged sessions is because is possible because google analytics 4 is much better at telling time than google analytics universal analytics at least ever was so remember because google analytics 4 is built from the ground up for today's world right today's world and tomorrow's world so what this means is 10 seconds so sessions every 10 seconds so if i see infusionsoft you say oh people coming in from our email system and here's how many were you know engaged sessions from those users remember a user can have more than one session that's why this number would be different but look at this this is bot traffic so i've got new users coming in from this but no one's staying more than 10 seconds so this is sort of bot traffic stuff and i happen to know this is this is not a bad thing this particular service measures your site and pings your site to see stuff but clearly bot traffic coming through right i just note this as a service to measure for stuff and what it's for it's great service but it's messing up my numbers right now so this is one of those things you'd have to learn how to filter out and that's not as easy to do in uh google analytics for at least not yet not as easy it was with universal holidays getting easier as the months go by but this is one of those things we look at and say okay mental note we'll have to filter this stuff out right again i'm not concerned that it's there because it's not in universal analytics universal analytics already is filtered out and universal analytics is what we're currently using to run the company right make make good directional decisions google analytics 4 just kind of poking around seeing how things show up getting used to it no pressure no pressure i got months and months to switch into this permanently so that's what we're doing right now we see this then we see the engagement sessions engagement rate sessions per user et cetera all the way down to total revenue once we set up e-commerce we'll have that and then conversions you know these different conversions events these are kind of like goals so goals kind of go away they just have things called conversions and you determine what events are conversions that's how this works now that's all set up i'll show you where that setup in just in a moment in the events reports but all of their reports are kind of the same format and that's kind of the good thing is there's not a lot of reports that's not that's not great but it's the same report over and over again so at least it's easy to use because you get really used to it for example if i go to traffic acquisition it will look eerily similar now this stuff up here will change right they sort of literally just swap the you know where these things go but this report same thing again if i zoom out you'll see it so it's the same same exact uh report that comes through here just you know a little more uh you know just broken down by a different thing in this case by session as opposed to by user right but but otherwise it's the same style report has the users has the engage sessions and everything and then my conversions so i get the results of everything so how much i have the engagement metrics and then what are the results of all that those actions happening so in that case you know again not not too bad audiences report if you come into this this is your basic sort of demographic information um that you can come through here and take a look at to kind of learn a little bit about the the audience themselves um that you have as well um and then you can go into engagement so engagement reports now this will be again different upon whatever the thing is that you're looking for some of these are going to be more useful than others and this is where google analytics 4 is not a report not really a reporting platform you would build a data studio report that shows you a funnel breakdown or something like that which is exactly what we will do i'm going to zoom in here since it's not allowed on this report just to show you so here we have the events these are the different things that are coming through the pageview event we just saw how we were sending that through they have click events scroll events session start events first visit events generate lead events right video progress events that are coming through so at this point we're just kind of clicking into them to see okay what do we see when we when we get through here this is what i would suggest you do as well remember this is not an extensive tutorial this is just a showing you a tour of what everything is and you can come down you can start to see demographic information et cetera right all coming in from google signals and that sort of stuff that comes through ga4 is a fantastic platform but it is radically different from universal analytics and that's why you don't pressure yourself to be an expert in this thing in 30 days because you're not going to be just get used to the basics of it get good enough to get going get a little familiar with where things are and then pick up some new skills and then change some things and in our case i promise you i'm going to delete this at least once if not twice i'm going to start over from scratch because the first time is me just practicing and seeing how things flow and getting used to how the data is organized then sorry there's demographics here i think i said demographics we're in the audience reports um but the demographic data down here so then seeing okay well now that i know what i know i would set it up very differently and i will i'm going to delete out the old one and i'm going to start up the new one because i don't care about historical data universal analytics has all that i'm not freaked out about using google analytics for tomorrow there is literally no pressure for us to start using google analytics for today but a year from now we absolutely should be in google x4 and using that as our main source of data but i got a year so that's why i'm that's what our little timeline it probably will happen faster than that but that's how we're thinking right now but again demographics and tech when you're learning about users you have all that stuff back here too then these events right so here i'm going to click on the all events reports it's right down here this shows every little piece of detail that's coming into google analytics four in ga4 an event it's an event is an event as an event is an event and that's the hardest thing to wrap your head around versus universal analytics in universal analytics there's all these different scopes like user scope and session scope and hit scopes and there's you know page view events that are wrapped a little differently than events are there's actually something called an event in universal analytics and it has category action label and there's some hierarchy to it all of that's gone with ga4 they'd call everything an event and these are just event names so the purchase or the excuse me the page view event is no different than a purchase event it's just the label is different and this one might have different details than this one has this one might have the page location this one will probably have the page location but it'll also have e-commerce information right and then you can turn on if it's a conversion or not it's something important to you so for example generating a lead is an event that we can use it's one of those those standard events that we can we can turn on and start using and we called it a conversion because it was important to us to be a conversion if i decide later i don't care about it as a conversion i don't want to use it as a conversion for reporting purposes think about conversion again as goal so goal there are no goals you don't set up destination goals and event goals and all that other stuff all that's gone you just turn you just say certain events are now conversions now this is really timely we're recording this in the the middle part of uh january in 2021 and for those of you who are sort of in the know in the agency world facebook and apple are in the middle of a huge spat and it's mostly facebook that's in a huge spat with apple because apple's changing a lot of things on the measurement side google analytics 4 is built for a future world where things aren't measured as easily so they're okay with it google's okay with it that's why you don't see google complaining about anything they were ready for this stuff facebook was not but one of the things that's interesting with facebook is that they are changing um how they're also doing conversions and they're going to kind of use a model like this where they will list out certain events and you will turn on certain events that you want to see as conversions right and facebook's example would be eight conversions and that is way sort of tangential to this training but i what i thought was interesting the way that facebook was headed is uh is that they're modeling what google analytics 4 does with events so here's all the events that you can have in you know that we have in google analytics for at the same time you can send all these events to facebook because you have something like tag manager and then you can tell google likes for it these are the ones i care about as conversions then you go to facebook and say these are the ones i care about is conversions so that both platforms are matching so i think it's kind of cool that you can use the same structure so it's a very weird structure in the beginning because it's what we call flat data right everything went flat all of a sudden so there's no hierarchy anymore and events and events and event it's just the event name itself and then what details do you want to know about that event so if i you know click into file download here it gives me it gives me the engagement events report and i can see different details that might come through from uh from that right so like page location the link url page referrer but there might be some other details that that you could pull through in those events that's why i like you know looking at the real-time reports and things like that to kind of get on day out because sometimes you want to know like the download name right whatever the download was that they that they got um so that's you know just sort of a way to think about events there it's kind of flat and events and events and event it's just every event has a different label based upon what it is a descriptive thing that's telling you what the uh the way i think about is like the the action or the behavior that is happening that's how we're naming our events and then what are the details that i would have in that that that event should come with so a video complete i want to know the video name i want to know um you know uh maybe how much time they watched or that sort of thing so those are the different details that would come with video complete but that wouldn't come with scroll because they're not i wouldn't care about a video name with scroll scroll's going to have something different like what percentage of the page which page did they scroll on that sort of thing and that's what we'll come through with a scroll event which of course would be very different from a purchase event which would have details of a purchase and maybe the page they were on when they purchased it so it's just a way to think about your data in the beginning again don't worry about getting this right because you probably won't and that's okay i think and especially in when it's a brand new platform as this one is don't worry about getting anything right being perfect at it just play around splash around in this pond that is now google analytics for get some basic skills down right get basic skills down do like the doggy battle right you start you know swimming around you you sort of just stay afloat then you can delete it come back reinstall it with a new way and then you'll be that much better and it becomes that much easier to use i'm a huge believer in that just get good enough to get going come back make it better later so that's kind of the the way to think about events here then the other thing that's really nice about google analytics for and again they they say google again saying they're not a reporting platform anymore they are an analysis platform so if you want basic reports go build reports in google data studio which is exactly what we do however there are times you want to analyze said reports and that's what this analysis hub is really nice for this is a whole separate section it definitely levels up what's possible with ga4 i would play around with stuff like this you can build and we're not going to go into this here because we just don't have time so i want to show you what's possible here is if we go to the template gallery these are the different styles of reports so there's like explorer reports kind of like the ones that were in like pivot tables and things like in universal analytics there's funnels 1 000 times better than what universal analytics has funnel analysis is fantastic it you can retro back historical data you can use comment remember in events and events and event so it doesn't matter if it's a pageview event or a button click event or a scroll event you can build a funnel of somebody that clicked on a certain page and then stayed there for 10 seconds and then scroll to 25 of the way through you can get very specific on your funnels it's awesome path analysis is like the flow reports in a way from universal analytics but then you've got other ones like venn diagrams that are set up with segment overlaps again user explorer if you want to look at a particular user i don't know if that's overly useful to be honest i think it's a little detailed but cohort analysis is there and then of course user lifetime i would take this with a grain of salt for sure because you know that's the other thing that we're looking at with ga4 is like how useful is this number um it'll be a representation of your user lifetime it will not actually be the useful useful uh user lifetime and you always want to use your card system for that but it's but it's pretty cool it's nice of what they're doing back here now i'm going to use these all the time i can already tell you these funnels are fantastic i will use these all the time um so something to get used to and just know that it's back here with uh these analysis hubs so pretty cool stuff but again you can't really play around with them and i'll show you one of these funnel ones here that i had set up you can't really play around with them too much unless you have information back here you have to have events coming back here and that's why you want to set all this stuff up so um anyway this kind of gives you an you know an example of how to play with it it is a much more complicated looking setup in the beginning this little interface um but at the end of the day you know it does work pretty well it doesn't take that long to get through it um as you can come through and and you know set up different things that are that uh different steps or whatever i'm not gonna again i'm not gonna do that here because it's not the point of this training is to show you every single possible thing uh if you're an academy member check out um win google analytics for basics and that'll talk you through the the funnel report in particular because we do go through how to set that up here but it you know it's again it's a little geekier looking here but it doesn't take that long to get a feeling for it and say okay you know i get what this is doing and you know i can go ahead and you know build out play with the date ranges and play with my steps and start building out a funnel um you know based on those steps etc right whatever the thing is that you're you're trying to look for so um with that i'm gonna go ahead and bring it back to the home page and then ultimately we're gonna start to wrap it up i do want to point out one other thing that i really like about ga4 that a lot of people do not know is back here that is debug view so debug view works with chrome or with the ga debug extension so this google analytics debugger extension if you're not using it super useful anyway for google analytics however it's really useful for google analytics for because when you have this turned on and you're on your site only your hits will show up here so you can see very specific things that are happening makes it so much easier to debug setups it's awesome even if using tag manager to fire stuff through so it's it's really cool um user properties is kind of where custom dimensions and custom metrics for those that are a little more advanced that know what that stuff is that's kind of where they are now so if you have a thing like a shoe size or something that you're recording for a user specific thing uh you know user id or something like that it would be in you know user properties um has it so pretty cool things that you can do and of course you can build audiences and hook them in the google ads just like you can with universal um and this is the platform of the future for sure like the way that i always phrase this is universal analytics is still the platform of today it's still the one you're going to use today and for the for the you know near future however google analytics 4 is absolutely the platform of tomorrow it is the one that you're going to need moving into it's built to do cross-device it's built for a world where there's going to be more and more dark data right things that data that we know is there we just can't get to it because privacy laws or tech and it's just going to get worse like that's normal that's the trends so we're not going to fight that we're just going to realize that and start using platforms that are built to model and have ai in machine learning and that's what google analytics 4 has so it'll have conversion modeling as part of it it'll help you in this new world so you absolutely need to get some experience with it the point of this little workshop is to show you around help you get started because it doesn't take that long within 10 minutes you can basically have it running and then let it collect data just let it collect data and sit back there and just kind of poke around and get used to it and don't put pressure on yourself to be an expert give yourself 90 days to play around with it and at that point at that point maybe you can actually go through and start you know maybe resetting it playing around with it that's what we did right it's case sensitive by the way i will tell you that's a huge learning we had um it's it well it's always case sensitive but uh the events are always like this so we had one that was called like a capital p purchase well that messed everything up because that was different from a purchase lower case purchase event so that sort of stuff we got used to it's like okay we got to make sure all of our event names are consistently named but that's the stuff you mess up when you first start so get all that stuff out of the way and make sure you sort of at least have the basics down and at that point you can start uh making it better and better and better um now um with that we'll go ahead and bring this one to a close of course if you have any questions on this pop them in the comments i always love to see those what was your one thing from this hopefully you want more workshops is your one thing right that you like workshops like this if you do next week's workshop is beyond the basics speaking of data studio we're gonna talk about how to use conditional formatting with data studio so be sure to subscribe you want to make sure and subscribe to the youtube channel uh and uh it'll notify you when when the new ones are live um we are growing day by day which i love is super exciting so thank you for those of you who have continued to share it with others and spread the word uh i don't know that we're perfect when it comes to marketing that stuff so we rely on the uh on the audience to do that and you guys are rocking it out so thank you for doing that and for uh helping to subscribe and others to subscribe as well now the other way that you can catch all these workshops in addition to get access to a ton of free tools is the measurement marketing toolbox so it's a free membership i mentioned before so you'll see this training back there we always have the most recent workshop wednesday back there just for your convenience but it also comes with a lot of other tools traffic tracking toolkit google tag manager cookbook the gtm cookbook for those that are doing that if you want to learn regex we have that if you don't know what fredrik says that's okay because you'll use the traffic tracker or the ace goals set up so the marketing behavior toolkit or the list goes on there's you know a split test optimizing plan that's back there's so much cool stuff that's back in the uh measurement marketing toolbox and as we create new tools we keep them back there for you it's our way of giving back to community completely free if you're not yet a member just go create that measure.tips ww just to name in an email it'll send you a password you'll have access to everything back there in the members area finally if you really do want to have the support if you want to have all of the courses if you want to have all of the workshops all these edited student workshops measure.tips getacademy will take you to the measurement marketing academy i want to briefly show you kind of what that looks like because we have the new members area now so when you come back here's what the academy would look like you have access to all of these pieces here so you'll have your win courses the on-demand workshops of course the toolbox which you would have anyway there's a winner circle now with a community support and ask an instructor so um when you come back here there's all the win courses we do these by date um we also update these as we go through so you'll see there's analytics one including when google analytics 4 basics we will eventually be doing a beyond basics later this year as well tag manager stuff so tag mentor basics beyond basics retargeting javascript basics for tag manager data studio dashboards and everything else there with the basics how to do funnel tracking traffic attribution which numbers are important to measure all of these are courses that are you know kind of taken as you want i will say pro tip take win your measurement journey first because it puts all the training in context so if you're new to the academy this is when you want to take first but there's lots of stuff back here especially into strategy because sometimes it's not about knowing how to do something it's what should be done and so we talk a lot about strategy as well so that's all the win courses the on-demand workshops this is workshop wednesday so you already have access to that one then you have access to all the other ones we have done in the past yes some of these are on the youtube channel but these have all been edited down so all of this stuff is taken out of these and they've got little zoom effects something else what we call the student edition so they're back here and you can kind of inventory those plus you have a nice searchable database that you can go through and you know search for you know goals or whatever the thing is you're looking for and it pops up all of the different lessons that fit that term all of the different workshops that fit that term um so that you have access to that so it's a cool way to to go through that you also have the resources we talked about the toolbox this is the free one that we'll still give you for a toolbox member if you're not yet you can go through and do that um then there's the winner circle this is an academy thing so anybody it's a winner circle member you can come through here you can join different groups uh that we've got ask questions of your peers what i like about this one is like some people are just better at seo than we ever will be so we ask members to help each other out because sometimes you have your own little super skill that you can help somebody else out with and so that's what a lot of those conversations happen however there are definitely people who want to keep a conversation more on out of the public eye and that's where the instructors come in so if you have a question over something specific you click the ask instructor put in your question it'll go to one of our instructors typically we really like seeing screenshots and videos so send us those and then typically our instructors send back videos and screenshots as well it's almost like having a consultant on call and the goal is to get you answers within hours not days so you can kind of get unstuck and on your way so it's kind of cool with ask instructor support we have lots of people that will just send us pictures of their or walk through a video of their site or their setup and say okay i'm trying to get this goal working how do i do it and our instructors help you out so uh all that is part of the measurement marketing academy again measure.tips get academy we'll take you there and we look forward to seeing you back there soon with that we'll officially bring this one to a close this has been getting started getting started with google analytics forum thanks again for watching this workshop and we will see you on the next one take care

Channel: MeasurementMarketing,io

Views: 1,018

Rating: 4.8857141 out of 5

Keywords: measurement marketing, measurementmarketing.io, workshop wednesday, google analytics, ga4, google analytics 4, google analytics 4 basics, ga4 tips, ga4 basics, new to ga4, new to google analytics 4, new google analytics

Id: Vh6nQ-_MMUw

Length: 40min 48sec (2448 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021