Google Analytics 4 (GA4) - Common Questions and Answers

you hi guys can you confirm if you are getting my audio correctly just give me a minute here uh can someone just type in to tell me if audio is coming fine also if if there isn't any all right if you guys see any audio or hear any audio issues or see any video quality issues then please do comment uh if you don't comment then i do not know if you guys are hearing me and seeing me fine or not so give me a minute here let me shut down the door behind me and i'll be back all right audio check can you guys hear me yes cool all right jungkook cool thank you guys for joining so i got a bunch of questions today on google analytics for uh well i've been getting these questions so i thought i'll do this live session to walk you guys through uh some of the common questions and answer them and if you do have any questions that you want me to answer and i'm not answering here please type them here now google analytics 4 is brand new and not of not a lot of clients are using that today which in my uh opinion they should be using the sooner you get on google analytics for bandwagon sooner you'll learn all the nuances and all the cool things that it provides so um those who are not aware of google analytics 4 right this is a new free version of google analytics one of the com first question that i always get is what is google context for so i'll answer that and then we'll go through all these questions but before i dive in make sure to give a thumbs up to this video you're gonna love what you see if you don't then you can uncheck it to unlike it or and also i want you to subscribe to this channel i provide full google analytics 4 training master class which is online as well as provide workshops and training sessions customized to your workplace if somebody has you know wants to bring me to their organization so i can show them how they can leverage google analytics for now once you have done that give give it a thumbs up subscribe to this channel check out optizen academy courses and i will drop a link here also those who are listening today uh i am currently running this promotion on option academy where you can get one dollar one trial so just pay one dollar get a seven day trial and in that you will also get a google analytics master class so if you are brave enough to just spend next seven days learning about google analytics for this is your chance to only learn for a dollar that course that i have will continue to evolve which means i will be adding more and more content as features become available in google analytics 4 or as i discover things that my clients are asking or i discover things that people are asking in forums right okay with that i'm gonna start and if any questions are not answered i'll answer them later maybe in a follow-up session i've done quite a few sessions on google analytics 4 and on so you can find those videos on this channel go ahead and browse that after this session so you can see what i have already delivered there's a bunch of bunch more that are in works so i'll be touching on different topics in google analytics for uh in this channel as well as in the courses if you do have any issues at all or questions or need clarification please type your comment here i will try to answer all the comments as much as possible we have limited time for this session so i want to make sure i cover the content here so first question is what is google analytics for those who are here either are already kind of playing with google analytics 4 or trying to figure out should i be playing with google analytics 4 or using it so first is google analytics 4 is a free version of google analytics it's the next version from universal analytics which you guys have been using so far if you have been using google analytics in the new version everything is an event so think about this every hit every action user takes or every interaction that happens in your browser or app is counted as an event that is a shift from how things used to work in previous version so you have you in universal analytics you had page views in in google analytics pf4 page views are now events so everything is an event that is a shift in the mindset on how things are working and it is one of those things that's very hard for people to digest i keep seeing these forum messages people who have are experts in google analytics because they have built their livelihood on google analytics universal analytics are freaking out because google analytics 4 does not align to their thinking on how they have been thinking now people who have been in the industry for quite some time know that this is how we all started everything was captured as a hit and then that hit can be called an event page view it doesn't matter there are certain things in google analytics 4 that are automatically captured so one of the question comes up is do i need to set up events in google uh do i need to set specific events for external link clicks pdf downloads videos etc those things are covered in google analytics for so you don't have to worry about those things when you enable they are called enhanced measurement events they are automatically tracked so a bunch of things are very very easy to track people who are freaking out uh one of the common question about this is hey google analytics 4 is not ready it's not ready in my opinion it's ready right sure there will be features there will be reports that will be coming up and they are missing like you guys have been used to a previous version of google analytics 4 which provided several cad reports those reports are not available anymore will they come in google analytics for maybe i think google analytics will have enough pressure from people who are complaining about it to put those reports but it's possible google analytics google might say we are not going to provide you those reports why because there is a way to get to those reports few canned reports that were available or you know whatever i can't count but let's say if there are about 50 60 100 reports those do not answer every business question that you have and they don't fit for every business vertical right but people got used to those reports every day i see reports people churning out reports just restating those things like how many page views how many visits you got what is the bounce rate bounce rate is number one thing that everybody started reporting every problem bounce rate every solution bounce rate that is the only thing people focused on every report i see guess what there's no bounce rate in google analytics 4. so there goes your livelihood of depending on bounce rate and those things have changed there is a different way of thinking bounce rate in old days just meant you know you came to a page whether you went to second page or not so if you didn't go to second page uh you just landed and left that is considered that was considered bounce rate default definition some people gave became creative and they said well my page is long which is the case with most of the articles pages and most of the uh you know blog posts in those scenarios bounce rate was very high even uh today this morning i saw apple uh quite a question somebody was asking me i would put my blog blog link on social media and my bounce rate is high well it's expected people are going to read your blog post or not read your blog post right but they are going to not go to the second page like for them to go to a second page is very unlikely so bounce rate is going to go up if you have a blog now some people got creative as i was saying they put scroll uh you know depth etc as an interaction so their bounce rate went down some people counted late click link clicks external link clicks on as not bouncing and their bounce rate went down but this is this was a way of them adjusting those bounce rates then you compare those to industry standards and there is no industry standard i published 12 years maybe more than 12 years ago a bounce rate guide which was looking at specific channels specific industries specific types of sites and publish some of the bounce rates people were seeing but comparing to industry is not a good guideline however if you did look at bounce rates you were able to guess whether your site is working or not but since everybody was becoming creative with their bounce rate measurements they were all over the place now that has been replaced with what's called engagement how engaged is the user with your site so that is one of the things that you can reverse and use like you know inverse of engagement as your bounce however that engagement is not just dependent on the bouncing it also if somebody takes an interaction that's a conversion events or ten or spend certain time then that person is called not counted as bounds hopefully that engagement metrics addresses most of people's site because either people are going to do something valuable for your site on your site or they are going to spend some time reading the content right or they are going to look at two or three pages in those cases if user does that then they're counted as engaged right it's not exactly a bounce where you came and you left so those are some of the differences that i have seen now i'm going to go and go to google analytics for share that screen with you and tell them to tell you why people are freaking and why you should not be freaking when you see google analytics 4 because it's ready if you know how to use it not to say like everything is available and everything is easy it's just you have to shift the way you are thinking and it is way more powerful than universal analytics was it provides you so much more information so much more control over the data that you can do bunch of stuff even like i've been thinking about uh you know building machine learning models on top of that we have a course that actually goes in and shows you how you can use google analytics data and run algorithms on top of that to find insights that were not possible when you use universal analytics so i'm going to go to google for interface here just give me a minute meanwhile if you have any questions then please let me know any specific things you want me to cover then let me know all right i am going to google analytics 4 property here and i'm going gonna share my screen so once you see it just let me know all right i hope you guys see my screen right okay so why are people freaking out people are freaking out as i mentioned because there are very limited reports if you look at in the customer life cycle how the reports are arranged right rather than being in a bucket uh for the previous way how it was you know behavior etc now behavior is scattered over things over different buckets so it's a customer life cycle here you have life cycle acquisition how are you acquiring the customer engagement how engaged they are with your site monetization which talks about whether you're making money from those users or not and then how good are you in retaining those customers how good are you in bringing them back on your side so while engagement measures right away you know are they doing certain things retention is are they coming back to your site again and again that's what it's measuring and as you'll notice bunch of reports are missing in these they're very light reports here and as i mentioned some of these reports might start to come back again where the power of google analytics 4 lies is in analysis hub this is a place where you should be spending a lot of time this is where you will find all the reports or construct all the reports that you have been missing right that have been missing from uh if you compared to universal analytics which is the current previous version however you want to call it so that and then integration with bigquery so those who do not know bigquery spend time learning bigquery it's not rocket science but it does take time to learn i will be conducting some sessions i'm conducting one with digital analytics association where i will go through and teach bigquery and how you can leverage that as well as for marketing analytics summit that's coming up i will talking about i will be talking about bigquery as well as sql so it'll touch a little bit on bigquery the marketing analytics summit to get you started and then uh the digital antics association workshop is going to be deep into bigquery those don't want to attend those they are expensive you still have an option you can go on uh you know become a member on optics and academy and you can get the bigquery courses if if you don't want to do that there are tons of sessions i've done on this youtube channel which are free plus there are tons of free resources if you are all about your free resources go for those but if you want some guidance hand holding questions that you can get answered then join one of those sessions when creating a new so i've got a question from karen here when creating a new ga property there is a way to add ua property under advance yes in that scenario does the g ga4 tracking pull the data into both or do i need to add both yes so in that scenario when you create this your tag will have both those scenarios but here's what i would say use google analytics gtm always use google tag manager is my opinion here then you will add both of those tracking codes in those and you will have to put those tracking codes so ga4 has a different tracking code and then ga uh universal analytics has different tracking codes however certain things will be overlapping as the data is being collected so i would suggest is both if you put one code it's not going to i haven't tried it but i don't think it covers both of them you have to use them separately i've always used gtm not putting on the page directly cool all right i'm keep getting these pop-ups i should remove this pop-up from here all right karen let me know if that answers your question so always use gtm set those two different tags and then you will start to track the data the tracking that happens in both universal analytics and google analytics 4 is the different right event tracking in previous version you had a category action and label those kind of things you can pass for event in google analytics 4 that's all gone what you have is now event and their parameter parameters you can have each i think that is about 25 or 35 limit on each parameter that you can pass for your events so when you pass these parameters so you can do more than category action label there are many more slots for you to use to pass that information so when you do tracking in google tag manager or even like directly on the site which i do not recommend because you have very less control you are dependent on developers to do it and uh working through their priorities it's a challenge right they have their own priorities you have your own priorities so they you know you have to work through those that's why always do it via google tag manager and it's so much easier there is much more functionality available to you when you use google tag manager and those who are interested that's there is a course i have on several places actually several platforms one of my best selling courses on google tag manager it doesn't cover google analytic uh for tracking yet but there is a new course that is coming up and it's also part of my google analytics for a master class that's available on a opt-centre academy all right so i'm going to read a few more questions here and then go back here how in-depth does your big query course go into what sort of actionable things will i'll get out of it so what my big query course goes into uh is going to be focused on how you can get your data from google analytics into google analytics for simple integration i even have a free video on that then it talks about the structure and it tells you how to write queries every type of query that's possible and then come up with business use cases that you can apply immediately so it's quite in-depth but it's not going to be the master class in bigquery which is it's the focus is mainly on google analytics bigquery marketing analytics use cases or product analytics use cases but i'm not gonna tell you how to admin your bigquery etc that's there are several other courses out there for that it's a wasp subject so everything that i focus on is related to my audience which is you know marketers and people who are using web analytics and for product etc okay uh that was from joseph curtis uh douglas asks when you you're when you transition from universal to ga do you lose your historical data great question that's one of the questions that keeps coming up do i lose historical data if you keep both codes on you're not losing anything your universal analytics keeps on collecting the data ga4 starts to collect the data as well all collection happens from the day you start put the code if you do take your remove your universal analytics code and only put ga4 which i do not recommend i recommend put both you need to look at both because your audience and you might be used to a certain way of looking at the data and it will take some time getting used to ga4 so if you do however decide i'm done with universal analytics i'm removing it in that scenario your previous data will still be there it just won't collect data going forward because you removed the code and only ga4 data will be collected so you do not lose historical it stays there i hope i'm saying this name right demito esther do you advise businesses to have both g and universal and if so which version should be linked to gtm do both and both should be uh implemented using gtm there is a universal analytics tracking and there is gfo tracking now some companies or some organizations some people are using the same gtm container for both and some are using separate containers for ga4 and universal analytics choice is yours there is no right or wrong answer however if you have too many tags already in universal analytics then i would suggest create a new container will help you with that management and then you can just remove the old container once you're done with universal analytics but it all depends uh i sometimes mix them up to try out different things because there are certain things that i'm measuring i want to see like i don't want to do those again here i'm still testing ga4 and sometimes i create a new container it's entirely up to you but if if i were to advise you at this point i would say put different containers if you can now it all depends on it if they have or whoever the developer is on your website if it's easy for you go ahead and put it and that way you can separate and remove but no hard and fast rule there doug says thank you and then daria i have an earthquake application and track it on google analytics for i want to see how many people ordered my app in google play store of which score they gave how can i see those details so now your google play store store is in google right we don't get data from that if you can figure it out i don't know how what apis in store are available if you can get that and put that hit into your google analytics four then it'll be available to you otherwise you do not know what's happening outside your domain only thing you can capture is what's happening within the domains that you control what types of tracking do you prefer for ga 4 and gtm great question what type of tracking it all depends on your business and this is where the differences in business or verticals etc come into play what are you trying to achieve any tracking and this is one of my the questions that i keep getting and i get i feel like people are not paying attention to what should be tracked first and foremost thing even before you start gtm ga anything step back and think about what are we trying to achieve here what do i want to know or what does a business want to know there are many experts who will give you these guidance or track distractors track this practice track this but my question is why why are you tracking something that's not going to add any value to your business do you do you care do you have videos track videos do you need to track videos yes those things you have to answer beforehand what are we trying to achieve what kind of events and ga4 by the way has uh requires you to think a lot more than universal analytics did the reason is because you can have so many events and so many parameters universal uh google analytics 4 has two main things like you've got users which is audience and you've got events users have user properties so you can define whatever this user is and events have event parameters before you start tracking whether gtm or not gtm think about what events will make sense and not only what events will make sense what event parameters will make sense because there are tons of things you can do custom tracking and there are recommended events and there are enhanced measurement events that are already being tracked so you don't have to worry about those but recommended events do we need to track a pdf download yes it's already tracked do we need to track this page view that session etc those are the things that have to be defined in your strategy so by common things if you just want to know common things then you don't even have to use i mean do any kind of setup all you do is go to admin and when you're setting the stream this is by default right data streams these things are already tracked page view is an event scrolls which required in the previous version for you to track separately you mark things that you want to track like how far people are scrolling outbound clicks are people clicking on external links and going somewhere else you had to track that in universal analytics it's automatically tracked in google analytics for site search are people what keywords people are searching for that's automatically tracked that's searching for on your site not from google or bing that's automatically tracked video engagement these are embedded youtube videos only not like a vimeo player or any other player and there is a specific code that you need to put to track that and then you have file downloads pdfs etc all these required you to have separate tracking enabled within gtm now you don't have to do that all you have to do is this switch is on and you can track them if you need settings right here you can individually turn them on and off right here site search how you want to track it what kind of query parameters contains the keywords those things are automatically done for you so that's it that's the limit now if you have e-commerce you definitely want to set e-commerce if you have legion you want to set lead gen events but it all depends on your business pay attention to this most of the time you will be spending or most of your time you will be spending on strategizing what needs to be tracked rather than getting in and doing the tracking itself believe me that'll save you a lot of headache that'll save you a lot of hours in you know cost associated with managing tax that don't matter so pay attention to those so they do not need to be tracked again in gtm as we can find them in analytics correct you do not need to track anything in gtm related to these they are automatically done for you that's a big difference and i'm sure they will be adding more content uh here more type of things so that your dependence is limited you just put one tag and it's all tagless i mean all you know custom coding or custom tracking has gone away they'll keep adding those things so okay so that should answer your question on what to track i have templates that i use for tracking and saying what events what properties and that is one of the things where you know when people say universal analytics or google analytics 4 is not ready i'm like it's more than ready think about you are limited to three events uh three parameters per event in previous tracking actually category action and label now you have tons of parameters and with in bigquery you can see all of those events all of those parameters what's coming up so your your imagination is is the limit here as far as you can imagine you can put it you will be able to track it and conduct your analysis i have mainly e-commerce clients but one law firm clean gender yeah so you'll have to lead gen most likely is going to be the thank you page of contact us page right you will track that and you don't even have to do those with gtm and there are ways in google analytics for interface to convert pages into index uh conver conversion events or goals or whatever you want to call them and then for e-commerce definitely there will be coding or there will be gtm implementation required because it will be dependent on data layer where you're getting the product values you're getting the whole you know checkout process so in that case you will need to put that in gtm it's not enabled in ga4 by default yet so here's your big query linking if you guys haven't done big query linking go through my video that is available on this channel or if you are part of if you are already a member of optics and academy then you will find a bigquery course that walks you through step by step on how to get this linking done and then you can start to see your data in google in bigquery i'm gonna actually go to bigquery and see if i can so big query you guys can still see my screen right if you don't then let me know so here in bigquery you can see i'm passing an option test project and you have event level data and you can do query table right here here you can see all the events when when event happened time spent all the parameters that are being passed you can have your custom parameters campaigns and threads any custom parameters that you pass you will be able to see them right here and then you have the values for those etc i did a full session on this whole thing to show you how you can start to see these values and what can you do with them but i'm gonna go in depth in my workshop so you can see everything that's possible so even though canned reports are not there you have hit level data every single action that's happening or being tracked is here you can create your own reports with bigquery that is with google data studio so all you have to do is configure these in google data studio the way you want and everything is available to you and this combined with your analysis hub ah where did it go right here that is where you can find everything so you can go ahead and construct your analysis up very interface is very much like google data studio and those who are used to adobe analytics might be familiar with this its interface is mirrors not exactly but very similar to how adobe analytics workspaces work in adobe analytics also you rely on these reports you construct the report the way you want rather than relying on canned reports those scanned reports are very limited here you can pick and choose and decide what kind of events what kind of parameters or those events what audience i want to see in my report so it can be it's very customizable i'm going to read few more questions here will a recording of this live be available yes it will be available i if you are registered on option academy for this session then you will receive an email with that session if not you can come back to the channel and it will be available here as well and those who are members it actually also is available in one of the courses where i uh compile all the live sessions i have conducted there are about 20 plus live sessions that i have conducted not on google analytics for but their various topics right so we cover experimentation digital analytics um you know all sorts of tools like google analytics for gtm et cetera all those live sessions are available in the course as well uh okay okay you are seeing my screen crew how are gtm tags different from ga4 i'll answer that karen and then douglas this integration to bigquery is limit to ga4 only yes uh so i'm gonna ask uh answer douglas says question first yes previous version of universal analytics you had to use third-party tools or integration wasn't easy right and it was limited like you would use super metrics or something to connect or you'll write your own code to get those apis this is native integration in bigquery and that is how i'm thinking they are using this say you are an analyst you have the data in different places bigquery you have the data here in analysis hub go configure the way your business stakeholders want this report so that integration is native now one thing i'll caution you there is a there is a free version of bigquery that you can use there that has some limits uh and it's there is also a paid version where if you have too much data and you're collecting everything you might have to pay and that cost can escalate pretty quickly i've seen horror stories about that so you have to manage what you want to put in bigquery as i saw uh showed you here this is a daily thing right this one is a daily event log everything that's happening by every user so if i bring in third party data i can even know exactly who that user is who did these things on my site so i can have but particularly saying hey douglas did these things on my site because i have douglas's information somewhere in my crm i have a user id that i can track douglas to and then i have every single activity that wasn't possible in universal analytics well it was possible but you had to do some other processing there and also there is this one is intraday so what happens here is as data is coming in every single hit with within few seconds shows up here so i can do real time debugging if i want so i can put this enable this in my bigquery integration and then i can see as the data comes in right right away yeah that says yes we use uh super metrics yeah so with bigquery no need to do uh super metrics everything is here all right going back to karen's question how are gtm texts different for ga4 so gtm is a container and rule enabler if you think about that it doesn't have tags by itself you enable those tags and say i want to track this tag and then pass that information to whichever analytics solution you want that is a direct integration with google altec so you say if user does this i'm going to pass this information to google analytics that's how it works when you can choose to pass that to say facebook pixel if you would like like hey people scroll i want to pass this event to facebook that's up to you so gtm does not have any tag you enable tags and triggers when do you want to log certain thing in gtm it's up to you ga4 is specific to google analytics for tags so you can put them on page i want to track these things in google analytics for you can put them directly on your page or you can say i'm not going to put anything on page why because anytime i have to make a change i have to go through my developers and it's going to cost me time and money so i am going to enable those via gtm gtm is just an enabler it does not store any data it does not fire anything by itself you tell it what you need to fire when and it will just pass the information from one place to another that's it it's a container it's a rule enabler so hopefully that answers karen if not there are certain videos that go through like gtm if you are not familiar and more than happy to answer your questions i also conduct uh office hours generally i open them to general public it's open for my students but i sometimes i do open them to general public if you have any specific question and the question is interesting that i would like my students to know about that as well so i open it and invite others as well all right so what else let me check here what else was i was going to cover okay bounce rate we covered now other thing that people want to know is where is my segmentation in in google analytics for right so i'm gonna go back here and where you see audience you can create new audience segments right here so you have a create a custom audience you have some templates here so let's say if i want to look at people who are within age and then i pick these age ranges so that is my segment and once that segment is created you can give a name and then you can save that and that audience will be available so if i go back right here here are my segments i created this mobile user segments so now i can see mobile users how they are performing on the site that's the audience that i'm using so that's where the segmentation is available all right i got another question from banduria complete beginner here should i use the old ga or ga4 we answered that question early on i think maybe you just joined here use both you can watch the session replay and where i talked about the differences here but use both and learn both g old ga is not going anywhere for a few years as far as i can tell people are so used to it i even had seen like you know as i was mentioning before like so many experts are freaking out on this thing like ga4 ga4 it's not ready it's not ready so they're gonna continue to use old ga companies are not going to move there is a different way of thinking the metrics won't align that's another big difference your numbers won't align if you look at both of those systems numbers won't align why there is a different way of how sessions are calculated in one word versus other there is minor difference and also you know when they collect hits those collectors in ga4 they are sent later so you will see some of those hits might come up later and that'll cause the difference in the numbers so there are certain differences i have an e-book that's available and i can drop that link here as well on 10 things to watch i think or i don't know exact title but i talk about the differences in ga4 and universal analytics i'll drop the link in here as the comment and also send out to those who haven't who have registered on uh optician academy for this uh this session if you haven't registered for that session and do you want to get uh the email with links then drop me an email and i'll tell you where to get those okay okay we are a training institute when you're stuck says here and i want to know what my best audience in what what my best audience is that is something you will have to analyze there are several ways of analyzing it use analysis hub use bigquery create audience so if you if i were you i would go in and start looking at these audience segments to slice and dice the data first let's just go and look all up users what are they doing where they are then i would go and use my analysis hub to start putting some reports together again it starts with business question who's my best audience right what do you mean by best people who are converting people who are consuming the courses people who are signing up define those what's best then look at those end actions make sure they are tracked properly that was one of the questions that came up what should i be tracking you need to track those and then once you have those you use analysis hub that'll be your first place to start this is where you can explore there are several templates available if not you can create something from scratch and start putting your stuff here segments that are available to you event names metrics you drag and drop and you can start to find them if you're interested in knowing how to use analysis hub again the details are available in the course but i'm more than happy to walk you through if you just want to have session and show up on my office hours just let me know okay uh i'll go through your training offering and reach out if i still have questions karen cool yeah thank you and right now by the way i'm gonna plug it in again uh i am running a promotion right now so that promotion uh it's a seven day trial for dollar one so you can try that and also there is i believe there is a coupon that expires i think this week now just send me an email i'll send you that and uh you just reach out to me at anil optigent.com or batra online gmail.com both will work right here i heard this but here you have a single user for your own site uh i didn't get simple user i didn't get that what do you mean by simple user for your for our own site if you can explain me i'll be able to answer that do you think ga4 is better than universal ga for e-commerce site based on funnels like courses or coaching sites i'm curious about the funnel analysis in ga4 i don't think it's uh ga4 is better universal antics for uh universal ga works fine here you can have much more information so funnel analysis again is one of the exploration techniques that you can do right here so if you go and check out you will be able to do right here so you pick that and you can pick your steps this is more customizable in that sense so i would say play with it see how you feel maybe you'll find like for your particular use case this works better i think in my opinion ga4 is much more flexible much more extensible you can bring in data you can customize it that wasn't possible in universal analytics universal analytics was black box you know you had all the data that's aggregated etc in here you you need to know how to aggregate but the flexibility is there tons of ways to slice and dice the data and that's why i'm a big big fan of where ga4 is now how the product evolves i do not know what they have in mind i do not know what i i am looking at so far i love it and it's just which i mentioned earlier it's just a different way of thinking so once you get hang of it you'll you'll start to appreciate what it brings okay thanks for the link to the ebook cool uh best is equal to paying customers yeah if you have paying customers if that's what you call them best whether they consume your courses or not and if somebody's paying that's easy to do how many people paid and then you have purchaser there is actually already audience segment called create call purchasers people who have made a purchase you can just slice the data based on that and see who the purchasers are now you want to know and this is where the course that we have goes in and say what makes a person purchaser what are the type of things that are indicator of person becoming a purchaser that's an important aspect to know right not possible in universal analytics in google analytics 4 with the data that you have at that level i can tell you which events somebody let's say you have five pdfs you have videos on your site you have page scrolls on your site you're tracking bunch of events i can tell you which series of events or which events are likely predictor of somebody becoming a purchaser so what can you do with that information you can make sure your users see those events or dose the actions let's say that i'll take a very very simple use case you have five pdfs download this ebook download that ebook and then you figure out ebook number three with your algorithm you can figure out people who download ebook number three and ebook number five end up purchasing one two and four don't have any impact what are you gonna do with that information you can use that information to make sure in your sequence people get to see three and five early on maybe right and that drives your action that's the level of insights you can get and then take action on and this is a very very simple use case maybe in those pdfs you have user attributes then you can say people who download three and are from us and you are in this agent are likely to purchase become a purchaser that's even deeper inside all that's possible by data that's sitting in google analytics for you just need to know how to use it how to bring those insights and those insights have to be tied back to your business uh questions that you're trying to answer that is how you conduct your analysis here lots of information you don't have to you know that course i'm talking about is we go in machine learning to use that you don't have to use machine learning even like if you just pull the data in excel or just in bigquery if you don't want to use bigquery pull it in you know like i said excel or data studio and you can conduct some of those analysis but there is a lot more for analysts here not so much if you are the end user you will have to rely at this point on an analyst to pull that information unless you want to go and figure out these things on your own okay where when are your office hours sorry i'm not a data pro that's fine i will send if you are there i will send an email you'll receive an email all the users do receive an office hours are there and sometimes it's open to public sometimes it's not so i'll let you know when it's open to public this is exactly what i want to know when the where the weakest link to fix as well yeah so you can know that information in ga4 now i'm not conducting complete gf and ga4 deep dive insights but those are the kind of things that i will discuss in my bigquery course because the data is in bigquery or even you can use analysis hub those who don't want to venture and say i'm not a sql guy if you're not and you're an analyst i highly recommend that you become a sql guy at least know enough to know sql i mean no enough to write basic sql you don't have to be an expert because analysis a lot of analysis depends on that data it's like multi-channel data that's coming in uh not ga or ga4 it's just one piece of the puzzle a lot of insights come from the other data sources your email system that's sending emails your crm solution that's tracking uh you know customer relationship etc like when did you acquire the customer what did they do call center data all that stuff actually influences users behavior so if you know how to bring them together how to conduct analysis more power to you you'll be invaluable asset or valuable asset to your organization okay this is exactly okay ga4 has sampling i believe it does have sampling i'm not sure about the limit so that's a question i will find out i'll try to find out what depth of sampling does it have but i will let you know you can email me and i can find out about that all right moving along what other things are there so there is segmentation we talked about and then there is also this admin panel i want to show you you know those who are used to old ga they were like hey i had this capability to do internal filtering ip filtering etc where is that all those things are now part of your data stream settings when you go here more tagging settings this is one which is kind of hidden and very hard for people to realize it's even there click on it and you can see various odd things that you can do with your tags you can modify the events that are being tracked so let's say you track an event in gtm but you realize it's not the right one you can make the changes here or you want to modify something about that the values etc but here is internal ip you know filtering you can set your ips by creating a rule here and when you create this rule all these ips that match this rule are tagged as this value that you assign as an event parameter then once you're done with that you can go back and filter those out in your settings so you go data settings i believe and data filters this is where you set and say traffic type internal that's the parameter i set in the previous one and i want to exclude this traffic or include this traffic this is where you can set those values so things are a bit scattered they are there they're just in different locations so once you kind of get idea about where things are it'll become very easy for you to navigate bigquery i mean sorry google analytics 4. all right what else can i cover any other questions let me go back to my stream i think i uh where did it go all right any other questions i can cover this is all i had so one thing i would say if there are no more questions go ahead and set this linking up that's one and then you have these data filters that people keep asking where do i filter internal traffic you know that that's available here data stream is how the data is coming so you can check all these settings these are already tracked and then more tagging settings are right here so you have you can remove unwanted referrals you can configure this is for cross domain tracking you can put that domains that you want to track as one in one property here you can even create or modify events so you can even create new events right here you you don't have to create everything there if there are page level events you can create them right here thank you page i can just go ahead and create that event name equals page view etc and then condition is whatever the parameters i want to use cool another question that actually i keeps coming up is a lot of people put when e-commerce tracking and particularly a bunch of you mentioned e-commerce tracking and legion when you're tracking your events one of the events might be hey purchase happened a purchase event or it might be a legion thank you page that you're tracking as an event you might want to pass value to it like what is that dollar value or whatever currency you google analytics for documentation actually it's not there yet yeah i think they're working on it and it'll be there but it's not clear to a lot of people which is what i see most of the time they will put a value of that event so purchase event let's say somebody purchased uh 100 worth of stuff they'll put 100 and that's in when they're configuring in google tag manager they'll put in 100 but and then that won't show up in monetization right here it won't show up in this report and the reason it doesn't show up like it's not the reason it doesn't show up in those reports is because you're missing a currency value default value the google analytics 4 documentation says that default value is usd however even if you're using usd you have to pass that currency value or currency code in your tracking otherwise your e-commerce data is not going to show up so those who are setting it up keep that in mind okay i've got another question here from daria i am so new on ga i started with ga4 but everywhere i see universal analytics courses i couldn't find very large ga4 courses should i start with universal or should i learn what else you haven't checked options academy courses then that is the largest ga4 course you will see it's the master class i have a beginners and master class master class is everything that i know is available or will be available if it's not available then you have access to me via my office hours so if anything you get stuck you ask me and i keep bringing those things and anything that will be you know our clients are using or i'm coming across in forums everything is translated into a lecture that's available in that master class so you don't have to look anywhere else every problem everything will be covered in that it's not covering everything yet but my promises it'll be there and if it's not there i am here to help so check those out and uh if you need to know more details send me an email i'm just going to put my email here so you can have that or you can check out and to answer your question should i start with gf4 uh i've been sorry universal analytics you should learn both if you are starting out many companies are still going to be using universal analytics for so don't discard that you still need to learn it but if you those who learn ga4 will be way ahead of most of the people in the industry like even forget this is a reset people are expert in google analytics google analytics 4 is a completely new ball game in terms of technical stuff so it's a reset this is your opportunity to actually master it and become one of those experts really early on companies who are seeking ga4 experts are looking for people who can help them so whether you as a freelancer want to get grab these opportunities or there is a you know somebody employer hiding you have a huge opportunity to actually become one of those early adopters of the tool and become expert at it so learn both what if we are not wanting to use usd but yes you then in no you're not forced to use usd then you just put your currency as gbp what i meant by that is in e-commerce you have to put your currency code otherwise your revenue is not going to show up so that's what i meant by that most of the people who are doing tracking in usd forget to add that they just assume it's default and it'll show show up but it doesn't okay what else can i show you guys here anything else you want to see but those are the very very common questions that i see all the time people uh keep asking this again and again in forums so i thought i'll conduct this session to demystify those answer those questions so it's clear and you don't have to ask those questions again okay i agree with karen i like the option of various views oh did i miss a question from karen oh oh i missed few of the questions all right let me just go back here uh if you are already using enhanced ecommerce tracking do you bother with the purchase completed goal if you are already using some of the event names some of the things have changed so if you're going to be using gf4 use ga force recommended list of events and parameters so check those out your previous one will continue to work one big change is views is gone how would you uh compensate in ga4 from multiple country sites or to group several specific sites together but not all is ua the only option yes for views are not there however again like i said you can conduct a lot of things here with your analysis of or your audience segments so maybe your audience segment is based on this template which is on the demographic information i don't know language code location country id region you can create those and then you can slice your data by that so you create let's say if you want to create those users right here i want to only look at specific country or region contains the value and then you put the value you know i just want to look at people from washington or you can have those audience you can create all these conditions then once you have washington audience then you can slice everything based on that so here are all my washington users nobody there but that's how you can get rid of those there are certain things you can create you know with your audience you can mix and match certain things and you will have those so it's not where you have you can pick up from properties but you can create those things you play with this one analysis hub audience if you just want to stay within ga4 interface that's where you'll go and then you also have custom definitions so one of the things is you can define a lot of custom definitions here to see what kind of parameters you want to see in your events and those are available here once you create custom definition of events whatever that is and they will start to show up in analysis hub as well everything will be available here how do you set up a reader okay let me just see one more what if we are not wanting to use okay i answered that question i agree with current i like the option of various views allows me to test around without messing up my master data yes that is true uh that you can have views but you can you know have various ga4 properties available to do that to get around that if you want and that way you don't have to mess up with anything or you can track everything and then create your analysis on top of that say i want to filter this one or i want to look at only these things there are so many things you can do to like you know internal traffic that's all tag you want to do certain other things those are tagged so you have the data but this is where you're playing and now in analysis hub is where you're conducting all those analysis again different way of thinking because there you have set defined reports you can go to here it's one section but you can create views that align with how you want to see the data how do you set up retargeting i haven't actually done retargeting but when you do these create custom here i believe you can do it here i haven't looked into that using ga4 so i will actually look into that and get back to you i was looking actually last night somewhere so who did ask a question benduria reach out to me i think i'll figure that out and let you know how to do that let's see if it's in here google ads linking yeah should be part of that audience you create those audience and then you segment them so you create your audience set here new audience create custom audience let me see if there is actually no it's yeah cool you send me an email all right what else so if you do have any questions after this feel free to reach out to me i dropped my email address those who are interested in the courses check out the courses as i said there is a seven day trial and there is also an option to get a discounted offer for ongoing membership if you want and part of that membership you get tons of courses not only ga 4 ga4 beginners ga4 master class universal analytics master class you have bigquery you have sql courses and then you get to participate in these five day challenges that we do on regular basis which are five day challenges means it in five days it gets you up to speed on a certain skill like maybe sql you take a course but you're not motivated those five days you can go through lesson by lesson you can learn and get up to speed just 30 minutes a day maximum it takes python we've conducted python classes we've conducted gtm classes google data studio classes on those five day challenges so you get to participate in those as well and those who want to go further there is a data science program that i have which walks you through how to use marketing data google analytics for data to find those in insights create machine learning and machine learning algorithms so you can conduct deeper analysis that course is also available uh on on the site but that's not part of the membership so there are membership covers these on-site uh sorry pre-recorded courses there are programs that we run on two or three times in a year which actually walks you through everything that you need beyond those courses to make you a full-on web analyst or data sign data sciences for marketing analysts all right hopefully you guys enjoyed this session if you did make sure to give it a thumbs up to this video i will send out uh the replay of this session once it's done it's compile i'll send a link so that you guys can see that or replay and if you have any questions don't hesitate to reach out to me you've got my email address cool thank you guys i'm going to give you a few more seconds to ask any question if not then i'll end the stream how did you like it comments benjuria pretty interesting thank you thank you for attending yes cool all right guys i'll see you next week with another session uh and make sure to sign up so that you can be notified when we go live every thursday pretty much every thursday is when we try to conduct a session and we've conducted about 20 or so so far make sure to watch those replays while you're on the channel or bookmark it so that you can see those and sometimes it's me running these sessions sometimes it's i bring in other experts and uh work with them to conduct these sessions so these sessions are generally very interactive not like your regular webinars where you just listen here you get to participate and sorry sometimes when i'm saying the name here reading those i might mispronounce your name so i apologize for that but i try to bring all the audience into the mix so that you feel part of this whole session it's an interactive session rather than one-way communication cool karen thank you this has been great karen is very helpful damn it tell me dope very helpful sorry maybe if i'm mispronouncing your name pandoria last question should you have a place for each site or have them all under one dashboard that again depends on your business are they all connected are they all separate sites if they're all separate sites keep them separate or if they're all part of the same ecosystem user jumps from one to another they're part of the same tracking because you want to know how people are going between back back and forth on those and then daria it was great thank you thank you everybody and i will see you next week those who want to enroll in the course that have more questions send me an email if you have any kind of question feel free to reach out to me bye you

Channel: Optizent Digital Marketing and Analytics Academy

Views: 543

Rating: 4.8000002 out of 5

Keywords: google analytics 4, ga4, google analytics, google analytics for beginners, google analytics 4 tutorial, event tracking ga4, ip filtering google analytics, upgrading to google analytics 4, how to use google analytics 4, google analytics vs google tag manager, ga4 vs ua, google analytics tutorial, ga4 events, recommended events google analytics 4, enhanced measurement google analytics 4, google analytics 4 events

Id: X_MKHGdQ5fk

Length: 72min 55sec (4375 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021