Google Analytics 4 tutorial 2021 (1 hour GA4 course)

if you are just starting with google analytics 4 this video is exactly what you need i will show you how to get started with ga4 i will show you the interface the reports and how to launch your first setup [Music] hey my name is julius and welcome to analytics mania youtube channel where you can learn google tag manager and google analytics and if you want to stay up to date with google analytics 4 consider subscribing it doesn't matter if you are completely new to google analytics or if you are trying to migrate from universal analytics to ga4 there are many topics to learn and this video will help you with that you will learn things like how to properly create and configure ga4 property we will take a look at their interface reports you will learn how to install google analytics for how to track your first events how to configure conversions and more and to make your learning journey more efficient and faster at the end of this video i will share additional tips and i will show the direction of what to learn next this will help you avoid wasting a lot of time if you are completely new to google analytics and you have never created or had access to any google analytics account in the past then you should log into your google account and then go to analytics.google.com now the interface of this page might look different but basically you should keep looking for some button that says login sign up or in my case this is start measuring so once i click that button then i will be asked to create a new account now this is a google analytics account but if in the past you had at least one universal analytics property and you notice analysis in this case is the older version of ga then you should log into that account and then go to admin in this section you should click create account in this first column and then you will see pretty much the same view that i showed before when i was just creating a new account now keep in mind that google analytics 4 is under heavy development and it is always updated with some new features so if you see some discrepancies between my video and what you see in the interface try to do your best to try to find how to replace those differences or maybe you can just check the description of this video because maybe i will have some updates right there and if you still struggle then post a comment under the video and i will try to help you so what we are doing here is that we are creating a google analytics account in other words this account is for a business so for example if you're working for a particular company then you can enter your company's name right here so let's say that for example i will enter analytics mania right here then you can read all these data sharing settings for example you can send some anonymous data to google analytics that will help you with benchmarking basically you can leave all of these settings as they are and click next now we are going to create a property so a property in google analytics is kind of like a website or a set of websites or in other words entities that belong to your business if your business has a blog the main website then the support page and you want to see all of that data of how visitors engage with those websites and you want to see that data of all those websites in the same reports then you should create one property that will collect data of all those websites so here you can enter things like all websites or main website blog etc then you have to choose the reporting time zone so if you are in the united states then select the time zone that belongs to the united states if you are from another country choose another one because this affects how data is calculated and displayed in your report so in my case i will choose lithuania and then you have to choose the currency so for example if my business operates in euros then i would select euros i would do like this but if your business accepts multiple currencies for example some people might purchase in euros others in dollars others in canadian dollars or something else then you still have to choose the main currency so for example if i choose the us dollars like this and someone makes a purchase in canadian dollars and you send that purchase to google analytics then google analytics will convert the amount of canadian dollars to the us dollars but in this case let's say that i will choose euros then let's take a look at the advanced options if you don't check the advanced options you will create only a google analytics 4 property but as of the moment of recording this video it is still recommended to use both versions of google analytics at the same time so in other words you should use the google analytics four property and install it on a website and also you should install a separate older version which is called universal analytics in this tutorial i will be focusing on ge4 but occasionally here and there i will still mention universal analytics so if you want to automatically create a universal analysis property as well you should click this right here and then enter the url of your website in my case i will be using this demo website so i will enter it like this but without https because it is right here and then you should keep this option enabled which is create both ga4 and universal knowledge properties now these two properties or in other words these two versions are completely separated and different so if you send data to ga4 that data will not be sent to universal analytics because we are going to use google tag manager to install these tools they are like two different buckets to different systems so if you want to run these tools at the same time or in other words in parallel you will have to install them separately so keep all the other options as they are and then click next then you will see some questions right here but they are not required so if you want you can answer them or you can just skip them and click create then you will have to accept terms of service by choosing your country and then accept so now what happened is that google analytics has created two separate properties for me if i click here to go back here i am in the admin and here we have the account or in other words the business so if i work in a digital agency then i should have a separate account for each client and then here we have properties so one property is for websites and i will be using ge4 and the other property is also for my websites and i will be using universal analyst property in the future it will be enough to have just ga4 property but as i've said right now there are some features that are still not available in ge4 but they are available in universal analytics so you should run them both at the same time but if you're watching this further in the future and you're not sure whether you just use g4 or both you can post a comment below the video with a question like is it still necessary to have both of them and i will answer now let's take a quick look at the admin of google analytics for so we have two columns one is for the account as i've said this is a business and then we have a property so this is where we are going to store the data about user engagement on our website on the account level you can manage things like users if you have multiple properties in the same account and you want a certain user to access all of those properties you can create that user on the account level and then give all the permissions to all the properties of that particular account and if we take a look at the property we have many more settings and a lot of them are very important so for example if you want to get started with the setup and you don't know what to do next then you can click on the setup assistant and you will see some tips what could be configured in your setup then if you want to change the currency or the reporting time zone you can go to property settings then we have property user management and then one of the most important things is data streams data stream is a flow of data coming from your apps or your websites so if you click right here you will see that you already have one data stream created because when you create a new property data stream is also created if you don't see any streams right here then you should click add stream and then select from where do you want to get the data in this tutorial i will be focusing only on web tracking and in fact this stream is also web stream if you click on a data stream you will see some additional settings right here you will also see a thing called enhanced measurement now this is available in the website stream and the purpose of this is to give you some automatic event tracking capabilities or in other words when enhanced measurement is enabled and google analytics 4 is installed on a website ga4 will be automatically tracking the following interactions scrolling when someone clicks a link that redirects a visitor to some external resource site search video engagement or in other words youtube video engagement if you have some videos embedded on your site and file downloads maybe in the future the list of these events will increase but right now as of the moment of recording this video i have these interactions also you can see things like your measurement id your tracking codes but we will return to this part a bit later in this video now one more thing before we move away from the admin is data retention so you should go to data settings and data retention by default google analytics 4 collects data only for two months and if you have older data than two months that older data will be deleted which is kind of a bummer so if you want to extend this retention you should go to data settings data retention and change from two months to 14 months and then click save if you want you can also explore other options and in the future you will probably see more options than i have right now but i mean these were the most important for this particular moment now let's take a look at the interface of other parts of google analytics 4 and after we do that we will learn how to install our own setup and how to track our first events so on the sidebar at the bottom left corner you can expand this and you will see sidebar menu right here unfortunately if i go to any of these reports they will be empty because this is a new fresh property and i haven't even installed it yet so if you want to play around with real reports with real data there is a thing called ga4 demo properties and anyone with google analytics account can get access to that below this video you will find a link to the demo account help page and on this page you will have to click access demo account link right here and after you click this link you will get access to three google analytics demo properties one is for universal analytics and two properties are related to ga4 so once you claim access to that account you will be able to find it by clicking right here and then entering the word demo and you will find it it will be named as demo account and here you will find three properties in this case let's choose ga4 google merchandise store this data is coming from a real google merchandise store where you can buy various merch of google and we can see that we already have some data like revenue users new users and even how many people have visited the site in the last 30 minutes so let's start from top to bottom here i am in the home so this is the home page of your google analytics for property here we have several widgets with different data points we have users you can click here and then move to new users you can click on revenue and see how the revenue was changing also here we have a widget related to real-time reports and if you click it you will then navigate to the real-time section right here then we have a block which is called insights so google analytics 4 is trying to depend more on the machine learning capabilities therefore it tries to give you various insights that hopefully will help you find some issues or find some opportunities this part is still not perfect but we hope to see some improvement later in the future so here are some insights right here if you want to see all insights you can click right here and then you can see all of them the more data you have the more insights you will get and if you want to take a closer look at some of the insights you can click right here for example organic traffic drove most of the conversions last month so i can click it and i can see right here you can give some feedback well this was not super useful but also some insights give you a notices about anomalies or unexpected spikes in your data so that is also quite useful and speaking of spikes here is one insight that says that certain segment of my traffic spiked last week i can click it and then i can try to identify maybe this was intended or maybe i was attacked by some spam bots that generated a lot of fake data so once you have this information then you can try to dig deeper into other reports and try to identify whether this is an actual problem or whether this is a success of some marketing campaign if you want to go back to home you can click on this icon again or you can click on this link right here then you can click the insights if you want to revisit the insights you can also click on this icon and here you will find more widgets that might give you some general overview of what is happening then let me quickly expand this sidebar once again and then we can go to the real time so real time in this case shows the data of what was happening on your website in the last 30 minutes if you're familiar with the real-time reports in universal analytics which is the previous version that report was showing data in the last five minutes this one is showing data from the last 30 minutes therefore numbers will be very much different here you can see users by source users by audience but let's skip the audiences right now then you have page titles or in other words on which pages were your visitors in the last 30 minutes then we have conversions event counts if you want to see other entries in this list you can just click right here and see all the events that were tracked then there is also a feature called view user snapshot so you can click it and you can drill down to some random user and you can see what that user is doing you can switch right here between the users and see what they're doing personally i'm not a big fan of this feature but maybe you will find this useful and if you want to exit the snapshot then you can click exit snapshot right here then again if we take a look at the list of events you will see events like view item or add to cart begin checkout review order add shipping info so these events are not tracked automatically by google analytics because every website is coded differently therefore it's just practically impossible to track automatically all of these things so if you want to start seeing this kind of ecommerce data in your reports you will have to either implement it with google tag manager or ask someone to implement this for you or maybe there is some plugin for your content management system that you can just install and that plug-in will start pushing data to the ga4 so this is not very simple however when it comes to more basic events like you know form submissions clicks then you can definitely track that on your own with help of google tag manager and some of these events are in fact automatically tracked by google analytics for for example page view user engagement session start scroll then we have view search results so this one is also automatically tracked by google analytics for now let's go to the other section if you have at least some experience with universal analytics you probably know that universal news has a lot of different predefined reports well at least as of the moment of recording this video this is not the case with g4 there are still some reports but the number of those reports is much smaller therefore you will probably spend a lot of time in a section called analysis where you will be building a lot of custom analysis hub reports but now let's take a look at the acquisition so this is the section where you can see the traffic sources from which your visitors landed on your website so if we go to acquisition and overview you can see the numbers of users numbers of new users then you can see countries you can see users by user medium user source so this section shows the initial traffic sources that acquired your user so this means that when a user for the first time landed on your website this was their traffic source and if you care about sessions then session mediums or session sources or campaigns they are visible right here so if the same user generated two sessions on your website and one session came from the organic google search and the other one came from email then you will have two sessions right here one is organic and the other one is obviously email if you want to take a closer look at this particular report for example session source medium then you click right here and then you can go to v traffic acquisition and here you will see some additional metrics like users sessions then you will see engagement rate how many events were done per that session then you can check how many conversions and what kind of conversions were made from these traffic sources for example you can switch and see purchases and see which traffic sources drove the most purchases and obviously how many purchases then let's go to engagement and here you can see the overview and then you will see the event data but only of a particular event which is page view or screen view event if you are also tracking data from your mobile devices so first let's take a look at the overview here you will see some widgets but honestly i don't spend a lot of time in this section instead you could go to the events and here you will see your most popular events and some additional data like the event count total users in table reports like this you can also use search so for example if you're looking for a certain event like add to cart then you can enter it hit enter and then you will find that event right here if you want to see more rows then you can add more rows right here you can jump to the certain page of the report also here is pagination you can click on that particular event and then see some additional data although i have to admit that at this moment this kind of drill down is not as good as it could be and then if you want to take a look at page view events you can go to pages and screens by default this table shows the page title and screen class dimension but personally i don't like it i always prefer seeing the urls of the pages therefore i just can click right here and change the dimension so dimension is basically this first part right here and every row is a dimension so home page then some other page so in this case i can just click right here and switch to page path and screen class and now i can see views and users and all the other metrics based on the url because from my experience page urls don't change that often compared to page title therefore reports based on page paths are more reliable for me if you want you can also add a thing called secondary dimension so for example one column right here is page path or screen class and then we can choose device category right here so we will have either tablet mobile or desktop by default g4 reports show the data of the last four weeks but if you want to change the date range then you can click right here and then select from other options or just select something by yourself like from here to here and then once you click apply that date range will be applied to your analysis then let's go to another section which is monetization so here you can see the revenue part of your business you can see the total revenue you can see the e-commerce revenue also you can see the number of total users who have purchased something and the last let's say four weeks and also you can see the number of first-time purchasers then we have average purchase revenue per user here we have your most popular items that were purchased and if you click right here you can then go to the list of the products that were purchased if you want you can switch the dimension right here and you can change this item name to something else for example you can see what kind of item brand was the most popular and in the metrics column you can see how many times was that product displayed how many times was that product added to cart then we have the number of purchases where this product was included then the item revenue and some additional metrics so when i was in the overview and clicked that link i was actually redirected to this e-commerce purchases section right here then if you're working with some mobile apps and you track that data right here and you offer in-app purchases then you could try to track them right here but this property is just for the website so there is no data related to in-app purchases then we have the retention section but i would recommend skipping it for now because i personally just don't believe in the accuracy of this data and for beginners this is just too difficult so let's skip the retention part then let's go to the demographics section you can go to overview and here you will see your user numbers based on the country then on city gender if you have enabled google signals also interests then you can click on demographic details and you will see some additional information right here as always you can change the dimension and choose something else and see how your numbers stack up then we have the technology part here you can see data like the platform so in this case we have just data coming from the website but if i switch to another g4 demo property which is flooded this is a property for a mobile game so if i click it you will see that the data is coming from three platforms we have android users ios users and also we have web users so website basically is just a demo website where people can learn more about the app and just click to download now let me go back to that merchandise store also we have things like users by operating system by device category and then some additional widgets that you might find useful and if you want to go a bit more detailed then you can click on tech details and you will see again that table where you can drill down and change some dimensions add some secondary dimensions and see what kind of data do you get then we go to the events section so here we have conversions and events click on conversions and this is the list of the most important events for your business and if you're working with mobile apps then there are some additional events like i think first install or something like that i don't remember but basically there is a list of predefined built-in default conversion events and then if you want you can turn any other event in your setup and mark it as a conversion so when you do that then google analytics 4 starts understanding that this event is more important than some other events so for example if someone subscribes to your newsletter then google analytics 4 will know that this event is more important than let's say scrolling but for now let's skip this part because i will later explain in this video how to configure your first conversion then we go to events this is the list of events that were sent to your property however keep in mind that this report does not refresh in real time so if you send some new event you will probably start seeing it only the next day so if we take a look at the events that were sent from the google merchandise store these are the events we have at payment info at shipping info add to cart and all the other stuff some of these events are tracked automatically like scrolling or page view and some of them were sent from the website maybe by developers or maybe by google tag manager or something else later in this video after we install google analytics 4 i will show you how to track your first events then analysis section this is a more complex part of google analytics 4 but it is also more powerful and you will probably find yourself spending more of your time right here so once you expand the analysis you should go to analysis hub and in the demo account you will find several predefined reports right here and i have also played around in the past so i see several reports right here so let me quickly delete on this trash from the past and let's take a look at some reports that are created as examples in this demo property you won't see them in your new property but just for inspiration we can take a look right here so for example here we can click on shopping behavior funnel and you will see the funnel of how visitors are behaving on your website and that behavior is related to e-commerce so we see how many users saw at least one item then how many users added at least one product to a card and then how many users made a purchase and you can see this sliced based on the device category if you built this report on your own then you could add even more steps for example you can also include all the checkout steps and to see where that major drop occurs then if i go back and then click let's say on the checkout behavior funnel this is another funnel report where we can see how the users behave when they move from the or actually the begin checkout to the purchase so we see that there is a large drop off between the billing and shipping and the review most likely this happens because after i entered the shipping information some additional tax was added therefore people just did not make a purchase then there's another type of report which is called pathing so if you click on this demo you can see how people were moving from one page to another page to another page and maybe this will give you some ideas of what is happening also a cool thing in pathing which was not available in universal analytics is that you can build path from the end or in other words you can select the purchase and then you can go backwards from the purchase and see what visitors did before the purchase in fact we can do a quick example so i go back here and then i click path analysis then i click start over and then i can select the ending point and here i will select the event name which is purchase so i use the search and enter purchase and then i go backwards and see what my visitors were doing before that event right here then speaking of other analysis techniques you can have a table which is an exploration report then we have segment overlap so you can include several segments and see if some people are overlapping and maybe this will give you some ideas then we have cohort analysis user lifetime report and if you want to learn for example how to work with funnel reports and exploration reports i will post some additional videos below this video now let's move to audiences section and here you can create audiences that you can later use in your google ads campaigns but unfortunately in this demo account i don't have enough permissions to create audiences so if i went back to the account that i have created just for this video and then i click new audience while being in the audiences section here i could enter some conditions in order to isolate a particular group of people obviously this new property has no data but i just want to show you some general principle of how to work with this so if you want to create a custom audience let's say of people who have added any product to a cart but did not make a purchase so in that case i could include all users where event name is add to cart like this and then i would like to exclude users who made a purchase so event is purchase like this and then this audience would return all users who have added something to a card but never purchased and then i would create this audience and i could link it to google ads and use it as an audience in my campaigns if you want to learn more about how to link google ads and how to reuse this audience then i will post links to some additional resources below this video also once you collect more data about the interactions that your users are doing on a website you can unlock a new type of audience which is predictive so once you click new audience in the audiences section you will see a new tab which is predictive you can click it and here you will see some audiences that will be using machine learning capabilities to identify certain people for example those people who are likely to buy in the next seven days obviously i still don't have enough data but if you're working with some larger accounts or properties in google analytics for then you should see some of these audiences unlocked and then you can create them and target them now let's go back to the ge4 demo property and below the audiences you will see custom definitions so if you are sending some parameters to google analytics for for example you know you send an event which is named click but you also want to send data about that click like what url was clicked what was the text of a button or something like that then you will need to register those parameters as custom dimensions and later in this video when we track our first events i will show you how to use this section and then finally we have a debug view which is a pretty cool addition to google analytics 4 so when you are testing your implementation you can go to the debug view and you will see a very granular data flow coming from your device well obviously right now we have a lot of debug devices right here but when you will be working with your device most likely you will be seeing just your device's data and in that case you will be able to see a stream of events you can click on those events and you can see what kind of information was sent on a very granular level and later in this video we will also be using this feature all right so that was enough for the overview of google analytics 4 interface and now let's take a look at how can we install it and how can we track our first events so let's go back to the ge4 property that you have created in the beginning of this video and then go to admin here i am in the ga4 properties admin section click on data streams and then you will have one data stream right here if you don't have it then you should click right here and then click web and enter all the information like the url of the website and the stream name enter the correct values because later you won't be able to change them however when it comes to this field you can just enter one valid url and you can use this stream for multiple subdomains or domains that should send the data to the same ga4 property but since in my case i already have one data stream i just click right here and here we have the measurement id in the tagging instructions section you will find instructions on how to install google analytics for on your website and there are two options one option is to cooperate with a developer and ask him or her to install this tracking code on all the pages of your website but since i'm a huge fan of google tag manager and the flexibility that it provides i always recommend choosing the google tag manager option instead and in this video we're going to do exactly that in this tutorial i presume that you already know what google tag manager is and how to install it if you are new to this then i will post a link to a tutorial below this video where i explain how to install google tag manager speaking of the google tag manager installation you should go to tag manager.google.com create a new container and then when you create a new container you will get these two tracking codes your developer should add this code to the head of the website and this code should be added immediately after the opening body tag your developer should know what it means also if you're working with some popular platform for example wordpress then you can try to find some google tag magic plugin that can do the dirty job for you for example for wordpress there is a plugin called google tag manager for wordpress so once you install it you will then just need to enter this container id into that plugin settings and then google doc manager will be installed for you so once you have created a new google doc manager account and container and these two codes are installed on a website then you should click submit do no changes and then click publish right here now you have just published your container and because of that you will be able later to preview these changes on your website in my cases i already have version six because i have used this container in the past but in your case you will see version one right here so basically what google tag manager does is that you use it as an interface to activate certain tracking codes on a website so once google tag manager is installed on your site we are going to activate google analytics tracking codes that will be sending page views and some additional events to google analytics for because your other option is to ask a developer to activate this code on all pages and then to code some additional functions that send interactions like form submissions or something else so instead of relying on a developer we are going to do this on our own so in google tag manager go to tags because tag in google doc manager is basically a tracking code that you want to activate on a site and then click new click tag configuration and here you should choose ga4 configuration so when this tag fires it must send the page view and some additional information about the page to google analytics but this tag by default doesn't know to which exact property should it send therefore we have to enter the measurement id and this measurement id can be found in the website data stream settings so go back to google analytics and while you are in the web stream details here you will see the measurement id so click this icon to copy and paste it right here now this tag should fire on all pages of your website or in other words this tag will fire on all pages where google tag manager codes are installed so in the triggering you should click on this pencil and then choose all pages so what we are doing right here is the equivalent to this recommendation where this code should be activated on the site so instead of adding this code with the help of developer we are activating this tracking code like this and now let's name this tag i usually do it like that ge4 dash and then the measurement id click save now we have to test whether this is working properly so we have to click preview button right here and this will enable the preview mode of google tag manager here i should enter the url of my website on which i want to install this google analytics 4 tag and i enter this url right here click connect now a new tab will open if this opened in a new window i would highly recommend for you to install a chrome extension which is called tag assistant companion this extension will enhance the preview mode of google tech manager and the preview mode will be opened in a new tab instead of new windows so this in the long run will be more convenient for you so once you enable the preview mode you will see that this is connected right here and also it is connected right here and in the preview mode if you click on the container loaded you will see that your google analytics 4 tag has fired if you want to learn more about how google tag manager works in general i have a quite extensive tutorial on how to get started with google tag manager and you will find a link below this video so once this tag is displayed as fired on the container loaded we have to go to google analytics 4 close this web stream details and then go to the debug view so you can expand this sidebar and then go to debug view since we have enabled google tag manager's preview mode we should start seeing our data right here since we are working with a new property sometimes it takes more time to start seeing that data in the report now this is an issue of google analytics 4 and i hope that this will be fixed in the future if you're using a property that has been created let's say several days ago then you should definitely start seeing your data right here also refreshing the page several times can also help because after i did that and you can see all the page views right here first page view second page view and third page view i eventually started getting the data right here in the debug view so here we have user engagement which is a standard event tracked by google analytics four we have page view so if i click on this and then go to let's say page location you will see the url of the page where i am testing my setup so if you see these events this is good this means that google analytics 4 has been installed properly also we can check some automatic event tracking so for example if you are on a website and then you scroll down to the very bottom eventually you should see the scroll event appear right here because google analytics 4 automatically tracks when a visitor scrolls below the 90 of your page height and here it is so this is the bare minimum that you can do to install google analytics for and if you want to launch this setup for all the visitors of your website you should then click submit in google tag manager once again and you can name this version for example ga4 installation and then click publish now if i go back to the workspace let's take a look at another thing that i mentioned briefly in the beginning of this video and that thing is that you can run both versions of google analytics at the same time on the website because as of the moment of recording this video it is still recommended to have both ga4 and the older version you can call it ga3 for example on the website in the near future i think that it will be enough to have just ga4 so if you're not sure whether you should start with universal analytics as well just post a comment below the video and i will answer that but now let's take a look how can you run universal analytics next to ga4 remember these two platforms are completely different therefore we have to create a new tag that will be sending data to your universal analytics property you can go to tags we are doing this in the same gtm container and then you click new tag configuration and then choose universal analytics and here you should select page view tracking type and then in the google analytics settings field you click right here click new variable and then here you have to enter the tracking id of your universal analytics property and we can do this by going to google analytics actually i can duplicate this tab so in one i will be keeping the ga4 and in the other one i will be using the universal analytics so here in the top corner i can click right here and then switch to my universal analytics property and then click on this right here then go to admin and then go to tracking info in the middle column tracking code and then copy this id right here and paste it right here you can name this ga settings then enter this id and click save now we are going to fire this tag on all pages so in the triggering section click anywhere and then click all pages we can call this ua and page view ua stands for universal analytics and hit save so now this tag will be sending data to the ga4 property and this one will be sending to universal analytics property this is the only thing in this video that i am going to do with universal analytics but if you want to track some additional events like form submissions then you will always have to do the job twice you will have to create one tag for ga4 and the other one for the universal analytics if you want to get more familiar about how to work with universal analytics and gtm then i have a google tag manager tutorial where the main tool that i'm using and i'm installing is universal analytics i will post a link to it below the video now if we want to check if this is sending data to that different property we should once again click the preview button to refresh the preview mode and now we will see that in the preview mode and container loaded event two tags have fired so if i go to the universal analytics property and then click on this stopwatch icon and go to overview you will see that this is my page view that i have sent from the website the reason why i am not diving deeper into universal analytics in this tutorial because then this video would be super long and eventually i believe that google analytics 4 will grow and will become a solution that completely and fully replaces universal analytics all right so now let's go back to the ga4 property or you know let's go back to the website and i will show you another automatic event tracking feature in google analytics for so on this website i will go to this page and then i will go to outbound link click tracking on this page i have one link that redirects to an external resource from this url it will redirect a user to another page which is analyticsmania.com now in google analytics 4 there is a feature called enhanced measurement that i have already mentioned several times before so if you go to data streams and click on the data stream and then click on this icon then you will see that ga4 is capable of tracking outbound links or in other words when the link redirects to some external resource so once i click that link right here you will see that in the debug view there is an event called click i click it and here i have some additional information about that link like link url is it outbound or not then link domain so i believe that it would be really useful for me to know what kind of outbound links are clicked that's why this kind of information would be useful in my google analytics 4 reports however as of the moment of recording this video parameters like link domain or link url they are not available in the reports by default so if you want to use this and see this in reports you have to register them as custom definitions which kind of doesn't make sense because this parameter is tracked automatically by the built in feature in google analytics four so i would expect this to see by default but i mean maybe in the future this will be improved but right now if i want to see and use this link url parameter in my reports like analysis hub i have to register this as a dimension so i copy this link underscore url then i go to custom definitions in the sidebar of ga4 and here i click create custom dimensions here i have to enter the event parameter that i have just copied exactly like this here i can enter a friendlier name or label for this event like link url then the scope should be event and description can be empty so now i click save and then within the next 24 hours you will start seeing this parameter in your reports and you will be able to use it for example here i am in another property and i have registered this link url dimension a long time ago so if i want to go to events and then i click on the click event here i will also see an additional widget of those clicked urls right here so this is one of the place where you can see those urls that were clicked another one could be obviously analysis hub however this would go beyond the scope of this video to explain how to use analysis hub but i will post some additional links in the description of this video so this is how you can work with the built-in event tracking of google analytics 4 but also if you want you can send some additional events from your website to ga4 let's say that in this case we want to track clicks on these menu links so if i want to do that first i would have to click one of these links or in fact i can click a couple of links and i will be doing that by holding the control key on my keyboard i will click one click another one so that they would open in the new tab and then in the preview mode i should start seeing these link click events right here so i click on the first one and if i go to the variables i will have nothing related to clicks therefore we have to go to google tag manager variables and click configure next to built-in variables then enable all the click variables right here one by one and after loading and saving disappears you should click the preview button once again to refresh the preview mode now i will click the first two links once again and here i have two links right here and if i go to variables we will see that both of these links have click classes variable that contains this value like site nav link main so i will copy this and i will use it as a condition to narrow down link click tracking in google tag manager now if this sounds confusing it kind of is so if you want to learn more about click tracking in general then i will post a link to a tutorial below this video because in this particular tutorial i expect that you already have some very basics of google tag manager and you just want to start with google analytics for so once i copy this part then i go to triggers in google tag manager and create a new trigger of which type is just links and here i select some link clicks and then enter click classes contains and that part now i will name this trigger which is link click and then menu link click or something like that then hit save and now i'm going to create a tag that will send an event to google analytics anytime any of these links is clicked so i go to tags in google tag manager new tag configuration and then i enter ge for event not g for configuration but ga for event here i have to select my previously created configuration tag so this means that this tag will reuse some of the settings of the previously created ge4 tag and one of those settings is the measurement id so this tag will know to which particular property should we send the data now it's time for the event name and event name can be whatever you want because google analytics 4 is quite flexible in this case so i will name it something like menu link click and then we can send some additional parameters about that event because just having this event doesn't give you a lot of information because you might be wondering like which exact link was clicked so let's check what kind of information can we get about each of these links so let's go to the preview mode of google tag manager click any of those previous two link clicks and then we have things like click classes click id click target click text so this is the text of the link then we have click url so let's say that we want to track click text and click url so in the event parameters section i will add two rows one row for each parameter and then i will name the first parameter link url and the other one will be named link text and here we have to enter variables that contain those particular values so the first one is click text so i click the insert variable button right here and then i choose click text and here in this field we want to send the url that was clicked so we click this button again and then choose click url so every time one of these links is clicked we will activate this tag that will send the data to this particular property and then together with that event we will send these parameters so now let's go to the triggering section click on the pencil and then select the link click trigger then finally let's name this tag i name it like this g4 event and then menu link click save it then click preview and once we have refreshed this let's click continue in the preview mode and on the website i will click several links the first one the second one the third one now i should see three link click events in the preview mode i click the first one the tag has fired and it succeeded then on the other two events the tag has also fired because it is in the tags fired section now let's go to the debug view of google analytics four and here i will see three menu link click events right here and if i click one of them i will see link text link url and some additional automatically tracked parameters so since i plan to use link url in my report i have already registered it as a custom dimension but if i also plan to use the link text parameter which is right here then i would have to register it as a custom dimension as well so i go to custom definitions then create custom dimensions and then paste that parameter here enter the label or the name for this dimension like link text and keep the scope event safe and now within the next 24 hours i will start seeing this parameter in my reports and i will be able to use it in things like analysis hub and now one more thing related to event tracking is conversions so conversions are events or interactions that are more important to your business because let's admit it scroll tracking might be useful but to treat scroll as a conversion would not make sense at least in most cases so if you want to treat a certain event as a more important one so let's imagine that these menu link clicks are very important to us and if we want to treat them as conversions we can go to google analytics for conversions and then click new conversion event and here we have to enter the exact event name that we sent to google analytics for and in the case of menu link clicks that event name is menu underscore link underscore click so i will enter it like this menu link click and click save and from this point all of the incoming events with this name will also be treated as conversions this will not affect your older historic data so if you want to treat a certain event as a conversion you have to mark it as a conversion as soon as possible if you want to learn more about conversion tracking in google analytics 4 i have another video that you will also find in the description of this video because there are some additional things that you should know also all the incoming events that you send to google analytics for will eventually appear right here in the events section but be patient most likely it will start appearing the next day after you implement these events and after you publish your google tag manager container so if for example you want to start tracking these events of your actual users you should once again submit these changes and publish your container and then for the dessert let's take a look at some additional tagging options in google analytics for just once again keep in mind that google analytics 4 is being constantly updated and you will get new features in the future so it is a very high chance that eventually you will see some new sections in the sidebar or maybe in other parts of the ga4 interface now going back to the tagging options go to admin then click data streams and then click on your website's data stream here scroll down and you will see more tagging settings right here click it and here i see five items but i think that in the future you will see more so first of all you have a modify events and create events options the modify events option is useful if for example you get some incoming events and the event name contains a typo so instead of you know having a developer to fix the code of the website or without the need to implement changes in google doc manager you can use this option to rewrite the name of that event and change it to something else and also you can rewrite some parameters as well if you want to learn more about this feature as always i have one tutorial that you will find in the description of this video then speaking of this option you can create events directly from the interface of google analytics 4 but this option depends on the incoming data so for example every time a page is loaded you automatically track a page view event but some page views might be more important to you so for example if a visitor lands on the order confirmation page you would like to have a different event name for that which could be like thank you page view or something like that so if you want you can achieve that with the create events feature in google analytics for you can click create event and then you can do the following configuration so if the event name equals to page view and the page location parameter contains let's say order successful then you want a new event to be created in google analytics 4 which will be named let's say thank you pageview or something like that so this would work just fine if you want to learn more about this feature as well i will also post a link below the video then let's go back to the tagging options section and this option which is configure your domains is needed if you are operating between different domains so let's say that your business operates on mybusiness.com but also some websites are on another domain which is businesswebsite.com which is a different domain now if you're operating on different sub domains of the same domain you don't have to do anything but if you have two or more completely different domains and they are part of the same user journey then you should click configure your domains and enter them right here for example mybusiness.com and anotherwebsite.com something like that obviously you should enter real domains right here so what will happen after you enter settings right here is that in many cases google analytics will be able to handle when the visitor goes from one domain to another one and google analytics will be able to continue identifying that person as the same person because if you don't configure this part and the same person goes to this website and later that person goes to this website google analytics will treat that person as two different people because this is just how cookies work on the internet so you should click this button and save the configuration then you can also define your internal traffic so if you want to exclude your developers or your own traffic from the reports you can use this part and also you can list some unwanted referrals so if a visitor comes to your website then goes to the checkout then goes to some payment provider and then makes a purchase and comes back to your website you will see the traffic source let's say paypal.com but if you want to ignore paypal.com from your reports i mean your traffic acquisition reports you should include the paypal right here like this and all the referring domains that contain paypal.com will be excluded as traffic sources and in that case the traffic source will be direct and that's the end of the google analytics tutorial for beginners remember this is just a very first step in your learning journey and there are many things waiting for you ahead so if you're wondering what topics to learn next here are my two tips the first one is to learn event tracking because that is the core of google analytics 4. you will learn that by watching this video and the second topic is to start learning how to see and how to use that data in your ga4 reports that's where the knowledge of the analysis hub becomes necessary and you can start learning it right here if you found this video useful hit the thumbs up button below the video because it helps me continue working on this channel also if you want to learn more about google tech manager and google analytics consider subscribing to this channel my name is julius this is analytics mania and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Analytics Mania - Google Tag Manager & Analytics

Views: 96,830

Rating: 4.9125986 out of 5

Keywords: google analytics tutorial, google analytics 4 tutorial, google analytics 4 property, google analytics for beginners, google analytics tutorial for beginners, google analytics setup, google analytics 4 setup, learn google analytics, ga4 properties, how to set up google analytics, how to use google analytics, google analytics setup tutorial for beginners, google analytics setup 2021, google analytics 4, google analytics, how to setup google analytics, google analytics 4 course

Id: QfUSKYJz5QE

Length: 53min 27sec (3207 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021