GOOGLE ANALYTICS 4 Tutorial (2023) - Ultimate GA4 Beginner’s Guide

welcome to this google analytics 4 tutorial designed for complete beginners if you've never used google analytics before or you want to find out about the most recent version of it also known as ga4 you've come to the right place from initial setup to becoming comfortable with the interface and understanding the various reports this course will help you figure out how your customers behave how well your website content is performing and to make better marketing decisions altogether google analytics should be one of your most powerful marketing weapons whether you're running an online store a blog or a brick and mortar business as long as you have an online presence hi my name is luke duran the founder of rankingacademy.co.uk and today i'm going to show you everything you need to know to get started with google analytics 4. to make sure this course is as easy as possible i have organized it into chapters so even if you don't watch all of it today you can easily come back to it later and start again from where you left off using the timestamps on the timeline of the video if you're ready let's start with the first chapter [Music] whether you've been using the previous version of google analytics for wine called universal analytics or you are a brand new user you'll need to set up a google analytics 4 account to use the latest version i'm going to cover both scenarios so no one is left out open a browser window and head over to analytics.google.com sign in using an existing google account it doesn't have to be a gmail account any google account will do if you're a brand new google analytics user you'll be taken to the google analytics welcome page to start setting up your ga4 account click on start measuring this will take you to the start of the account setup process before continuing let's repeat these first few steps for those of you who already have a google analytics account so we'll end up on the same page go to analytics.google.com when signing in you should be taken to your existing google analytics account in the bottom left hand side menu click on admin in the first column click on create an account this will take you to the start of the ga4 account setup too everybody should now be on the same page the first thing you'll need to do is give your account a name it could be your business name your blog name whatever you feel will be easily recognizable today i'm going to create a ga4 account for one of my clients called excel electrician limited and use his business name to create the account the next step is to select what data you're willing to share with google bearing in mind the data is anonymous have a read through the various options i usually leave the default selection here click on next on the next screen you'll be asked to set up your web properties in google analytics a property is a website a mobile application a blog etc that is associated with a unique tracking id your google analytics account can contain one or more properties for the sake of this tutorial will just track my client's website data i'll just use the name of his website in the property name field set the time zone you want your reporting to be in this is important as the data that will be collected will be based on the timezone you choose since my client is located in the uk i'm going to choose united kingdom as a time zone and british bound as the currency click on next on the next screen you'll be asked to provide some information about your business such as the type of industry you're in how big your company is and so on you don't have to fill this in and you can skip to the next step if you want then click on create this will trigger a pop-up to prompt you to accept the terms of service make sure the right country is selected read the terms of service if you want then tick the radio box and click on i accept another pop-up will display on your screen asking you if you want to receive email communication such as updates and tips on how to better use ga4 announcements and so on select the ones you feel might be useful or not at all then click on next now you need to specify where the data you want to track will be coming from which is what is called the data stream if you remember you can collect data from multiple properties such as an ios app an android app or a website since i want to track the activity of my clients website i'm going to choose the web option add your website address in the website url field and the name of the stream which i'm going to call excel electrician web stream make sure the enhanced measurement option is activated this will automatically measure interactions and content on your site in addition to standard page view measurements such as page views scrolls site search and more you can customize this if you want but i would suggest you leave it as is for now then click on create stream congratulations your google analytics 4 account has now been created you should now see a summary page which recaps the information you have filled in including your stream name your stream url your enhanced measurement but most importantly your measurement id which is what you'll need to add to the tag configuration on your website using the tagging instructions you can find here this is what we're going to do in our next chapter [Music] as you've now created your ga4 account you need to insert the measurement id located on your summary page to all of your website pages so you can track the activity of your website visitors this is done through tagging your website pages with a special piece of code which acts as a container you can also find instructions on how to tag your website pages on your account summary page as you can see there are multiple ways of doing this depending on whether you already have an existing tag on your web pages or if you are using something called google tag manager i'm not going to go through all the scenarios here as it would take too long i will assume that if you already have a tag installed on your web pages or you're already using google tag manager you'll know how to add your new measurement id to them if this is the case you can jump to the next chapter using the timestamps in the timeline of the video for those of you who are completely new to this i'm going to show you the best way to tag your web pages with your google analytics measurement id using google tag manager [Music] google tag manager is a free tag management system that simplifies how you can track your website activity without having to modify the code of it to use google tag manager first you'll need to create an account head over to tag manager.google.com and log in with the account details you used when creating your google analytics 4 account in the top right hand side corner click on create account give your account a name once again here i think it's a good idea to use your business name then select your country scroll down to the container name in most cases it will be your website domain since we want to track the activity of a website the target platform will be web once you're done click on create agree to the terms and conditions then in the top right hand side corner click on yes this will take you to a page with a pop-up that displays two pieces of code which is what you'll need to add to your website the first piece of code needs to be inserted into what is known as the head of your website pages while the bottom piece needs to be added to the body of your pages if you don't manage your own website you'll need to ask whoever looks after it to add the snippets of code in the right locations i.e the head and the body of your pages if you manage your own websites through a platform like wordpress wix or squarespace or any other platform you can do it yourself very easily here is how if your website is built on wordpress log into the admin area in the left hand side menu click on plugins then click on add new search for google tag manager you should see a plugin called google tag manager for wordpress just install it then click on activate once the plugin is activated click on settings under the general tab enter the google tag manager id to retrieve your google tag manager id go back to your google tag manager account click on the admin tab in the top right hand side of the second column you'll find your google tag manager id if you've logged out of your google tag manager account log back in your tag manager id will be listed under the container id column copy it and add it to your wordpress plugin then click on save changes that's it your google tag manager has been added to your site if you are a wix user log into your wix dashboard on the left hand side menu click on marketing and seo then on marketing integrations you should see a google tag manager option in there just click on connect you will then be prompted to enter your google tag manager id go ahead and save if you are a squarespace user log in to your site from the left hand side menu click on the settings option then click on advanced finally click on code injection in the header box copy the first piece of code from your google tag manager account and in the footer box copy the second piece of code then save if your site runs on a different platform i suggest you refer to the specific instructions for it that's it your google tag manager is now created and installed on your site let's now finalize our setup and add our google analytics for tag to our tag manager so we can start measuring the activity of our website [Music] login once again into your google tag manager account from the main screen click on the container name in the main window click on new tag then click on the tag configuration panel from the sliding window select the ga4 configuration option in the measurement id field add the measurement id of your google analytics account if you forgot how to retrieve it just log into your analytics account from the left hand side menu click on admin in the property column click on data stream click on the stream you have set up you should find your measurement id in the top right hand side window copy it go back to google tag manager and paste it in the measurement id field once you're done click on the triggering panel then select the option all pages this means our tag will fire on every page of our website give your tag a name let's call this one google analytics for then click on save once you've completed these steps click on submit in the top right hand side of the window click on publish give your container a name and a description as it can help you track the history of the changes that have been made to it then click on continue wait for a few seconds that's it your tag is now installed you should now be able to track the activity of your website users the last thing you want to do is verify you've installed your tag correctly and it is sending data to your google analytics account to do this open a browser window and load the website where you've installed the tag in another window log into your google analytics 4 account from the left hand side menu click on real time you should see at least one live user and where he is located on the map which is likely to be you this indicates your tag is definitely sending data to your google analytics account don't panic if you don't see any data instantly as when you create a brand new account it may take a little bit of time to process the data in my case it took about 10 minutes before i could see live users if you do congratulations you've successfully created a google analytics 4 account and installed the tracking code on your website which is going to provide you with tons of insight you can use to improve your marketing decisions this is what we're going to look at next [Music] if you've logged out of your google analytics account head over to analytics.google.com and login for those of you who have been using the old version of google analytics you should now have two analytics profiles one for the old version and one for the new one you can switch between the two using the drop down in the top left hand side window like in my example if you're not sure which one is which just look for the one that has the letter u a next to it this stands for universal analytics which is the old version so pick the other one if you're completely new your view will automatically default to the gfo home screen once you've logged in there is currently very little data for my clients profile as i've only recently created the account for the sake of this tutorial i'm going to switch to another profile which is a live demo account for the google merchandising store so i can show you all the various reports that are available let's start with the navigation bar when hovering your mouse on the left hand side of your screen a sliding menu pop-up will appear this is a top-level menu of ga4 and is divided into four main sections which are reports explore advertising and configuration we're going to start with the report section which is by default pre-selected when you first log in it will automatically display a report snapshot that summarizes what's been happening on your site over the past 28 days this is essentially the home screen you will see whenever you log in this dashboard is very practical if you're short of time and will give you an overview about the overall performance of your site in just a few seconds in the first graph you'll find the number of overall users out of which how many are new ones the average time they're spent on the site and the revenue they have generated the card on the right hand side shows live data and includes the number of users who have been on your site in the last 30 minutes as well as where they are located scrolling down will show you cards that are related to where your website traffic is coming from in this example it looks like this site is getting the majority of its new users from organic search engine results followed by people entering the website address directly in a browser to access the site which is what direct means then display advertising which are banner ads paid advertising and so on this is very useful as you can instantly figure out which channels work best for you you'll also see a summary of your campaigns as well as the geographical location of the users additional filters are available on this card so for example you can filter the geographical location between new users and returning ones if you move further down the page you'll see some information related to the behavior of your visitors more specifically about their retention level on your site for example the first graph shows you how frequently a user returns to your site within a day 7 days or a 30-day period while this graph shows you how well you have retained users who first visited your site during a specific period if you hover on the table you'll see the data breakdown for example during the period of january the 2nd until january the 8th the website received almost 13 000 visitors the following week only 5 of these visitors returned to the site and two percent the week after and so on this last graph is all about the most popular pages of your website your visitors are viewed based on page titles the last row of reports is about conversions or what you sell on your site in this example you can see a breakdown of the products that were sold in the last 28 days conversions do not need to be about physical products you can also track conversions for an ebook download for example or a quote request a phone call or a form submission and much more more on this topic later if you scroll back to the top you can use the search function to look for specific reports and click through to them but you can also ask questions using natural language which is a very cool feature especially when you're a beginner if you want to change the range of the data you are looking at use the calendar right here you can select from predefined date ranges or select a custom range by clicking on the dates you want then click on apply all the reports will update automatically as part of the calendar option you can select the compare feature and compare your data with a previous period this is great if you want to see if you are moving in the right direction i personally use this function a lot next to the calendar you'll find another few options the first one being the comparison comparisons let you evaluate subsets of data side by side for example you might want to compare all data generated by desktop devices and all data generated by mobile devices you have the ability to share your reports using the share functionality clicking on the next icon will provide you with some basic insights about your site performance which can be very useful when you're starting out for example how many users did i have last week would provide a direct answer this covers the home screen walkthrough which gives you a snapshot of your performance let's stay within the reporting section and drill down further into the report selections starting with real-time reports [Music] you can access the real-time report by clicking on the real-time link at the bottom of the real-time card on the home screen or click on the report section in the main menu and then on real time as the name indicates this report will show you what is happening on your site right now or almost the data you will see is actually based on the activity that was captured on your website in the last 30 minutes in this case we can see that in the last 30 minutes there has been 140 people on our website 86 percent of which are using a desktop 13 a mobile and 2 percent a tablet you can see the user breakdown per minute if you hover on the bar graph on the right hand side you'll see a map indicating whether users are geographically located you can zoom in and out for more details when you scroll down you'll find more real-time data the layout is very similar to the one you can find on your homepage but this time it's all related to the activity that took place on your site in the last 30 minutes you can see where your traffic is coming from in this example google or people typing the website address directly in a browser the audience type which is something we will be talking about later on as it needs to be configured and which pages these users are currently on the event count card will show you what these users are doing such as viewing a page scrolling looking at a product etc finally you have the conversion data which requires setting up more on this later the real-time reporting also has an interesting feature called view user snapshot when you click on it you can see how some random users are navigating through your website you can scroll through different users using the card at the top which will show you the device they are using and the location this particular user for example is from south korea and is using an apple device on the main screen you can see what path he has followed based on the events that are being tracked in google analytics you can see he initially viewed a page then another one scrolled down and looked at a product to exit the view user snapshot click on the button in the top right hand side of the window and you will return to the main real-time reporting screen i find the real-time report very useful when you want to track a specific type of activity such as a promotion an ad campaign or anything similar that requires monitoring as it happens but for more in-depth reporting you'll need to look at the lifecycle reporting suite this is what we're going to do next [Music] the lifecycle reporting suite is a set of reports that helps you analyze your customer data at every stage of their journey and is like looking at a conversion funnel the first stage is acquisition which is how visitors found your website it's followed by engagement which looks at how visitors behave once they're on your site and finally monetization which looks at what these visitors buy download or which form they're filled in based on the goals that you have set for your website the last piece of your customers life cycle funnel is retention and helps you measure customer loyalty or the ability for your website to get visitors to come back for more let's explore the first stage called acquisition [Music] for this chapter i'm going to switch to the gf4 account for my own website which is likely to look more like yours the acquisition report is split into three different subsets of reports while the first one will provide you with an overview the user acquisition will focus exclusively on users while the third one will be looking at traffic acquisition the difference between user acquisition and traffic acquisition is important to understand so if it's unclear to you here is a quick explanation a user is a unique visitor or a person who visits your website so the user acquisition report will look at how users have found you traffic to your website is measured in number of visits called sessions so if one person visits your site three times in a day for example it will be counted as three sessions the traffic acquisition report will look at where those visits come from let's start with the overview report the overview report will provide you with some top-level information such as the number of users for the last 28 days as well as the number of new users this information alone tells me that all my visitors are new and no one comes back to my site since it's harder to get new visitors i should definitely look into how i can keep visitors coming back to my site you'll also see the real-time number of users in the last 30 minutes and how these users came to my site which in my case is mostly through organic videos which i assume is from my youtube channel or by directly typing my website address in a browser there is a very similar card in the row below but this looks at sessions which as i explained earlier can be translated as visits as you can see although i had 547 users coming from organic videos it generated 773 visits meaning some users visited my site multiple times if you run google ad campaigns they will show up in this card i don't run any so that's why it is blank and if you want to understand the lifetime value of your customers you'll need to set it up and it will show here you can stay on the overview to do some more analysis and play with the various filters but instead i suggest you dive straight into the user acquisition report which will provide a lot more insights the user acquisition report will show you the channel split your users have come from in proportion to the overall users and the evolution over time don't forget you can change the date range using the calendar which will help you identify any changing trend the table below will provide detailed information for each channel such as engagement rate proportion of new users but most importantly conversion and revenue i don't have any conversion or revenue set up for my website but if i flick back to the initial google demo account for the same report you can see how valuable this report becomes as you will be able to identify which channel brings the most money let's go back to my account by default the table will filter your result by channel you can change to something else if you want by clicking on the drop down arrow here or if you need more details you can add a secondary dimension for example i'd like to know a little bit more about where exactly the traffic is coming from for all organic channels which is where most of my traffic is coming from just click on the plus button right here and choose from one of the dimensions you want to add in my case acquisition then pick an option from the available list i'm going to go for source now not only i can see which channel the traffic is coming from but also from which individual website to expand the table view click on the number of rows per page you want to see finally you can filter all the results using the search box right here and only display organic results for example this now shows me precisely where all my organic traffic is coming from the traffic acquisition report will provide the exact same data but based on sessions or visit instead of users you'll be able to filter the data in the same exact way obviously i don't need to do this here so we can move on to the next stage of your customer journey engagement [Music] the engagement section will help you understand how your visitors behave on your site based on the events that trigger during their visits this is where you'll be able to find out which pages get viewed the most for example the average time visitors spend on your site what's their purchasing or downloading and so on to access the engagement report click on the engagement option from the left hand side menu just like the acquisition report this section will be split into four sub-sections starting with an overview the overview report is a summary of visitors behavior and shows some important engagement metrics as i've already mentioned here you can see the average user's engagement time average number of session per user and engagement time per session once again the real-time data card is also part of the overview additionally you can see the number of views the event count and event types if you're not quite sure what events are here is a brief explanation events are user interactions typical events would be a page view someone scrolling down a page clicking on a button viewing a product and so on this is central to how google analytics works and provides an insight into what's happening on your site the last card on this rule is a very important one as it shows the most viewed pages of your website or screens if you are using an app based on their titles scrolling down the page will show you the user activity over a 30 day period and the user stickiness of your site google analytics calculate the stickiness of your site by comparing engagement of active users over a short period of time versus a larger period for example the first metric here shows daily active users versus monthly active users a higher ratio suggests good engagement and user retention the two indicators below show daily active users versus weekly and weekly versus monthly but let's look at page and screen in more details you can do this by either clicking on the link below the card or from the main menu under engagement pages and screen the first card will display the top 5 most viewed pages of your site based on their titles if you scroll down the table below will give you the data related to those pages this goes beyond the top 5 pages and you can extend it further using the drop down here by default the pages are ranked by the highest number of views and sorted by page titles the problem with sorting pages by their title is that many website owners have given their pages the same titles this means the views for those pages will be automatically bunched up together in the report which can be misleading for more clarity i suggest you change the sorting selection to page path and query strings instead this will sort pages based on their url or web address since two pages can't have the same url the data will be unique to them and they will be separated on the table the graph in the top right hand side of the window will plot pages based on users and views so you can quickly see what the most popular pages are which in this case is my home page but if you select another dimension from the table let's say i want to see the pages that visitors spend the most time on and click on the average engagement time the pages will rearrange accordingly you can get a lot of insights from the pages and screen report and i would expect you spend a lot of time on it let's move on to the other engagement report events as i've already explained events are users interactions that are being tracked within google analytics this is the core of how gfor works since everything is considered an event you can find the events that are being tracked in the event reports such as event eventcal by name and if you scroll down you can see the breakdown of the most popular events to find out more about an event just click on it let's say if i click on this file download event i can see when that event occurred over time from which country and so on although it might be difficult to wrap your head around events when you're a beginner they can provide great insights so spend a bit of time to familiarize yourself with them let's move on to the last report within the engagement section conversion for the sake of this report i'm going to look at the google demo account as there isn't any conversion setup in my personal ga4 account or my clients the conversion report will track some of the most important actions that take place on your site conversions are goal you want your visitors to achieve in this example three different conversion events have been set the first one is for a first visit the second one is for visitors who have begun the checkout process and the final one is for those who have made a purchase which also includes the total value by looking at these goals you can quickly assess if your website is doing its job no need to work hard to get visitors to your ecommerce site if they don't translate into sales that's what conversion tracking is for whatever contributes to the success of your business should be set as a conversion it doesn't have to be related to product for example if you run a blog you can set a goal such as the number of people who have registered for your newsletter or if you are a small business the number of people who have submitted a quote request conversions or gold are so important you should be checking them virtually daily to understand if your marketing strategy is paying off and if you're investing in the right channels when clicking on a specific conversion event you will be able to find out which channels are the biggest contributors to your success so you can invest more money into them and pull back on the ones that don't later on in this tutorial i will show you how to set a conversion for your site this brings to an end the engagement report section let's move on to the next one [Music] the monetization report section is mostly geared towards those of you who sell physical products through an e-commerce store or subscriptions to a service you'll need to set up events with the right parameters according to google's recommendations so you can collect the relevant data before you can use these reports this is beyond beginner's level so you might want to skip to the next chapter otherwise here is a brief summary of what you can find within those reports when they are set up the monetization overview report will include metrics such as your total revenue number of purchases average purchase revenue per user what items have been purchased and so on the e-commerce purchase report will display data specific to the items themselves this is a very useful report as you will be able to figure out what your most popular products are which ones bring the most revenue which ones are the most viewed etc and improve your site accordingly for example although the for everyone google t-shirt has been viewed almost 7 000 times it only generated 224 dollars in revenue while the google red sweatshirt was viewed just under 4 000 times but generated six times more revenue i am not sure whether red sweatshirt shows on their site but it might be an idea to give it more prominence if you are running an app the in-app purchase will show you the number of purchases being made in your apps while the publisher ad report will enable you to measure the revenue you generate from the ads in your mobile app both of which are not set on this account as it is just tracking the activity off the website time to move on to the last report of the lifecycle suite [Music] from the left hand side menu click on retention this report will show you data that helps you understand how frequently and for how long users engage with your website or mobile app after their first visit the retention report will also help you understand how valuable users are based on the additional revenue you generate after their first visit the first graph is easy to understand and looks at new and returning users bringing new users to your site or app can be a costly exercise you want as many new users to return as much as possible so you can spend less on promoting your site through adwords or social media ads for example the other report can be a little tricky to understand if you are a beginner especially if you are not familiar with the notion of cohort so i'm not going to expand on them my advice here would be to spend a lot more of your time on the acquisition and engagement reports instead we have now cover all the reports within the customer lifecycle suite let's move on to the user report suite [Music] in order to go through these reports i will be using another google demo account which is mostly app based from the left hand side menu click on user you'll notice this section is split into two one related to demographics and one related to technology the demographics report will help you understand who your customers truly are where they are located their gender their interests and more being able to identify your audience types is critical if you want to create content that resonates with them you wouldn't want to publish content about early retirement on your site if most of your audience is aged between 25 and 30. this is a silly example but you get the gist but to be able to provide the best experience for them you also want to know the type of devices they use on what platform which operating system they are on etc and you'll find all this information under the tech option let's start with the demographics report which again starts with an overview here you'll find the geographical locations of your users by country but also by city as well as where the current users are located in real time you'll also find out your audience gender split and what they are mostly interested in google is able to collect this data from all users who have some sort of google accounts such as gmail google drive google docs youtube and so on and bring it in as part of the demographics report the data is obviously anonymous you can also find out what the most popular age groups are and most popular languages straight away you can see how valuable this data is and do some quick analysis for instance most of this audience is male age between 25 and 34 the vast majority of them come from either india or the us and they are mostly interested in media to find out more granular information click on the demographic detail option just like every other report you can see a table that breaks down the data further as we've already seen in the overview the vast majority of the visitors come from india or the u.s but although the number of users from india is way higher than the number of users in the us their average engagement time is nothing in comparison with the u.s audience which also seems to translate in higher revenue you can do more analysis by changing the dimension for example if you are looking for more local information you can drill down to a city level the better you'll understand your audience the easier it will be to produce the right content and capitalize on it let's now look at the technology our audience is using from the left-hand side menu click on tag just like the demographics report you'll see a tech overview first then take details let's start with the overview here you'll find what the most popular platforms your users are on the operating system they use their browsers which type of device such as desktop mobile or tablet screen resolution and more using this data will help you display a consistent experience across all platforms and devices as usual you can delve deeper into the data by clicking on the tech details option and drill down into specific aspects to help you make decisions this brings us to the end of the overall reporting hub let's move on to the next one [Music] hover on the left hand side of the window and from the main menu click on explore this is the most advanced part of ga4 and will help you take your analysis to the next level if you click on the template link you'll see a list of predefined reports or what google calls techniques that will help you uncover deeper insights about your customers behavior from path analysis to funnel exploration and use cases there are plenty of techniques to choose from alternatively you can create your very own using a blank one i'm conscious this is a tutorial for beginners and this section might feel a little overwhelming so i'm not going to spend a huge amount of time here however so you understand how powerful these techniques are let's click back out of this and look at one of the existing templates so you can see one of these techniques in action let's go for path analysis which is one of the most popular ones this technique will help you understand how your visitors progress throughout their visits from the moment they land on your website from the starting point which is where a visit will start i want to know which path my visitors follow to do this i'm just going to change the step 1 criteria from event name to page title and screen this will display the breakdown of the most popular pages from which my visitors start their visit unsurprisingly this is my home page you can expand the selection by clicking on the link here to find where my visitors who started on my homepage go to next i just need to click on the page itself and the next step will appear on the screen with a breakdown of the next pages visitors go to you can add more dimensions to the report using the options available in the variable column on the left hand side let's say i want to see the country split as an additional dimension all i need to do is drag the country dimension on the tab settings column and drop it into the breakdown section this will update the report automatically and show me the breakdown per country when i hover on the pages don't forget you can also choose the date range of your choice using the calendar right here this path exploration technique will help me find the top pages that users open after opening the home page uncover looping behavior which may indicate users becoming stuck and more this is only one tiny example of what you can achieve using these reporting techniques and i am sure as you get more familiar with gf4 over time you will be using this section more and more let's now look at our next hub [Music] from the left hand side click on advertising the advertising hub is all about tracking the marketing activity that drives traffic to your site such as newsletter campaigns paid and organic traffic affiliate traffic and so on these reports focus mostly on attribution and attribution models which i feel are beyond the scope of this tutorial and should be the subject of another video altogether feel free to explore this in your own time but for now let's skip to the next chapter [Music] from the left hand side menu click on configure in this hub you'll find a list of the configuration options you can play with to fit your analysis needs you can configure modify or create new events create new conversions create new audience types and set up new custom dimensions there is also what is known as the debug view which will enable you to check incoming data into your google analytics account using the configure hub i'm going to show you how you can set up a basic conversion for your website so you can measure its effectiveness [Music] a website conversion happens when a user completes an action that you've defined as valuable to your business if you're running an e-commerce store for example understanding how many items of a specific products you've sold will be very valuable to you thankfully conversions are not limited to selling products for example on my website i offer a service called one-on-one live sessions the goal of this page is to encourage visitors to book a live session with me anyone filling in a form will be redirected to a thank you page which is what will be considered as a conversion let me show you how to set this up in google analytics in the configure hub click on the event option in the top right hand side corner click on create event from the sliding window click on create click in the custom event name field to give your event a name you should see a list of predefined names you can use such as add to cart begin checkout file download the form on my site is to generate leads so i'm going to choose the generate lead option the next thing you need to do is to configure the conditions that will trigger this particular event in the parameter field choose event name in the operator field select equal and in a value field enter page underscore view this means this event will only trigger whenever a page view is occurring obviously this is way too broad and i need to narrow the triggers further down otherwise any page view will be added as an event let's add one more condition click in the parameter field and choose the page location option in the operator field choose contain as an option for the value field copy and paste the url of the page you want to set as a trigger you don't need to copy the whole address just the bit that's after your domain name which in this case is think dash u this now means that our generate lead event will only get triggered whenever the thank you page is viewed let's take this a little further and add a value to it leave the copy parameters option ticked then click on add modification in the parameter field add value and in a new value field add what you think your lead will be worth in my case the value of a consultation lead is 375 dollars so i'm going to add 375. click on the add modification option this time in a parameter field enter currency and for the value field add your preferred currency in this case usd once you're done click on create you should now see a summary of the event you have created which in this case will be triggered whenever someone views a page that contains a thank you in the url you can now close this window you should now be back to the window showing the existing events which are set by default when you created your ga4 account unfortunately the event you've just created will not be added to this list as it takes up to 24 hours for any newly created event to appear once 24 hours have gone by all you need to do is turn the event into a conversion using the toggle next to it from then on anyone accessing the thank you page not only will trigger the event but will also appear as a conversion into your account you don't have to wait for 24 hours and you can configure the conversion straight away if you wish from the left hand side menu click on conversions then click on new conversion event in a new event name enter the following generate underscore lead which is the event you've just created then click on save whichever method you use you'll still have to wait for the event to be triggered i.e for visitors to access the page you are tracking and the data to be processed into your account which will show in this report but to make the most of your conversion tracking data you should use the standard reports from the lifecycle hub to do this click on reports in the left hand side menu then expand the engagement section from there click on conversions if the event you have set up was triggered you should be able to see it in the details of these graphs and listed in a table below where you'll be able to see the number of conversions it has generated which in my case is two for more granular information click on the event name from this screen you'll be able to find the traffic source from which the visitors came from before converting in this example both conversions came from visitors who found my website in organic search results and the total value of it is 750 this is extremely useful if you want to figure out which channels bring most of your conversions and where to invest your marketing budget you can also find conversion data under other reports such as the acquisition report for example click on the acquisition report and then the traffic acquisition scroll down to the table information where you'll see a column called conversions which aggregates the results of all the conversions you have set up if you have more than one you can look at the one you're interested in by clicking on the dropdown and selecting it this is also equally useful if you want to understand your channel performance this brings me to the end of this tutorial which hopefully will provide you with the essential knowledge you need to get you started with google analytics 4 help you improve your online presence and invest your marketing money wisely don't forget to like and subscribe and until next time happy marketing

Channel: Ranking Academy

Views: 160,327

Keywords: google analytics tutorial 2022, ga, google analytics 4, google analytics setup, google analytics tutorial, how to use google analytics, learn google analytics, how to setup google analytics, set up google analytics, how to use google analytics in my website, how to create google analytics account, google analytics 4 tutorial, analytics google, what is google analytics, setup google analytics, google analytics for beginners, google analytics 2022, google analytics tutorial 2023

Id: gjNSEksLxoc

Length: 48min 41sec (2921 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 22 2022