What's New in Google Analytics 4

all right thanks everyone for joining we're going to kick off our webinar for today so welcome to our session on google analytics 4 which is the new version of google analytics today we're going to be doing a heavy overview of kind of the new features and also some tips and advice on how to get you started so as we dive in here's my plan for our time today we're going to start off by doing an introduction to what is google analytics for why is it even called google analytics 4 and how did we get here uh next i'm going to focus a little bit on helping you understand how it's different than universal analytics specifically to do that we're going to go over all of the new and exciting features that many of you have never probably had available before in your existing google analytics account and we're going to touch on what those most important features are at the end i'm going to share some tips and tricks of how you can get started and since i love talking about google analytics so much we have plenty of time for q a at the end so if you have any questions that you want to get answered about ga4 i blocked out my calendar and i'll try and get through every question you have um so with that let me do a quick introduction so my name's charles i work with adswerv i've been working with google analytics for just about over 10 years i've been with this company for about seven i am deeply experienced with the google analytics 360 ecosystem on the larger google marketing platform um i've done trainings uh implementations i've sold google analytics 360. i've done just about everything with it um and today i'm really excited to share with you uh everything about that new version of google analytics just a quick fun fact about me um i actually started to play hockey about a year ago i didn't even know how to ice skate took a learn to play class and now me and my wife actually play together and i love sharing this photo uh it's probably my favorite photo i have it's of my wife um checking someone sideways so some really good vertical on the defender there so with that let's go ahead and get started for today so what we're gonna do is we're gonna introduce this new version of google analytics and to do that let me start with a quick overview of kind of how we got here many of you who have been using google analytics for years are deeply familiar with it some of you may or may not realize that in addition to google analytics google actually has another analytics platform called google analytics for firebase or firebase analytics and this happened a few years ago and what's happened is google started to remove the mobile capabilities from google analytics and then firebase started to have the mobile mobile first components that google analytics used to have and then in addition firebase started to get all of these new features that google analytics never had like funnels and streams and all sorts of things so at the end of the day um for any of you as marketers who actually had mobile apps or web or only had a website or a mobile app this wasn't ideal because each of the platforms worked very differently there are some exciting features that maybe web users wish they had and vice versa so what google's done is as i mentioned they've already started to remove a lot of the mobile app components from the existing version of google analytics and started to move them over to firebase and this has really led us to where we got today about what is google analytics for so there's a few ways that i hope i can explain it to maybe make it simple really what google analytics 4 is it's the it's the reunification of both mobile and app underneath one platform that's kind of the first component uh google analytics 4 used to be called app and web or app plus web it's now been renamed to ga4 and you may be asking why it's called google analytics 4 well if you kind of think of the history of google analytics it's been around for about 15 years it started off as urchin which google acquired and turned into google analytics so that would be google analytics one and then a few years later they made some significant updates and released some new features and we had something called classic analytics which was a different version of the tracking code and then later we had the uh universal analytics launch which is the version we all use today is what we call universal analytics included measurement protocol real time multi-channel funnels and then this latest release and update and the newest code version is called uh google analytics four so this is kind of the fourth iteration of google analytics now another way to think about google analytics 4 and what it is um as i kind of alluded google has these two different measurement platforms and to get a little bit more technical for a second the actual data model for these platforms was different google analytics has been around for 15 years and for me one of my favorite facts is you can actually use the version of the tracking code from 15 years ago the urchin.js and it'll still send data into google analytics today so the data model and the back end of google analytics is largely the same even today 15 years later and the data model is essentially based off of hits it's a very old way of doing measurements we have page view hits and event hits and transaction hits now google analytics for firebase was a newer model and a newer platform many newer platforms like snowplow or heap or firebase use what we call as an event event-driven data model where events are used to track everything instead of hits so google analytics for firebase has an event-driven data model and what google's done is effectively they're adopting the firebase model as the new model for all of google analytics in fact if any of you use firebase today you can actually upgrade those and it'll use all the historical data and allow you to carry that forward into google analytics four however for the website of google analytics it's a different data model and because of that it doesn't carry the data forward in fact you're going to have to implement new tags uh on your website or through google tag manager to use google analytics for and i'll show you a little bit about that towards the end but the really important takeaway here is that google analytics 4 is essentially the adoption of this event driven data model and it's bringing that to both web and app as well as everything else we might want to track through measurement protocol so that is what google analytics 4 is it is essentially an entire update to everything you knew about google analytics it's a new data model it's a new back end a new front end a new user interface everything about it is going to be different so with that what i want to do is i want to talk you through how this new version of google analytics is different than universal analytics or the current version and to do that i'm going to show you what i consider the biggest new and exciting features that ga4 has as i go through um please continue to ask questions in the chat i'm going to get through most of those at the end but let's get started for today so i'm going to actually go into ga4 and talk about a few of these features so you can see those but one of the biggest changes that google analytics 4 has is it has something called automatic or enhanced measurement so if you rewind the clock and think back to the first time you ever implemented google analytics the first time you implemented it when you put the tracking code on your website it only tracked page views by default now for many people that was a big challenge because um maybe you got busy or you didn't have time and when you logged in months later you only ever have these page views so what google's doing is they're taking a kind of a fresh approach to basic data collection and we have something new called automatic measurement and what's gonna happen here is when you implement the tracking code or add that tag in google tag manager for the first time it's going to have this new setting that's enabled automatically called enhanced measurement and what this does is out of the box when you implement that tracking code it doesn't just track page use it's actually going to track other interactions automatically so it's going to track scrolls outbound clicks site search video engagement if it's a youtube player as well as file downloads automatically without you really having to configure anything so what that means is for many of you as you're getting started you should have more robust data than just page use when you actually implement it for the first time so you can kind of think of this as a light version of google tag manager where it just has this auto tracking out of the box so that's going to be one big change to how ga4 works now another new change is going to be this brand new user interface so if i go back into ga4 what you can see here is we have a brand new ui on the left hand nav if you uh know the current version of ga we always talk about acquisition behavior and conversions and audience in ga4 they've complete completely rebuilt these so acquisition engagement monetization retention we're also going to see new features that used to only be in google analytics 360 or the enterprise version like analysis and the other thing here is google's taken a fresh approach to how the ui works so the ui and current ga usually just had a graph at the top and a table at the bottom uh google's trying to give you a lot more data on these kind of report cards um and introducing things like real time insights other sort of interactions and just giving you a lot more within the reports than just kind of that graph and table we worked with before we're likely going to see the ui change i don't know it feels like hundreds of times uh this product is still very new so this is probably gonna start seeing uh numerous updates and it's already exciting with what we have today now here's another really cool component of ga4 and i think this is something that all of you will really like there are new identity methods in this new version of google analytics when we think about the current version of google analytics or universal we typically only measure users by their anonymous client id or a user id and what i mean by that is the default id in google analytics today is a first party cookie so if someone comes to your website it creates a cookie and then if they come back in the same browser with the same cookie they'll be the same user but if their cookies get cleared or they visit in a different browser or an incognito window they're going to be a different user every time and if you wanted to actually try and track that user across devices or browsers the only way you can really do that in google analytics today is by sending your own user ids and typically you can only do that when your website has some sort of authentication where they can log in and when you do that it's kind of challenging to analyze in ga because you actually have one view or place where all of the anonymous data is and then you have a separate place where all of the logged in data is and there's no place to kind of look at both at the same time so what google's done is they've taken a fresh approach to how identity works and also added a very important significant new feature so first of all how the new identity methods work is google actually will use both of your ids at the same time in this new ga4 so by default it'll still use that first party cookie or that default identifier however if you send your own user ids it'll actually use those in addition so you kind of get the best view of your users without having to switch to those different profiles in addition a lot of things we did with existing ga we had to create those separate views or those separate reporting suites and a lot of that would only work point in time forward google's built a lot of the settings in ga4 to actually be retroactive and be on the fly so if you decided that you didn't want to use your own user ids and you only wanted to use anonymous ids you could just change the setting and it'll apply on the fly automatically both backwards and forwards and then five minutes later you could change it back and it's not going to permanently change any of your data so they're making this more flexible now in addition i mentioned there's one really important new feature and that is going to be the addition of google signals now this is a new feature that google has some support documentation on but it hasn't ruled out fully so many of you probably don't have access to this or won't yet but it's coming soon now what is google signals well many of you probably don't have your own user ids or even if you have your own user ids you don't have a lot of them not that many users on your site will log in or authenticate so tracking your users across devices and browsers could prove basically impossible google signals is effectively google's identity graph of google signed in users who have opted into data sharing now with ga4 they've actually built google signals to power all of your reports and what i mean by that is if you opt into google signals and you also have enough volume of traffic for your site to meet the minimums which i think is about 500 users per day then what happens is all of these reports in here can actually use this google identity graph to power a more connected view of who your users actually are and in the current version of ga the cross device reports were usually limited to just one report now you can use this google signals in all of your reports it's the default identity for everything so that edition should help you solve challenges of not having a lot of your own user ids and give you that kind of flexibility now in addition to that um there are also new cross-platform reports specifically to help you identify the overlap between your users so if you do have users that are connecting on different devices and browsers you will be able to use these reports to see that as well now there's also other exciting new reports and i feel like it's always better to show you in the ui so let me show you the new real-time reports so the current real-time reports in universal analytics are pretty old they're probably i don't know five four five years old they've never really had that many updates to the visualizations so what google's done with the new real time is they brought over some of the firebase real-time components and i think the ui looks way better in addition they've made them much more interactive so you actually have the ability to drill into certain events and see their parameters or their subtypes you can also see we have user properties these are similar to like user scoped custom dimensions in current ga which was never available in real time so now we actually have like custom dimensions that you can use in your real-time views where you couldn't use those before so that's a big improvement and related to that another thing that i'd like to show you is they also have a new feature that they've carried over from firebase called debug view so i'm sure debugging is no one's favorite job uh this is where we're trying to figure out why something in our analytics isn't working or maybe we're making a new update and we want to test it to make sure everything's working and to do that typically we have to kind of open up all these extensions look in our look in our browser and open up that inspect element and look at the network console it's just a lot of work right so what google's done is they've built this new debug view and you can think of this as a real-time stream of your test data so what happens is if if you're in preview mode of google tag manager or you use the google analytics debugger extension and you turn it on automatically it'll set a flag and send all of the data that you do when you visit your website into this new debug view and when it does that it streams the data in and allows you to see the exact time stamps and the order of every event and every action and in addition you can click on any of these events and see all of the metadata for it what were the parameters what were the custom dimensions what were the user properties and it can be a much more clean place to look at all of that data which hopefully will make troubleshooting and debugging a lot simpler for a lot of you so i've already been using this new debug view a lot and i really like it that's how it works now here's another component of ga4 so i've if you've ever attended any of my talks before on existing ga i always talk about advanced segments as really one of my favorite features in ga and it's the single feature that i use to differentiate who's a beginner user and who's more of an intermediate or advanced user advanced segments for me are what makes google analytics so special because it's effectively an audience builder so if you have a question you're trying to understand what your users are doing or why something happened this audience builder or advanced segments allows you to quickly filter the entire platform to tell you everything about that audience now what i like about ga4 is they've taken the audience builder and they've actually added even more powerful features in it and to give you an example of that there's three key ones first if if you've ever used uh the advanced segments you know when you build them you can only build audiences in ga to show you all users or all sessions that did or didn't do something now a lot of people who have used adobe analytics always like to brag that they also have an option to only build segments to show you uh events or the actual data that had something happen not an entire session or all an entire user history so what ga4 did is now we have an event scope option so you could say show me all the events where this parameter had this exact value and then it'll apply just for those events so now those adobe users can't brag that they're the only ones with that feature in addition if you've used google analytics one of the things it doesn't do a good job at is time in google analytics we usually measure time by what was the average time per page or what was the average session duration or or maybe what was the average user duration but if you wanted to answer questions about time for a subset of interactions or something more specific that becomes very challenging so an example how long did it take your users from starting the checkout until completing the checkout did they do it in 5 minutes 10 minutes 15 minutes or when they started to fill out your lead form how long did it take them to complete it anything you want to answer around time is very challenging now what's awesome about ga4 is they've made time more of a first party component for the platform so you can actually build audiences off of time so you could do exactly that in here you can say show me how many users started and completed their checkout in five minutes or less and i'm going to show you later another version of time with funnels which i think will make this even more clear now we'll come back to time when we get to funnels but the last piece of the audience builder that i really like is we have better options for you on temporary or permanent exclusions and let me show you what that means one of the most powerful features in existing ga is obviously its integrations with google ads or adwords and one of the things everyone talks about is the ability to build audiences and share those without having to add tags to your website and the classic example of remarketing audiences is always usually uh doing uh excludes right if someone's purchased your product you don't want to show them ads and that's the thing we always talk about as like the easiest place to start but think about that example when you want to stop showing ads do you want to permanently stop showing ads or temporarily stop showing ads so if i purchase a pair of shoes um it makes sense to stop showing ads but what if i came back to the website two months later and i started looking at sweatshirts or maybe even a different pair of shoes at that point if i've come back and i started looking at products again it might make sense that i should be eligible again for remarketing ads now with temporary you can build kind of time or other conditions to have them removed temporarily instead of permanently and you can do that both for the audiences that you use in ga as well as the audiences you share elsewhere for things like google ads so again it's taken the audience builder and added even more powerful features now here's another thing that's really cool about ga4 google's completely reimagined how conversion tracking works so if for any of my long time users at ga you're probably painfully aware that google analytics has a limit of 20 goals per view and the goals the way goals work in existing ga is they're kind of permanent once they once you set it up and it starts collecting data that data can't be deleted so you can't really reuse your goal slots so if you started creating goals 20 years ago or 15 years ago in google analytics you still have those same ones today and in today's marketing world where we have macro and micro conversions and we have different marketing campaigns that are seasonal um that just doesn't scale well now what google's done with the new conversion tracking is first of all we have 30 conversions as uh the the default per property so you get more and then in addition these are flexible so if we set up a goal so let's say i set up um uh this file download and this is for a seasonal camp campaign or something i can enable it as a conversion and you can see how simple it is you can just turn these on or you can turn them off directly from this report so it's super ample super simple um to set up your conversions and you can do that directly from your events tab so i turned off that file download i can just turn it back on as this event in addition when you mark something off it frees up a slot for you so then it keeps the data and that conversion data retroactively and gives up a freeze up a slot for you to use it moving forward so conversion tracking is a little bit easier to set up at least for the macro conversions and in addition way more flexible and on top of that they've also just started to roll out i think most of you should have this new feature by now you can also use modify events or create events to easily uh or it's not necessarily easy but it gives you the flexibility to create more targeted conversions like if you wanted to create a conversion for people who view your blogs you can do that with this new create event feature which just rolled out so conversion tracking again more flexible a little bit easier and has been rebuilt now as we near the end of our time today i'm going to show you probably my favorite set of new features and i think you all are going to really like these one of them i think things that google analytics has never done a good job at is funnels it is basically impossible to create meaningful funnels in the free version of google analytics the only way to do it was to really upgrade to the enterprise or the 360 version of ga now what ga ford has done is google's actually taken a set of features that used to only be in google analytics 360. and now everyone has access to them in ga4 and that's going to be this analysis module and one of the features that comes with it is funnels so now for the first time if you use ga4 everyone has access to create powerful funnels whenever you want and to do that you just open up analysis you go to funnels and you can define your steps on the fly these are retroactive so they'll work with your past data your future data so they're very flexible you can see our visualizations at the top you can easily see completion and abandonment rates you can add in different breakdowns for device category country city whatever you want and then they're also interactive so you can click on these and actually build audiences to even do further analysis like if you wanted to build an audience for people who abandoned on the fourth step of your funnel so simply you now have an enterprise feature that is extremely powerful available in the standard version of ga4 in addition these funnels and some of the features in here don't even exist in the enterprise version of google analytics 360. so let me give you an example of one of those new features if i asked any of you to tell me how your funnel is performing over the past year that would again be impossible in current ga and it would even be very challenging in google analytics 360 because the funnel components only really give you a bar chart and bar charts aren't really great for analyzing things over time now one of the new features they added is this new trended funnel and all you do is you change this visualization piece to trended at the top and what it does is it simply plots each of your steps on the fly on a graph so now you can visually see how it changes or doesn't over time so super simple in addition there's a lot of flexibility with funnels so you can make open verse closed funnels an open funnel allows you to enter in on any step where a closed funnel requires you to start on the first step which is your classic kind of waterfall type visualization now i mentioned i was going to bring time back up so check out how cool this is if you just check this box at the bottom for show elapsed time it'll it'll add a time component to your funnel so if you wanted to see exactly how much time it's taking your users to do each of these steps so to visit the site come back on an organic start another visit view another screen on the fly if you add that elapsed time google will actually calculate the exact average for any of the steps you create whether that's minutes seconds days weeks it'll calculate that average for you and that's something the current version of ga just simply can't do in any meaningful way you can also do things like easily see the next thing someone did uh once they got to a certain step on your funnel so did they view another page did they click something scroll whatever it was and then related to that in addition to funnels they've also i think made padding actually useful paddling is another really difficult thing to do in the current version of ga so i can show you what these new pathing reports look like i think it'll be way more fun to go into ga4 so again our our new analysis module this used to only be in ga360 i can go to our analysis hub i'm just going to click this path analysis in the top right hand corner and this is going to load an interactive a padding report that we can start to explore or change with how we want so by default it shows all the events remember this is an event driven data model but if i want this to just be like content i can easily move from events and say actually could you show me the page title or if it's mobile app also include the screen view and now i can see what are the most popular pages so in existing ga we had those flow reports but those were normally very sampled like severely sampled and then also they were aggregated so you couldn't easily do things like say i actually want to see what the next group was not just the top five so now you can see all of those in addition you can start to click and see the next action you can also come in and start to group or exclude things and then on top of it you can also start to drag things like to see breakdowns so let's see if i break anything but i'm going to try and grab country and i'm going to drag it in my breakdown it should load my report again you can see how fast that happened but now if i hover over any of these it tells you exactly what the breakdown was by country at the bottom there so a lot of power here and if you want even more power those audiences that i showed you before you can also just drag those on the canvas and if i only want to look at padding for paid traffic well there's my paid traffic uh audience or segment and now this pathing report is just for my paid users so again i think pathing has actually been made meaningful in ga4 and as my slide the next slide is going to show another cool kind of hidden uh tip or trick in ga4 if you start this path analysis and then you click start over it actually gives you an option to choose a starting point or an ending point now you can do backwards pathing by starting with an ending point so as an example if i start with this ending point maybe you want to figure out what users did before they converted or what was the most common path for my converting traffic if maybe a conversion i care about is a file download um i can click that file download and now using this let me get rid of my page traffic so i have more events in here but now you can start to see the exact backwards path or the most backwards common pass that happened for each of these set of users so you can easily work backwards not just forwards so backwards pathing was something that you could never do with ga4 i'm sorry with the existing version of ga and now we have a ga4 all right so i have one more piece to show you and i hopefully saved the biggest feature for last so there's one thing that has never existed in google analytics that only existed in enterprise that now all of you have which i think is the biggest change to google analytics ever anyone that starts to use google analytics as you get more advanced all of us have a common need or a common feature that we need that we didn't have and what i mean by that is at a certain point there's just things you need to do outside of google analytics if you've ever wanted to try and integrate your crm data or to integrate your e-commerce data or your b2b uh marketing automation data with google analytics there wasn't really any way to do that without upgrading to the enterprise version because ideally you want to kind of put it in a marketing data warehouse and work with that raw data or if you've ever gotten to points where you want to do advanced analysis or advanced visualization if you wanted to use google analytics with tableau or you wanted to build your own predictions or your own data science models you can't do that with the free version of google analytics very well because it's very difficult or impossible to get the data out of ga in its raw form you can only use this api it's it's usually very sampled it only gives you subsets of the data not all of your data and that's one of the biggest features that google analytics 360 had if you upgraded to the enterprise version you got this bigquery integration and you could have access to all of your raw data well ga4 includes a free bigquery integration and it's free because you can connect it to a bigquery sandbox which has no cost so now for the first time every user of google analytics not just the paid enterprise version has access to the raw data and what i mean by this is this is the event level data with the user ids the client ids all the events all of the metadata exactly in a data warehouse that then you could take and do whatever you want with it in addition they've even improved the performance of bigquery over the existing version of ga so another big improvement here is they've actually are rolling out a streaming table so if you want raw data in your own data warehouse within seconds check out the new streaming component it'll actually export raw data within seconds of when ga receives it and make that available in this bigquery data set and this allows you to build a marketing data warehouse either within bigquery or bigquery has free imports on exports so if you want to take raw data from google analytics and put it in azure or put it in snowplow or store it in aws you can do that all day long this is now opening up kind of your ability to have access and ownership over your own raw data and this gives that ability for all of you as analysts to do advanced analytics that used to only be possible in that free version of ga so again that's why i consider that the biggest feature of them all because now you have have that in the free version so with that um let's kind of wrap up um some tips and tricks and kind of some advice i've hopefully showed you tons of exciting things and i'm still having to get better at this it's not called app and web anymore it's called ga4 so a question i just showed you all a ton of exciting features and many of you might be thinking or asking oh my gosh should we go and get started and just drop everything and move all over to ga4 today it's very important to let you know that even though i showed you tons of exciting things there's still a lot of components that ga4 can't really do yet there's some use cases that are simply missing and a better way to think about it is ga4 is the future and it's the new version of ga however it's not quite yeti ready yet to replace the existing version of ga and the reason why is it's under heavy development and google is still working on building it up to have use case parity with ga and the last thing i would want you to do is to try something new and then feel like you were tricked because it couldn't do other things that you expected it to do so i'm just letting you know there's a lot of things you might expect it to do that are even very simple that it can't as an example basic reporting right now in ga4 can be a very big challenge and i mean even basic content reports uh an example many of you do content groupings you build your own custom content groups that feature doesn't really exist in ga4 you can't build those in the ui we don't have a multi-channel funnels component attribution is very challenging we don't have an attribution module we don't even have a referral exclusion list yet i think that's going to roll out very soon but again it's just not here yet integrations that you all depend on like search console or maybe even google optimize haven't rolled out or don't exist the data studio connector was just released but it's missing components so the long story short here there is so much exciting stuff but there's still a lot more that's coming to it so i just want you to have the right expectations that um it's going to give you things that you could never do in ga but it's not ready quite yet to replace ga so my biggest recommendation for what you should do is you should consider dual tagging and what i mean by that is you should consider using both versions at the same time the way ga4 works is when you get started it actually sends data to a new property so it won't impact your current universal properties at all um the data again is kept separate and with that ga4 is free and it's very easy you can actually get like the basic page you tag in google tag manager in like 15 minutes or less it's super quick i've got some guides for you to help you with that and what you should really think about doing is starting to collect some base data and then slowly building up your ga4 implementation over time and maybe in the next year or two we'll start talking about when it's ready to replace ga and how we're going to replace your existing version of ga but right now it's too soon uh the existing version of ga is not going away there's no deprecation timelines that have been announced um it's just too soon to talk about any of that but it's also too soon to switch over to ga4 so what google and many of us experts are really recommending is to consider a dual tagging approach where you start to slowly build up a ga4 implementation so when all of these missing features come out you already have some of the underlying data to be able to use and hopefully accelerate your switch over later to these new ga4 so that's my advice um if if you thought everything here was exciting and you're not using ga4 today i would highly recommend just getting started and that's really my advice for today so we went over what ga4 is how it's different than the existing version of universal analytics i showed you tons of new exciting features and hopefully the biggest takeaway if you're thinking about implementation is it's in a place to get started and to maybe test with it but it's not ready yet for you to kind of switch over as your primary analytics tool um especially if you're a more intermediate or advanced user so as i promised we have plenty of time for questions i'll stay as long as needed um if you need to leave um that's great if you want to connect with me i'm at charles farino on linkedin or twitter i post a lot about gda4 so if you don't like ga4 don't follow me um but we'd love to have you there so with that what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna open up the questions and i'm gonna try and get through all of these alright so our first question how can we measure landing pages in ga4 so for that if you want to do landing page analysis in ga4 my quick tip and trick about that again hopefully this is something google analytics will make easier for you in the near future but the easiest way to do landing page analysis now is you're going to use a new event that google has called session start so if i go to my all events report or if i stayed in that session start event um google starts this session start event um anytime essentially the session starts so that's kind of like a landing page event so if you just use that event in analysis or in the standard reports and then apply like a secondary dimension of the page name uh that's how you're going to be able to do kind of your traditional landing page analysis is to key off that session start event there's another question about how can i check page load times in ga4 so brian asked that question that feature is completely missing we don't have anything about page or site load times so if you wanted to do that in ga4 it's something you'd have to implement yourself with your own events my best recommendation would be to continue to use the existing version of ga to do that because i'm going to guess there's a higher probability that that feature is on the roadmap to eventually happen in ga4 so you probably want to continue to use ga for for page load times a few questions about recordings absolutely we'll send recordings and the slides uh blake you asked how do we set up link click events in ga4 um with ga4 you track events very similarly similarly to how you track them in existing ga so you can create events for whatever you want the biggest difference is there's this new data model and in the new data model let's first think about the old data model the old data model for google analytics was event category event action event label the new events in ga4 is an event name and then event parameters so we don't have a limitation of category action label instead we have events and we have parameters and i think in the free version you can apply at least 20 parameters per event so you get even more you don't have a one two three or that waterfall event hierarchy you have three form events you can use so if you want to set up a link click event uh you can uh simply go on google tag manager use the existing link triggers and you're just gonna have an event name of uh in like internal click or maybe external depending on how you wanna track it and you're just going to use the event names and parameters so similar approach but just different naming conventions on a different hierarchy now there's a question from jacob how do we translate our current ga events to ga4 so this is another great question and i'm going to give you some some good advice i hope on this the event naming conventions again this is one of the biggest changes with ga4 we don't have category action and label we have event names and event parameters so what i mean by that is like when i click on that session start event or this time i clicked on view search results let me change this let me go to page view as an example this is our page view event and when we look at this page view events we have parameters we have all sorts of things page referrer page location page title apparently semo is king author all these things so before again we had an event and an action and label now we have events and parameters so how you're going to track things in ga4 is you're just going to think about what is the event name so if you're going to track a video then the event name might be video and then you might have a parameter where you have an action of play pause and then you might have a video title as another parameter and then the value of that parameter is going to be the video title obviously and then you might have a video author you might have uh what was the the buffer rate of that video we just have these free form parameters so you just do it that way so my advice is eventually you're gonna want to have all of your tags and like gtm and the data layer map to that approach and that's the cool part about gtm if you use google tag manager today the data layer for google tag manager already has an event name and parameters when we do a data layer push so if you do that the translation is probably pretty easy uh if you have other methods then it might be more difficult the best practices over time to just make it work natively but if it's a lot of work for you i do know that we have um some clients and some some users and they're taking kind of a hybrid approach um if you wanted to do like the lazy the lazy man's or lazy people's analytics what it would look like is you could create an event name and you could have it be like the event category so a dynamic and then you could create one parameter for event action and another parameter for event label it's going to make ga4 really hard to use but it makes the uh translation super simple so i wouldn't recommend that but i just wanted to point it out for different flexibility options you have for that perspective there's a question if we have if we plan to have more properties under account should we use gtm instead of the gm4 tag um i'm not sure i fully understand that question gtm if i were to log in google tag manager they already have a native ga4 tag i would recommend 99 times out of 100 to use the native gtm tags um your there is another option where you can hard code the g-tag version on your website um i don't recommend that because google tag manager is is obviously the best way to do it from the maximum amount of flexibility and power so i think if you're asking like should you implement ga4 through google tag manager or not the answer is always going to be try and implement it through google tag manager or any tag management system versus hard coding it there's a question from anton how do you make sure that the bug mode only recognizes the tester so good question if i go to this the bug view report um what you're gonna see is right now there's there's not really anything in here the way it works is there's a debug mode parameter so i don't know let's be dangerous let's just try it right now so i'm gonna go to adserve.com i'm gonna use this google analytics debugger this is this extension right here it's a free extension that you can install so this is one way to make it really easy uh when it's on and you refresh the page what happens is automatically the extension sets that debug mode flag and the data should stream in here uh automatically on the fly so i think if i click something and scroll and have some interactions the data should dispatch and you can see right now it started to dump in my data so check out how cool that is that's how debug view works in real time all right and again you can click on all of these and see all the parameters and with that the alternative approach is if you send the debug mode parameter like you can set that in google tag manager with fields to set or you can also hard code it you would simply play with that parameter to set it other ways um instead of this parameter or the preview mode of gtm but that's how it works um let's see can you tell us more about the ga4 export to bigquery and whether or not user id will be accessible so if you want to know more about the the ga4 bigquery data set i've got a blog post on mine cmo also has a similar one but what i wanted to show you was you can already see the schema i'll try and put this in chat for everyone the schema absolutely has user ids as well as client ids so if you want to see anything about the bigquery export and what data's in there check out that and the answer to your question is yes you have a user id in there and and also you also asked is there a limit on the amount of data with bigquery you can set up your own data retention settings so if you want to collect that data forever it's very easy to do with bigquery it's outside of google analytics so once it's in bigquery it's under the control of google cloud so whatever policy you put behind it is going to be the policy that's there so that's completely up to you uh question from uh i think kamir if we install ga4 in parallel to ga universal are we gonna face any hit limits on the account level so here's a fun fact ga4 doesn't have hit limits but it actually uses the firebase model firebase today is free and unlimited uh ga4 carries that over so if you want to track 32 billion hits per month you can do that the existing version of google analytics had a limit of 10 million hits at the account level ga4 right now at least has no hit limits so feel free to send it as much data as you want and it also doesn't impact your universal properties at all even if you're on google analytics 360 and you're paying for it if you track 32 billion hits it doesn't affect your contract or your billing for the existing version of ga um there's a question what do we use cross domain when you collect data um so i think the question here is on cross domain tracking this is another fun feature to show so google actually just rolled out or starting to roll out the new version of cross domain tracking for ga4 if you set up ga4 and you go into your data stream you're gonna find your cross domain settings in the tagging settings at the bottom in here there's a new configure your domains and this has our cross-domain measurement and the way it works is you just come in here and you enter your domains and it actually works automatically so cross-domain tracking should be a lot simpler than how it was in ga4 or in existing ga where we have to set these other settings the one missing piece though is we don't have a referral exclusion list so we still have some issues with subdomains but for cross domain this should be way easier to set up there's a question from blake can we revert ga4 back to ua so ga4 is completely separate than universal analytics so there is no upgrades or reversions i know google is saying that you can upgrade your properties to ga4 it's not really an upgrade in the way you might be thinking i think when people think upgrade they're thinking it carries their data forward ga4 when you click that upgrade it's going to create a new property and require you almost in all cases to add new tags so it's not a true upgrade and carrying your data and because of that there is no downgrade it's completely separate so ga4 is one property type and universal analytics is another property type and the data for each stays completely separate um and that's how it works there's a question i set up a new property and it set up ga4 but what i really wanted was a universal property so i've seen this question a few times so right now in in google analytics i'm clicking that create property button and when you do that it opens up this property setup and you can see here it's creating a ga4 property if you scroll down if you click show advanced options this is how you can create your universal property there's a question from elise when do we believe ga4 will be fully functional and google will deprecate universal ga4 is under heavy development uh and that's awesome it's getting tons of new features i don't know it's kind of just my guess i feel like the next six to 12 months it'll be fairly feature or use case complete maybe even sooner so hopefully soon again there's a lot coming um for deprecation timelines i couldn't tell you google's made it clear it's too early to even think really think about that so nothing about universal analytics is going away or changing at least today or for the near future a question from miriam um same thing so you create your universal properties daniel asked what is the use case for user parameters so user parameters are now like the new event action and label or the attributes of the events you track so with ga4 we don't have category action label we have an event name and event parameters so now you have way more effectively attributes of an event that you can track through key value parameters and that's how we use parameters there's a question on the support page i shared that in chat so if you click that link for schema you can get the support page for the ga4 export there's a question from william about transferring filters filters work extremely different than ga4 your filters are absolutely not going to carry over from existing ga right now the only filter we really have in ga4 is to exclude internal traffic so um if you're used to things like lower casing or maybe even advanced things where you start to play with pages our filters don't really do that so that's something that's very different and so it gets to some of the use cases i think google's still working on but transfers can't be uh filtered uh user properties same thing can't carry over custom dimensions to user properties there's a question is ml working in ga4 i think what we mean by that is machine learning uh there's a lot of machine learning that is kind of behind the scenes in ga4 uh you're gonna see that in a few different places one of those is gonna be they've rebuilt the intelligence kind of components and are starting to improve this as well so if you go to your home screen and you click insights these are automated insights on your traffic you can also set up your own manual alerts too that's been added and then in addition google's also started to build some predictive audiences i think right now they're based off lifetime value and probability to convert for e-commerce um but long story short google's made it clear even in their most recent emails that machine learning is kind of at the forefront of everything they're doing at ga4 so there's going to be a lot with that honey you asked um do we see the lack of having property views as kind of a challenge so uh what we mean by that let's open up ga4 from the account selector uh if you're familiar with existing ga you know that if i click here i have all these different views like master raw sandbox if i click ga4 i don't have that there's nothing there is no views so views are very different in ga4 they don't really exist at all in the same way instead what google has is they have this concept of streams and then they have this other concept uh if i go back let me go back to my home tab there's this new concept of kind of views on the fly so if we create a comparison i can come in here and say i only wanted to include maybe my web stream so some of those components are being built here um but this is where google's still working on additional features so i'm hearing a lot and i have a lot of use cases that ga4 can't do to replicate all the use cases around views like the classic example you set up regional views or directory level views um but there's gonna be a lot you're gonna see probably in the next six to twelve months on that joe you ask can we use gtm events in our current implementation within ga4 absolutely all it is is it's kind of thinking about how you map the events and their naming conventions to this new model and i gave some great examples before so the great news is if you already use gtm getting data into ga4 is going to be very uh it's going to be much simpler than if you don't have gtm in place vanessa you're asking is it optional that ga4 is ga4 going to replace universal analytics um the answer to that is eventually that's why it's the new version of google analytics um but again nothing about universal analytics is changing it's too soon so more to come on that right now we're kind of at the middle i think of our journey where they're still building up the the product to have everything universal did luis this is a really fun question i'm excited to show everyone is it possible to change attribution models in ga4 so let me show you maybe a little preview of what the future of of of some of this functionality looks like in existing ga by default all of the left-hand nav has a standard attribution model which is last non-direct and you can't change that it's kind of permanent with ga4 one of the things you can do is if you open up this um what do i want to do i want to go to a report like engagement i'll show you a few cool things along the way so first i'm going to click on pages and screens one of the things that google's never done is they've never been able to give you conversion data for content if you open up your existing pgw report in google analytics there are no goals or conversions on your content reports because that hit base data model doesn't work with conversions and mixing pages and sessions and users in ga4 if i scroll to the right over here we actually have conversions and revenue in our content reports in addition if you open up this customize report option there's an attribution type on the right hand side you can actually change the attribution type now as i mentioned the full suite of attribution features doesn't exist yet but you can change already some of the attribution models on the fly they're largely built off of last or first touch right now eventually i'm expecting things like data driven a linear attribution weighted maybe even your own custom attribution to be available here and hopefully be in a way where we can change it for all of our reports so uh for your question it is possible it's very limited but the future is pretty exciting in that area and i think that's a big improvement ah let's see we got a question from manuel is the debug view as powerful as user explorer in universal we actually have a user explorer report in ga4 you go to analysis uh there's this new template gallery it's probably the easiest place to find it the template gallery has some workbooks to kind of help you with things and there's a user explorer here debug view is different than user explorer because you're actually debugging in real time where user explorer usually is data after the fact so the answer to that is you actually have the best of both worlds in ga4 you have a user explorer as well as the bug view a question has google improves the method of signing the user's location for user location it's the same way as current ga where it uses an ip address so there's not really any i would say improvements it's just the same way universal analytics does it there's a question about how do we enable ga4 so if you want to get started with google analytics 4 all you have to do is go into google analytics you're going to go into your admin section if you already have an account if you don't it's going to ask you to create an account when you go to google.com analytics and now as i showed before if you click create a property or you simply start creating an account it's going to ask you to create a new ga4 by default it's the new default experience so if you want to get started simply go through there and then i would recommend taking a look at some of the slides at the end uh for that guide um google i think makes it a little bit confusing there they suggest adding the code directly on your website the biggest thing i would advise all of you on is to ignore that best practice use google tag manager if you can and implement ga4 in google tag manager it gives you the maximum amount of flexibility uh let's see amanda my friend is on and said thanks for all the great content so it's great to see you thanks for that there's a question can you show us a report for clicks on third party websites and site search uh for clicks on a third-party website i'm not sure if you mean outbound links uh outbound clicks are tracked through the automatic measurements by default so if you implement ga4 one of your default events will be a outbound click in here it does require a little bit of additional setup because you need the parameter of outbound equals true and then for site search um i don't think i have that in the demo account another thing is i know google is working on a demo account so many of you use the demo account for ga today hopefully that starts to become available soon um so yeah hopefully i can show that later once we get that demo account louise how do we see assisted conversions my answer to that is use universal analytics we just don't have that attribution module in ga4 yet if you wanted to really do it in ga4 there's only two ways to do it you could use audiences to kind of show you users who had two different traffic source interactions and then use the audience to do that or you use your bigquery data set until google releases our attribution features so there are some options but in my mind we need the attribution module there's a question for thomas should we set all events as a conversion by default um no i wouldn't recommend that i did that in my account because i'm i i like to break things but if you're doing this on a real website uh you really only want your macro and micro conversions you have 30 of these so you still want to be careful about what you're setting up and make them meaningful like honestly having a thing like uh scroll be a conversion is probably never going to be useful for me so there's certain things you know that really aren't truly a conversion like someone's scrolling on your site i i think some people might argue it's a conversion but for me it's it's not right it's a scroll it doesn't mean they did something that was important it was a question can we see data from luis or hold on let me make sure i don't need this [Music] there is another question from eric can you say a little bit more about the switch from hits to events beyond adding flexible parameters how are they different um so for that everything is an event so i think maybe to get a little bit more technical without getting too technical in existing ga when you get to an intermediate or an advanced user you learn a lot about scopes and what dimensions do and don't go together like you can't mix pages and content and basically session scoped metrics with a page scoped or event or hit scoped so we get into all these scenarios in existing ga where we can't mix data because in ga4 everything is an event a page using event a transaction is an event everything is an event the biggest difference for me if i if i try to make it simple is we don't have a lot of those scoping issues and instead a lot of things just make more sense and are easier to work with than they were in the existing version of ga okay and now luis you asked could we send data retroactively within measurement protocol no there is no uh kind of external data import for all of your historical data into ga4 unless you use ga for firebase and already are collecting data on an app there's no way to carry your data over into ga4 measurement protocol just started to roll out it's an alpha we have some libraries that we're going to be sharing next week for python php we already have an apple tv library if you go into your data streams and you go into one of your streams at the bottom you're going to see the new option for measurement protocol one of the biggest improvements here is google's added a new concept of secrets if any of you have ever complained about spam in an existing ga this new concept of secrets should hopefully prevent a lot of the spam that was happening in google analytics because now someone can't go to your website and grab your id and send it data through the measurement protocol without your consent they need your secret value that's in here in order to send data through measurement protocol so there's a lot of improvements in measurement protocol but it's not going to solve your use case around retroactive data that's never really been supportive in ga a question do we have scrolls and heat maps nope still don't have that in ga4 i still advise you looking at things like session cam or hotjar or crazy egg they just do a way better job how do we need gtm to make events track so you're talking about your category action label so all that's different in ga4 is we have an event name instead of an event category for like the the the highest grouping of our event and now instead of an action and label where you only had two attributes for your event right if you had a video and you had five different per or five different things about that video you wanted the author the video title the buffer rate uh maybe the video location we only had a category action label i have too many so the old way of doing things in ga would be you would stuff everything in one of those parameters with ga4 now you just have an event name a video and then an event action a video title a video author a video buffer rate and you can go on and on and on so you have much more flexibility in how you track events and you're not forced into google's definition of you have to think of this as an action and label now you think of it as what is the event and then you define the attributes and parameters um there's a question can i explain more about how user id works with gtm simply user id in google analytics whether it's new google analytics or ga4 or or old ga or new ga it works the same if you want to use your own user ids somewhere on your website you have to collect the user id and typically that's through authentication so if a user logs in on your website if your backend or your crm has an id for that user then we want to try and collect that we can't collect their email address because we can't collect pii in ga so we need a user id typically a developer will store that in a cookie or they'll pass it in the data layer to gtm and then once we grab that from the cookie or in a data layer or somewhere else you simply pass it in the user id field in ga or ga4 so that's the simplistic view of how it works there's a question about how does internal traffic work could i share any examples right now internal traffic in ga4 is mostly about excluding it and if you wanted to exclude it you would use these new features and that data filter as well as in that stream setting so how it works is you kind of go in here you go into your tagging settings you can define your internal traffic right now by defining ip addresses um one of the things it doesn't have yet is regex for ip addresses so be ready for that and then how it works is it actually sets a parameter called a traffic type so everything works with events in ga4 and even your internal traffic filters kind of set an event parameter or kind of a user parameter and then that parameter actually works with the filter that was over here so you can set up a data filter and in that filter you could exclude anything that had that parameter value and filters are also kind of cool because now there's new settings for filters you can mark them as testing versus active so previously in ga when you created filters you'd always create a new view to test those now on ga4 you can actually mark them as a testing state and google will kind of temper or we'll mark those in a separate kind of event uh collection so it's not like making changes to the data you care about most and then when you know it works you can set it as active enrico uh oh great question how about sampling uh what about limits like ga 360 and cardinality so here's how sampling works with ga4 and how it's different than existing ga so let me go back into the platform uh in existing ga all of your reports in the left-hand nav are always unsampled but anytime you do something with those reports like if you out of the secondary dimension or an audience then if you had a high volume of data over 500 sessions with whatever date range you're looking at it would sample your data ga4 has standard reports all the standard reports are unsampled and they continue to stay unsampled no matter what you do with it so if i go to those pages of screen reports and i start to add a secondary dimension it'll be unsampled in addition i can use the comparison feature and start to filter things using this and it'll continue to be unsampled now it's important to note that even though all of these are unsampled it's a little more limited than the flexibility the existing ga offered so a lot of that flexibility only exists in something called analysis analysis is the place in ga4 where you can do like really powerful freeform analysis build your funnels have these pathing reports and this is where sampling does exist in analysis sampling will happen at 10 million events so if you're analyzing anything with 10 million or more events then it could potentially be sampled and that's the simplistic view of how that works the cardinality limits is a really good one unfortunately that's an area where i think we're waiting for better documentation from google on cardinality definitely exists but the documentation isn't very clear about where and how where and how and what the limits are just that it happens in certain cases so the biggest kind of improvement here that i think many of you will be excited about first the data is always unsampled in your sense and your standard reports even when you do something and in addition in the existing version of ga when i told you or you found out your data was sampled you probably were very sad because you figured out there was no solution to that without upgrading to google analytics 360 or 150 000 kind of subscription with ga4 you have your bigquery integration and bigquery gives you your unsampled data in a data warehouse so if you need to work with unsampled data and you have higher volumes your bigquery export actually gives you an alternative to now work with that in a way you never had that flexibility before there's a question for measurement protocol when will it be released anton well good news i think if you log into ga4 you'll already see it that rolled out a few weeks ago at least the alpha we actually have an apple tv library if you want to see an example of how it works luis you asked about sampling we just addressed that jacob when will we get a 360 version uh we're going to find out more i think about 360 uh next year so there will be an enterprise version of ga4 but right now there's nothing really available for pricing or information um so that'll be coming just not available yet uh we will share the recording uh more positive feedback thanks for that um there's a question this is kind of technical when we create a new property there's a g tag code and it has a config a new property as a new line i'm not sure on that uh that one is an interesting one if you if there's anything i haven't addressed or you have very technical questions like that um i'm a huge uh believer in uh measure slack so if you didn't know there's a free community for measure slack and there's even a channel in here for google analytics and bigquery and adobe and in here there's 10 000 of us that help each other answers questions i'm very active in here i can put the link in chat so the best place to get like something like that addressed is gonna be to apply and join the free measure chat community so let me throw the link in chat for everyone if you're interested in hopping a board so there's that link uh how do we think the new consent mode will integrate with ga4 so that's a question from gunner it already integrates with ga4 if you're not familiar with consent mode google's worked i think with the iab to work with new consent frameworks uh to opt in opt out change consent settings on the fly ga4 and existing google analytics already integrate with consent mode another cool thing in the last email google shared that they're building ga4 to work with a cookie-less future so what's exciting about that earlier someone asked about machine learning we're gonna probably have a future at google shared they're working on it where google will start to model some of your data so if we have a future where we we don't have consent to track every user google will be able to kind of infer and just like it does in google ads or how facebook does modeled conversions google analytics will start to have similar features as well payload size oh i can't remember the exact one for that i do know let's see what do i want to do sometimes i have to search app plus web because i find what i'm looking for easier using the old name i don't think the payload size was in here i can't remember the exact one for that there are some limits documented here so that one one might be a good one for measure slack again uh deprecation again no timeline too early don't worry nothing about universal analytics is going away anytime soon uh cream you ask can we connect google analytics for to data studio absolutely uh there's already a connector but note as i shared in my in my outro uh there's some limited things like i think event parameters aren't available yet and audiences weren't even available but google added audiences last week so i have a feeling all that will get addressed very quickly so yes you can connect it but just be aware there's some things that are missing there's a question from stanslove can we use the analytics.js tag with ga4 no you have to use either gtag or implement it through google tag manager analytics.js is the old that's why it's ga4 because now we have a new version of the code and it's definitely been built on gtag there's a question is this session start still 30 minutes long uh answer to that by default uh the sessions are still 30 minutes uh even in firebase when they use sessions it was 30 minutes there should be some settings to allow you to change that on the code actually i don't know if we have the settings yet to change our session lengths i know we can extend sessions and we can end sessions through the code i'm pretty sure but i don't think we can control the session and sessionization because that should be a server-side setting within ga um so that might be another use case we're still missing uh there's a question is there a limitation on how much data we can import in the bigquery sandbox so for bigquery sandbox i believe the limits are all readily available here so the answer is absolutely since this is the cloud data warehouse there are going to be limits i can share some information on the bigquery sandbox for all of you um so there is quotas you can you can see you get a free tier 10 gigabytes here's the thing about bigquery that i'll just give you all for advice on pricing if you want to kind of think about that it is incredibly cost effective um if i just go to the this standard bigquery pricing page google has has just made this so available and i think so affordable for everyone bigquery in general proper bigquery like when you when you actually don't just use the sandbox it gives you free tiers so you get like 10 gigabytes of storage you get a terabyte of querying and then if we go to the pricing where did it go i have too many things on my screen it's like two cents per gigabit and then you get discounts if the data is stored after like three months it goes down to one cent and for most of you the tables you're storing are going to be small so if you want to think about billing for most of you that are kind of under that 10 million events we're probably talking about pennies or dollars or like less than 100 like it's it's so cheap so pricing is usually something you don't have to worry about unless you're getting to a situation where you're building these predictive models and you're using tensorflow and doing all these really advanced things for most standard uses where you're simply doing some standard sql or maybe some standard visualizations your costs are going to be incredibly low and again everything's in here there's tons of things bigquery have around cost and helping you set up billing alerts and all sorts of other things so this should be a huge ad as google improves the session time not really for that we don't really have a lot of flexibility is there a report on search queries that people have used on search engines we don't have the google search console integration so that's another limitation can i please show you how data will look when exporting on sample data sure so what i'll do real quick do you want a preview of what bigquery looks like i'll give you a quick uh preview so let me load up the new ui for bigquery so here's my bigquery project i've got lots of like internal google analytics projects connected so i'm gonna have to find my ga4 property so in here this is our analytics pros project uh the app or sorry the ga4 not app plus web uses this naming convention analytics and then your property id there's the intraday table and here's my daily table which is the events so i've got 36 days worth of events tables in here you can see the schema but if you wanted to see what the data looks like i'll just go to preview and here it loads a few rows of data so you can see what it looks like so i've got event dates timestamps here's my parameter keys here's the values so here here's how you can see it here's the event name and here's the parameters and current ga we had category action label now event name and as many parameters really as you want so different and more flexible session start page title page location right page view and then if i scroll right you have all sorts of other things value sequence ids there's my user id so that's the ga client id here's my user properties i love emojis so i collect those for no particular reason lifetime value and revenues if you're using e-commerce our device information so again you've got a lot in here metro city traffic source information you can go crazy so again this is a huge addition to ga luis what are the benefits of consent mode consent mode is really important because if you are doing things right and you're asking users to have proper consent and also giving the option for them to change their consent mode simply allows google analytics as well as all of really google's ads and measurement platforms to easily respect that consent flag a lot of people use a consent management system like one trust or others and those are going to integrate uh with uh consent mode natively so most people are gonna use consent mode through like a consent management platform but it's gonna end up just making things way more flexible than it was without it the question what are the major changes for like a more basic analytics user or a more beginner analytics user so if you only use analytics to check their facebook campaigns uh my opinion would be honestly i don't think ga4 helps a beginner analytics user or maybe is the best place for you to start because universal analytics again is just easier more built out and more mature so i would say if you're kind of asking that question i would continue to use universal analytics if you just need the basics because ga4 some of the basics haven't really been built out in an easy way to use yet so that's an interesting question and i feel like if for that target audience ga4 yet maybe isn't isn't the best yet but again it will be uh do i believe running machine lot learning models based off of a big query will be worth it the answer is and you're you're asking about whether you should build machine learning on your own or use ga's native the answer is absolutely um there's a huge amount of people that upgrade to google analytics 360 so that they can have bigquery and build their own machine learning models so it's always better to do it up yourself versus or rely on someone else's models but there's a trade-off you might not have the resources or the time to do that or it might not be worth it right because the amount of time and resources that you do have it might not actually produce results that are are actually better or save you money or or show the the return versus the native one so if you think of a maturity curve for analysis most people start with the ui then you might graduate to some of the more advanced features then at some point you graduate to using some of the data out of ga and then you start doing advanced analytics so once you're in that top corner of maturity and you have like usually a bigger team or more advanced use cases that's where bigquery becomes the go-to model and the biggest benefit is you can customize it with whatever you want you can bring in your own other data sources more easily than you can at ga um you just have that full control a tutorial on how to start with bigquery um so i would say uh the two biggest places for that there's some ga4 specific ones i really like what ken williams has um one of our our our friends in the google analytics ecosystem bountious has some good guides um so he's got some stuff here i think on where is his bigquery stuff i think it's on the reporting and analysis section he's got just a bunch of great generic stuff the other the other cases if you're just looking for bigquery 101 i think we have some trainings on some other resources on our blog there's quora courses um there's just a lot of free tutorials i think both on google and any of your common sas based learnings for like a bigquery 101 if you want to use bigquery long story short you need to know how to write sql i am not a great sql writer i know enough to be dangerous and that's why i kind of depend on other technical resources to do anything with bigquery you can't learn bigquery without learning sql so my advice would be you're gonna want to get into the bigquery kind of side or the data science side you definitely need to invest in a sql class and learn how to write sql because that is going to be the core of of what you do with bigquery how does ga4 block traffic from bots and crawlers so it does that automatically uh previously in ga you'd have to check a check box uh now it's actually i think selected by default ga4 doesn't even have a checkbox it automatically detects traffic from the iab's bot list and excludes it by default and you don't even have the option to turn it off uh there's a question on how limited is the api and how we integrate ga4 with power bi the apis just got announced there's an admin api i think a real-time api and a data api for ga4 they're all in alpha and i think they're available for trusted testers you should be able to find them in a support center uh for limitations it's kind of going to be like data studio uh the g the google team's still releasing all these new features but you're probably gonna find if you're a mature user of the existing uh apis you're just gonna run into a variety of things it doesn't have yet uh how do we create custom dimensions and metrics in ga4 so we have a custom dimension and metric feature in a ga4 but it's important to note that the concept of custom dimensions right now at least is very different than existing ga so if you go into your events reports you can see right here i have the option to manage custom dimensions when you create event parameters by default those parameters will only show up in bigquery if you want those parameters on your events to be available in the ui you need to set them up as custom dimensions so our custom dimensions and ga4 are basically our hit scoped custom dimensions or event scoped custom dimensions uh we have a lot of those we can do them for dimensions and metrics anything that's like a user scope dimension we use something different called user properties what we don't have is we don't really have a concept of session scopes and we don't have a concept of product scopes yet so for any of our e-commerce users uh product scope custom dimensions i think we have some of the documentation of how to set them but we can't actually make them in the ui yet so they're similar but there's some differences now and we're still waiting for some use case stuff um let's see how does ga4 compare to other enterprise tools like adobe um right now i don't i just feels too soon to do comparisons i know everyone likes their comparison charts if anyone made a comparison chart of ga4 versus adobe it would probably have a column where eighty percent of it would say coming soon or to be determined um because it's just very early and it's build out so if you just ask me like adobe has been around for what 10 15 years ga4 has been around for 12 to 24 months depending on how you look at it so it's really hard to see how it matches up especially because we don't have the enterprise information yet which will be coming next year so it's really hard to answer that question right now just because it's it's very early um someone said enjoy the hockey and thanks for answering the questions thanks so much um so with that we went 33 minutes over time i think there's still how many of you over over like 50 of you on chat so thanks for uh staying staying along i had a lot of fun we'll send the recording on the slides after again if you want to connect with me you enjoyed our time together um just my first last name charles farina on twitter uh also find us at adword inc and i'm also on that measure slack community so we'd love to stay connected so thanks everyone so much for the time and i hope to see you soon

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Length: 92min 34sec (5554 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020