Week 9— My Journey into Data Analytics — DA Minidegree Review — CXL Institute
Welcome to the 9th Week, this week I covered the GA4 Module and it blew my mind. If you have been using UA (I am sure all of us are), G4A will bring in a lot of emotions, you might end up liking it or hating it, but as they say, you cannot ignore it. This article will give you an overview of What’s different in GA4, fundamentals, and things to look out for.
Google Analytics 4 is an Event-based Tracking Platform that has a different interface and offers different standard reports and parameters.
GA4 tracks users instead of the user sessions tracked by UA. GA4 also combines website data and app data into a single data set. Google Analytics 4 supports cookie and cookieless tracking.
Understanding Data As Events vs. Sessions
In UA properties, Analytics groups data into sessions, and these sessions are the foundation of all reporting. During a session, Analytics collects and stores user interactions, such as pageviews, events, and eCommerce transactions, as hits. A single session can contain multiple hits, depending on how a user interacts with your website.
In GA4 properties, you can still see session data, but Analytics collects and stores user interactions with your website or app as events. Events provide insight into what’s happening in your website or app, such as pageviews, button clicks, user actions, or system events.
In GA4, events can be split into 4 categories:
- Automatically collected events
- Enhanced Measurement events
- Recommended events
- Custom events
- Automatically collected events are collected automatically with basic data collection. Events tracked automatically include first_visit, page_view, session_start, user_engagement.
Note: These automatic events can’t be switched off or disabled. They are the critical components needed for Google Analytics, so you will find them in all Google Analytics 4 properties.
- Enhanced measurement events are collected automatically if you have enabled enhanced measurement. You can enable/disable the collection of individual enhanced measurement events via the Admin page within your Google Analytics 4 property. These include Click, file_download, scroll, video_start, video_progress, video_complete, view_search_results.
- Recommended events are events that you implement yourself, but that have Google-predefined names and parameters. Recommended events unlock existing and future reporting capabilities not available for custom events (events that you name yourself). Here are the events recommended for all properties, Retail/Ecommerce , Jobs/Education/Real estate, Travel, and Games.
- Custom events are events that you name and implement yourself. Before implementing a custom event, check that there is not an automatic, enhanced measurement, or recommended event that already provides what you need. Learn how to implement custom events for web and app.
Event Parameters in Google Analytics 4
Events can be sent to Google Analytics with parameters. Parameters are extra pieces of information that are tied to the event. For example, the page_view event is sent to your reports with the page_location and the page_referrer parameters. The page_location parameter lets you see the URL of the page that someone viewed, and the page_referrer parameter lets you see the URL of the previous page they viewed.
In UA an Event has an Event Category, Event Action, Event Name, Event Value, and Custom Dimensions. In GA, Events have Event name and Parameters
Sending Events to Google Analytics 4
There are different ways to send events to GA4, such as
- Creating New Events from Existing Events — if you want to create an event for people viewing a specific thank you page on your website. You can create a new event using the existing page_view event
- Creating New Events in the Interface — Navigate to ‘Events’ and select ‘Create Event’ on the top-right corner. Make sure you have edit access enabling you to create the events. Select the data stream, name your new event and enter the conditions you want to use for matching, and then choose if you want to copy (or modify) the parameters for your new event. Once the conditions for your new event match an existing incoming event, you will begin to see your new event in the ‘Events’ report
- Modifying Events in the Interface — To modify incoming events, navigate to ‘Events’ and select ‘Modify Event’ on the top-right corner. This option lets you modify events, parameters, and values. Eg: modifying the click event, which is automatically used to track outbound links. Moving forward, the click event will be reported as outbound_link.
- Sending Events Using Google Tag Manager — You can create a new tag using the ‘GA4 Event’ tag type. You can then name the event and add the parameters (and values) you would like to send to your reports. This is the easiest and recommended way.
Explorations (Analysis Hub)
Explorations is a collection of advanced techniques that go beyond the standard reports to help you uncover deeper insights about your customers’ behavior.
What can be done in Exploration?
- Quickly perform ad hoc queries using one of the various analysis techniques
- Apply various visualization styles to your analysis
- Easily switch between techniques to find the right insight and view
- Drill down into the data to find deeper insights
- Create segments and audiences to use in your analysis
- Use filters and segments to focus on the data that’s most relevant to you
- Export the analysis data for use in other tools
- Share your analyses with other users
Key Difference in UA and GA4
- Data Collection and Sampling — With Universal Analytics, there were certain limitations in terms of the amount of data that could be collected with the free version — 10 million hits per property per month — which might not sound that great for traffic-heavy websites. GA4 eliminates this restriction by enabling free unlimited data collection, and, additionally, eradicating any possibility of sampling in standard reports.
- Free Connection to BigQuery — previously this was available only in the paid version of Google Analytics (GA360). The underlying functionality grants access to your raw (complete) data with full ownership rights; meaning you can merge it with any sources (e.g., even your CRM platform that contains customer emails) to get a more holistic overview of the customer journey since it serves as a separate data warehouse.
- No View Level — GA4 does not offer specialized view functionality. Reporting occurs at the property level, which is essentially your master view. For example, there is no equivalent method to isolate your blog traffic from your main site.
- Cross-Domain Tracking — In GA4, you set up cross-domain tracking through an admin setting only rather than through tagging and admin modifications.
- No Bounce Rate — In order to understand the quality of your traffic (which is what bounce rate was meant to do), you now have the three new metrics introduced above:
- Engaged Sessions
- Engaged Sessions/User
- Engagement Time
- Goals are no longer available — In order to identify an action as a conversion in GA4, it will require you to assign certain Events as conversions.
- Site Speed — Unlike Universal Analytics, Google Analytics 4 doesn’t measure site speed.
What do you think about GA4? How has your experience been? Let me know through comments.
