Google, in its infinite wisdom and (monopoly) power, is forcing us all into the world of GA4 (Google Analytics 4). Goody-goody! Oh, great joy! Please, sir, can I have another? GA4 is universally condemned as a trainwreck of a user interface, but few are brave enough or confident enough to get the attention of the Googlers on the GA4 team who are forcing us all to adopt it by summer, 2023. I’m not going to sugar coat this. I hate GA4. It’s the worst. Maybe over time Google will listen to user feedback… but for now, we’re stuck with it. Let’s make the best of it and learn the basics of GA4.
Install GA4
If you haven’t already, you can and should install GA4 parallel to UA (Universal Analytics). The easiest way to do this is as follows:
- Set up a Google Tag Manager Account via the same email (Gmail) that you use to manage your current UA / Universal Analytics.
- Log in to your current Google Analytics account, and under Admin > Create Property, create a new GA4 account.
- Make sure you get the GTM account ID.
- Back inside of Google Tag Manager, set up one (or both) tags – a “traditional” UA tag and a new “GA4” tag. Here’s the help file on setting up GA4 via Tag Manager.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time here, but make sure that you get Tag Manager to properly install both a UA and a GA4 tag. Then check to verify (use, for example, realtime) to see that data is flowing into both your UA and GA4 accounts.
Pre-Basics: What Do You Want To Measure?
As small business marketers, we usually want to measure a specific set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), often on a weekly or monthly basis. For most of my clients, I measure results on a monthly basis. We will assume you know your keywords, you’ve done your ON PAGE SEO, and you’ve done your OFF PAGE SEO.
Here are some basics that we want to measure:
- Rank on Google Searches vs. keywords (not accessible in GA). Use a tool like MOZ, SEMRush, or AHREFS to measure or WhiteSpark.ca if you are locally oriented.
- Other key metrics such as link authority, page speed, site: indexing. These are “diagnostics” about whether your site has the SEO credentials to rank and is moving in the right direction. Check Google Search Console as well.
- Traffic by Source – how much traffic (users / traffic / sessions) is your website getting each month? And, where is that traffic coming from (organic, Google Ads, social media (organic), social media (ads), direct, or referrals?
- Within that traffic, is it “engaged” and does it lead to a “conversion?” (Conversions must be defined: see below).
- Debug what traffic source “converts” and why/why not. Improve your SEO / ads / social efforts to improve the ROI (vs. $$, blood, sweat, tears).
- Slice and Dice Your Data. Ask a question (e.g., how much of my traffic is from Texas vs. California), and optimize Google Analytics to get the answer.
- This is “segments” in UA
- This is “comparisons” and/or “filters” in GA4
GA4 Basics
As we walk through some of the basics of GA4, I recommend you access the ‘Google Analytics Demo Account‘ for example, the Google Merchandise Store. Throughout the process, remember the GA4 is ** NOT ** intuitive. Many data points are hidden, and you have to figure what you want to know, and then figure out how to get it to display that data. Whereas in UA, there were many clickable menus and drill downs, GA4 has lots of blank screens – YOU have to figure out what YOU want to know.
- UA: Data is presented easily in “report” format. It “suggests” data to you, which you can (easily) find by browsing.
- GA4: Data is hidden from you. You face a lot of “blank screens.” You must figure out your question, and then figure out how to get the answer.
I like to think of it like playing JEAPORDY with Google. Figure out the QUESTION and then figure out how to find the ANSWER. With that in mind, et’s walk through the basics:
The Home Screen. This is the data that hits you when you first log in. Some basic concepts are “cards” (these are report-like fragments of information). For example, the ‘reports snapshot‘is (supposed to be) a quick way to see the data for your website. On the top right, click on the ‘time horizon.’ The geniuses at Google haven’t (yet) learned that most people want a report for ‘last month,’ but you can manually choose last month as a custom report, so see data for last month. The default is ‘last 28 days,’ and why they choose 28 days is maybe based on the cycle of the moon? But 28 days in the default report period. Here you can see –
- Users – these are people who have visited your website. ‘New users’ vs. ‘users’ is a representation that one user can return more than once in the time period. Also, note that in GA4 the replacement for ‘sessions’ is often ‘traffic,’ as one user can create traffic, which is more than one session.
- Realtime – this is what’s going on right now on your website. You can drill in if you like. Most of us don’t really care what’s going on right this second on our website, but maybe you do.
- Insights – this is a generally useless attempt at Google AI. Try it and see if you can find any insights there. I’m looking for an insight as to the names of the people on the GA4 team, so we can request that they all be immediately laid off.
- User Acquisition – this answers the question of where your users come from. It’s very important (so discussed below).
- Traffic Acquisition – remember, “traffic” is “sessions” in UA4, so this is the essentially the same as user acquisition. This does have more information on “campaigns” such as your Google Ads campaign, or other sources of traffic.
- View Countries – this is what is called “geography” as you can drill down into Country > State (Region) > City. Here’s an example of where GA4 is totally stupid. You can drill down to state / city but you do so on the far right by building a comparison. It is not easy to just “click into” a state (e.g., California) and then see the cities (e.g., Los Angeles, San Francisco). This has to be done manually through a step-by-step process, which is very difficult to set up. (Return to insights to see if you can find the team and fire all members).
Left Hand Menu. On the top, you’ll see a white home in a blue circle. If you hover, you’ll see some non-intuitive icons. Hover there and you’ll see:
- Reports. This opens up “cards” with drill downs to more data. Some of this is the same as the “home screen” as referenced above. We’ll highlight a few in a moment.
- Explore. This is basically custom reports. In normal English, we would call these “custom reports.” But that’s too intuitive for the Googlers, so they called them “explore.” When you create a new “exploration,” you are basically creating a new “report.” This is similar to the movie House Bunny, in which she explains that “fringe is bangs.” I haven’t explored these explorations too much, yet, but I think that’s what they are: reports.
- Advertising! Surprise, surprise, surprise. Advertising gets its own tab prominently on the left, because Google wants you to, well, advertise. Here you can drill into “channels” which are the sources of traffic…
- Configure. Click here and you get a message that Configure has moved to Admin. So GA4 is brand new, and they’ve already screwed it up so bad that Configure is an orphan. Click on the GEAR for ADMIN and that, as in UA, is where you configure many of your settings, such as who has access, new properties, etc.
- Here is where you can manage user access, as well as link your GA4 account to your Google Ads account (“important”).
Reports: the Workhorse of GA4
Click on reports on the left. This is where most of us will find useful information. At the top, notice the link to “add comparison.” This is what was in UA4 the very useful segments feature. It has now been chopped down to the crappy “Add Comparison” feature which is a ZILLION times more difficult to use. When you click “Add Comparison” on the left, it will open up Conditions and Dimensions. It’s not really clear what the linguistic relationship is between comparison, condition, and dimension. I think “dimension” is some sort of Asylum for the Analytically Insane where the GA4 team lives and tortures small business marketers for fun.
But, you can play around here, and add what a normal person would say is a “view” or maybe a “filter” to the data. For example, type in Dimension = Region = California, and you can see data that is coming from people in California. You can add another dimension for Texas and compare traffic from folks in the two states. Scrolling down you can see data points such as their retention, conversions, etc.
Note: once you create a comparison you can carry that through other features of GA4. Thus, “comparisons” function like “segments” in UA, with the limitation that they are much harder to use and deploy. Because, they improved it by making it worse. (See “dimensions” where the team lives to understand this “upgrade”).
Within Reports: Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, and Retention
Reports is the most similar to UA, so once you are in the “reports” tab you can drill down even further. For example:
Acquisition – how do users find you? On the far right you should see “first user default channel” which is Googlespeak for how they first find you. Here you’ll see direct, organic search, paid search, display and other markers for “how” they found you. Unlike in UA, none of these can be drilled down into by simply clicking; you have to create a custom report to see for example, more information on Referrals. You can play around with the “plus” sign to see more variables. It sucks as there is no obvious organization to these elements, and way too many variables. Within this blizzard of data… try to latch on to something useful! Under “Add Filter” you can add a filter to see just one type of data (e.g., people in Texas, people who came in via a mobile browser, etc.).
Traffic Acquisition – this is the same thing as above, just focused on sessions. Here, however, is where “campaigns” live, which can be your Google Ads campaigns, as well as campaigns created by UTM codes.
Engagement overview. Here, you can see some basics of “engagement,” that is how long people stayed on, which pages, they visited, etc. The Pages and Screens card is useful here; these are the web pages that were popular. Drill into that.
Within Page and Screens, Google Analytics now displays the PAGE TITLE. That might not be very helpful (and if two pages have the same title, they are lumped together). So click on the plus sign and get into Page Path and Screen Class. This will show you the URL, as in UA. Again, if you have a comparison turned on (e.g., Texas) you can compare your Texas users to your total users. Or you can play around with comparisons and filter, for example, “organic” traffic only to see what’s going on with just organic traffic (more on that in a moment).
Conversions. Here you can dig into what you called a conversion. In this case, click on “purchase” and you can see where your purchases came from. Some conversions are “automatic” especially e-commerce. But if you use “thank you” pages – you need to define these separately (see below).
Demographics. You can see demographics information.
Tech. You can see information such as the browsers or devices that people use. This is especially useful to see percent coming in from mobile vs. desktop.
Scroll back up and click into RETENTION. This is a new thing in GA4. Google is trying to show you data, get you to worry about “retention,” that is users who are coming back. Maybe important, maybe not. Maybe a tiny sliver of hope that something better will occur in GA4 than in UA. Click into this, and see how empty the data is to shatter any illusions you may have had that GA4 is an improvement on UA. Return to “dimensions” and hunt for the GA4 team to send them pink slips.
Explore
Here is where reports live. You can try to create some. It’s really hard. Try watching some YouTube videos, such as this one on how to use Explore.
Advertising
This exists as a tab on the top left. However, to do it as a “comparison” of source / medium.
Help
Help – top right “?” icon, or here – https://support.google.com/analytics/ or visit Skillshop.
CONVERSIONS
Watch this YouTube video on how to track “Conversions” in GA4 – https://youtu.be/6ueyNgqdkZI
ALTERNATIVES to GA4
Heretofore, I have been a fan of Google Analytics. It’s free. It was relatively easy to use. And it was powerful. But with the advent of GA4, I would recommend beginning to look at alternatives. Until/unless Google improves the easy-of-use of GA4 for small business owners, it may be simpler to use an alternative that is more customer-focused. One recommendation: Piwik.pro.
