{"id":166210,"date":"2023-06-19T17:01:38","date_gmt":"2023-06-19T16:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/?p=166210"},"modified":"2023-06-19T17:01:38","modified_gmt":"2023-06-19T16:01:38","slug":"using-google-analytics-4-reports-to-grow-your-business-with-digital-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/google-analytics\/google-analytics-setup\/using-google-analytics-4-reports-to-grow-your-business-with-digital-marketing\/","title":{"rendered":"Using Google Analytics 4 reports to grow your business with digital marketing"},"content":{"rendered":"

A tutorial covering our recommended process, report, tools and KPIs to grow your business<\/h2>\n

By the time you read this, it's likely that Google Analytics 3 or Universal Analytics (UA), whatever you call it, will be no more. Switching to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) presents a big challenge for any business that wants to use a data-driven approach to improving their marketing. As the timeline shows, many of us have become very familiar with UA since we may have used it over the last 10+ years.<\/p>\n

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I'm excited about switching to GA4 since, I've been using Google Analytics since it was first created, when Google acquired Urchin, centreing my consulting, training and Smart Insights learning materials and templates on it as a practical tool to help improve digital marketing using a data-driven approach.<\/p>\n

However, the differences between GA4 and UA mean it's a BIG change and to get the most out of it, you and relevant colleagues will need to devote time to learning, ideally in a structured way. We have created our new free guide to help our members with the learning and transition process.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The challenge of GA4 is that your previous tools and techniques for analysis and reporting will no longer work as before and will need to be replaced by new, unfamiliar reports and measures. But, it's also an opportunity since the event-based data collection and reporting model of GA4 makes it possible to perform new types of analysis to identify improvements to your communications and your review and refine process to drive leads and sales.<\/p>\n

Our free tutorial for marketers learning how to use the reporting in Google Analytics<\/h3>\n

In our new guide, 10 essential steps for using Google Analytics 4 to grow your business<\/strong><\/a>,\u00a0 I highlight ten key learnings and actions that are relevant for any business and any marketing team looking to harness GA4.<\/p>\n

This guide is designed to both help you learn about the most useful new features and measures and as a checklist to review the approach of how you use Google Analytics. I'll also highlight the reports and measures that matter.<\/p>\n

What does this guide cover?<\/h3>\n

The guide is structured around ten key learnings and actions that are relevant for any business and any marketing team looking to harness GA4.<\/p>\n

This guide is designed to both help you learn about the most useful new features and measures and as a checklist to review the approach of how you use Google Analytics.<\/p>\n

We'll prompt you with questions to ask to check your implementation and understanding of GA4 and also highlight the reports and measures that matter.<\/p>\n

These are the ten steps, more detail and examples are available in the guide. In this article, I cover the first 5 steps.<\/p>\n

1. Create a plan to train yourself and\/or your team on how to get the most value from GA4<\/h4>\n

As you\u2019ll likely know, GA4 is NOT a small change from UA. The event-based data collection model is completely different to the previous page view-based data collection and the reporting interface is completely different with reports with new visualizations, labels and metrics.<\/p>\n

To best apply GA4 to any business there are two key phases involved:<\/p>\n

Phase A. Setup and customisation of GA4 to report on your business<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since the sunsetting of GA4 was first announced, Smart Insights has advised on customizations and have provided a detailed checklist on what needs to be changed - this is\u00a0our GA4 setup audit checklist<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are many details to consider here, but one particular \u2018gotcha\u2019 we flag up in the guide is the Data retention settings<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Phase B. Improving your process of using the standard reports and customization to review and refine your communications<\/strong><\/p>\n

This phase is more focused on education and learning for marketing teams. Training should focus on how to use GA4 to support marketing activities. It should enable marketers to be able to work through this process and answer these questions as part of their regular reporting of their always-on and campaign communications.<\/p>\n

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Since many businesses have now set up GA4 properties and completed or are refining their customizations, this guide focuses on the second phase that many businesses are now grappling with.<\/p>\n

For our Business members, we give a structured learning approach for applying GA4 for both phases in our interactive Google Analytics Learning Path<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Our Learning Path uses many examples from the Google Demo account<\/a> that we recommend anyone looking to learn GA4 adds as a favourite to their Google Analytics account as a cross-reference of what is possible. This account uses a merchandise store as the source of its data. I\u2019ll also use this example in this post. We\u2019ll see that it doesn\u2019t always illustrate best practices.<\/p>\n

Differences between UA and GA4<\/h3>\n

In the guide, we explain the main differences between the different versions of Google Analytics which should be considered when planning education and training for GA4.<\/p>\n

The main difference is that GA4 uses a Different data collection model<\/strong> \u2013 GA4 is based on an event-based rather than pageview-based measures and a new property needs to be set up within GA Admin to collect website data via a data stream using Tags which within your HTML page header which can be defined in Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager which we recommend for customization.<\/p>\n

You can gain an idea of the Event-based tracking by viewing the Real Time tracking, shown here for Smart Insights.<\/p>\n

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In the guide, we summarize the main events you need to learn and check are set up.<\/p>\n

2. Customize conversions for your business<\/h4>\n

In Universal Analytics there were 5 different types of Goals<\/em> that were used to track key business outcomes such as leads generated or sales. In GA4, there is a single type<\/em>, Conversion Events<\/em> which you or your tech helpers have to set up and customize as explained in our learning path.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Advanced Module<\/div>
\"Auditing

Auditing Google Analytics customizations<\/strong><\/p>

Part of the Google Analytics Toolkit<\/p>

Learn how to audit and set up your Google Analytics account to get clean data and customize reporting for your business <\/p>Learn More<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

GA4 has many standard events such as page views, first_visit and user_engagement to which you can add your own events such as lead_generated or user_logged_on. Since there are many events that appear across many reports, one of the first things that a business should do is to agree on their custom events and to simplify to those that are relevant for your business as conversions.<\/p>\n

To summarize, the process of assessing your set up of Conversion Events is:<\/p>\n