10 essential steps for using
Google Analytics 4 to grow
your business
Our recommended process, reports, tools and KPIs to grow your
business with GA4
10 essential steps for using Google Analytics 4 to grow
your business
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
1. Create a plan to train yourself and/or your team on how to get the most value from GA4
2. Customize conversions for your business
3. Measure your high-value audiences
4. Create performance review dashboards
5. Visualize your marketing funnel
6. Define your process for reviewing and improving funnel efficiency
7. Learn how to analyze using standard reports
8. Learn how to setup and share custom reports and Explorations
9. Exploit platform integrations
10. Track and adopt the latest features
The switch to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is exciting since it offers a new approach to help
you improve digital marketing using a data-driven approach.
However, the differences between GA4 and Universal Analytics (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 what's changed, ideally in a structured way. We have created our new free
guide to help our members with the learning and transition process.
The challenge GA4 presents is that many of the previous tools and techniques used for
analysis and reporting (that were available in UA) will no longer work as before, and will
need to be replaced by new, unfamiliar reports and measures. However, since the eventbased data collection and reporting model of GA4 makes it possible to perform new types
of analysis to identify improvements and refine your process to drive leads and sales, this
is a great opportunity for optimizing your marketing.
What does the guide cover?
The guide is structured around 10 key learnings and actions that are relevant for any
business and/or marketing team looking to harness GA4.
This guide is designed to both help you learn about the most useful new features and
measures and as a checklist to review how you use Google Analytics.
We'll prompt you with questions to ask to check your implementation and understanding
of GA4 and also highlight the reports and measures that will be most useful.
1. Create a plan to train yourself and/or your
team on how to get the most value from GA4
As you’ll 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.
In this section, we will outline some of the main differences between GA4 and UA which
need to be understood by GA users and covered in any training.
To best apply GA4 to any business there are two key phases involved:
Phase A. Setup and customization of GA4 to report on your business
Q. Have we customized Google Analytics for our business?
Since the sunsetting of UA was first announced, we have advised Smart Insights
members on customizations to learn about, and have provided a detailed checklist on
what needs to be changed - this is listed in our GA4 setup audit checklist.
Q. Have we changed the default data retention settings?
There are many details to consider here, but one particular ‘gotcha’ we wanted to flag up
is the Data retention settings.
It’s essential to change these in Admin. By default, these are set to just 2 months, limiting
analysis through time in Explorations, but not standard reports. This should be set to 14
months.
Phase B. Improving your process of using the standard reports and customization
to review and refine your communications
Q. Do we have a plan for learning new reports and using them to improve
communications?
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.
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.
For our Business Members, we give a structured learning approach for applying GA4 for
both phases in our interactive Google Analytics Learning Path.
Q. Are we using the Google Demo account to learn GA4 setup and reporting?
Our Learning Path uses many examples from the Google Demo account 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. We'll also use this example in this guide. We’ll see that it doesn’t
always illustrate best practices.
Differences between UA and GA4
For reference, the main differences that need to be acted on when switching to GA4 are:
1 Different data collection model – GA4 is based on event-based rather than pageviewbased measures, and a new property needs to be set up within GA Admin to collect
website data via a data stream using Tags. Tags are within your HTML page header
which can be defined in Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager, which we recommend
for customization.
You can gain an idea of the Event-based tracking by viewing the Realtime tracking,
shown here for Smart Insights.
In the bottom right you can see the Events that users of GA now need to become familiar
with. These are all new, although page_view will be familiar. The most important standard
events are:
•
page_view when a page is loaded in the browser (or an app screen)
•
session_start - recorded when a visitor first arrives on the site. Sessions last for
30 minutes
•
first_visit - self-explanatory
•
user_engagement - this is recorded when the user navigates to another page or
the session ends. See the explanation and how other related events such as scroll
are recorded in a session.
If you look at events for your site you may also see Enhanced measurement events
explained below such as click (these are outbound, not internal), scroll (not when a scroll
occurs, but when the end of the page is reached), download, form_submit and
view_search_results.
2 Different tracking codes – new tracking code has to be installed on each page.
Hopefully, you have had this set up for some time so you will be able to review
performance against historic data and can compare GA4 to UA for differences in
reporting volumes.
This Supermetrics article explains differences in data collection between GA4 and UA,
showing how you can compare reporting volumes and review potential problems.
Q. Are we using Enhanced Measurement?
The Datastream makes it easier to report on some interactions such as video plays or file
downloads through ‘Enhanced measurement’. Check with your Admin in the Datastream
section that you are making the most of these features.
Q. Are we using Google Signals?
This integration relates to Google Ads and is recommended if you use Ads. It's also
recommended if you want to understand the age-gender demographics of your site
visitors. Learn how to setup Signals.
3 Different goal setup – goals have to be customized in line with the event-based
approach and are now known as conversion events. This is a key difference, more on this
soon…
4 Different interface of reports and navigation labels – including new AI-based insight
recommendations.
5 Different measures – a small number added such as engagement and some removed
such as Page Value and goal value.
6 Different Privacy model – If relevant to your business, GA4 can be configured to
reduce information collected to be consistent with consent gained from users (if required).
GA4 is sometimes considered not to use cookies, but the default is for it to use cookies.
2. Customize conversions for your business
In Universal Analytics there were 5 different types of Goals that were used to track key
business outcomes such as leads generated or sales. In GA4, there is a single type,
- Conversion Events - which you or your tech helpers have to set up and customize as
explained in our Learning Path.
Advanced Module
Auditing Google Analytics customizations
Part of the Google Analytics Toolkit
Learn how to audit and set up your Google Analytics account to get clean data and
customize reporting for your business
LEARN MORE
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.
So the question to ask is:
Q. Have we set up and marked the right Conversion Events?
To summarize, the process of assessing your Conversion Events is:
•
Understand standard GA4 Events
•
Set up your own custom events (e.g., for leads)
•
Agree which of the custom events should be conversions
•
Mark relevant standard and custom events as conversions in the Admin section
If you’re not sure what has been agreed in your business, your first point of call should be
the list of conversions. You can then compare to Events. Looking at the Google Demo
account we can see some Events that have correctly been set as conversions such as the
E-commerce events add_to_cart and begin_checkout. However, other events such as
page_view and first_visit have been marked as conversions, which isn't logical...
3. Measure your high-value audiences
Not all website visitors are equal. In our learning modules which are structured around
our RACE digital marketing Planning Framework, we explain how to go beyond reviewing
the volume of visitors and considering measures to assess their value, quality and cost
(the VQVC mnemonic from Dr. Dave Chaffey's training).
Quality of visitors is based on the proportion who engage with the content and then go on
to convert. Conversion rates naturally differ for different traffic sources and landing pages
on the site and it’s vital for digital marketing to compare this variation to boost
conversion.
We recommend that you use your analytics reporting to build up this picture shown as
our content optimization matrix. This will show you your most and least effective content
so that you can boost conversions.
High value audiences also deserve special ‘VIP communications’. GA4 and Google Tag
Manager make it easier than ever to create audiences to retarget using Google Analytics
remarketing or other media platforms like paid social remarketing to boost conversion.
GA4 is an opportunity to review your approach to optimization. Email marketing and onsite retargeting through personalized panels can also be used for retargeting and GA
should ideally be able to report on these.
4. Create performance review dashboards
One of the first things you notice in GA4 is that there are fewer reports than UA. Although
simplification sounds a good thing, there is no new support for dashboards. In particular,
what is vital for data-driven reviews as part of 90-day planning is year-on-year (YoY)
performance review of channels and content.
GA4 is a great, free service, with improvements to enable you to customize detail reports,
e.g., to add in conversion rates to the standard reports, but it still contains many metrics
and reports.
Q. Have we created custom dashboards for our regular reporting and review?
Although custom dashboards can be built in Google Analytics, it’s not readily possible to
create a quality dashboard for presentation by senior management teams that
summarizes the effectiveness of digital marketing across the marketing funnel for a
business, particularly for the all-important ‘deltas’ of MoM and YoY performance. Using
other reporting and dashboarding tools such as Looker, Domo, Dashthis, Klik and
Tableau is better for this.
We’ve upgraded our RACE digital marketing dashboard in Looker Studio to support
analysis using GA4 data members who need this type of performance review using a free
tool.
The purpose of the Smart Insights dashboard is to help managers to complete a regular
monthly review of the current effectiveness of their digital marketing using Google
Analytics 4 with Google’s Looker Studio (formerly known as Google Data Studio).
Google has recently increased quotas for Looker Studio for GA4 analysis after decreasing
them. Details of quota increases shared here.
5. Visualize your marketing funnel
Previously, in UA, the funnel was part of goal setup. It’s an improvement in GA4 that it’s
now an Exploration which means it’s more accessible and easily configurable to other
types of non-e-commerce business.
This example Exploration shows how you can segment your funnel to compare
dimensions for different audiences. In this case, it’s different types of device and you can
see that mobile devices have lower conversion than expected.
Although funnels are visually appealing because of their simplicity, the reality is that they
don’t vary much between reviews, so for a more detailed understanding of paths there
are improved Path exploration reports in GA4. We’d also recommend regularly reviewing
the top 3 reports as shown in the next sections.
6. Define your process for reviewing and
improving funnel efficiency
It’s useful to consider your classic review process and where you can improve it.
In our Masterclass on GA4 and in the Learning Path module we cover each of these
questions and how to answer them using the reports in GA4 compared to UA.
These are the basic questions you should be asking to make your regular analysis more
focused:
•
Q1. What are our marketing activities doing for our business?
•
Q2. How many people are visiting our site? How are visits trending?
•
Q3. Who is visiting our website? Enabling Signals in GA4 can help answer this.
•
Q4. Which communications activities led to website visits?
•
Q5. Where do visitors arrive (and how many convert)?
•
Q6. How popular is different content and what prompts conversion? Adding event
tracking to your personalization services can help answer this.
•
Q7. What are the common customer journeys?
•
Q8. How well are we serving our customers?
The most important reports to review are these which inform the content optimization
review referenced at step 3.
First, the snappily named User acquisition: First user default channel group report.
You will want to use this or the companion Traffic acquisition report for regular analysis to
answer the questions: Which communications activities led to website visits and then
conversions. By default, this report is sorted on total users. To answer the question about
quality of users it's useful to select a relevant Conversion Event - here we have selected
'add_to_cart'. It's best to customize this report to show conversion rates to the event too,
so you can assess quality of traffic.
The second Landing pages report assesses which landing pages attract traffic and their
conversion rates. If you have specific audiences that are important to you, you can add a
comparison, explained in the next step, which adds an additional row to the table for a
particular channel.
Here we have chosen paid search to compare to all traffic. You can see that there are a
lot more people directed to Drinkware and Stationery rather than Apparel, so reviewing
this might be useful.
7. Learn how to analyze using standard
reports
Q. Are users of GA4 trained to use the standard reporting analysis features?
Some features are familiar, but others have changed. At least one person in your team
with the Admin role should know how to use these for analysis. Here is a checklist of
concepts in GA you need to be familiar with. They are available to all users unless stated.
•
1. Use Comparisons (formerly segments) where you can compare a subset of your
data in reports.
•
2. Use Filters to exclude data from your reports (this enables you to focus on
particular dimensions, e.g., some folders in a landing page report).
•
3. Use Audiences as permanent segments that can be used for comparisons and
remarketing, for example in Google Ads. Learn more from Google
Help and Analytics Mania.
•
4. Customize detailed reports to add important measures Google has missed
(e.g., Conversion rate to events!)
•
5. Add Reports to the Library and share them as part of collections (Admins only
can create these, all users of Property can view).
•
6. Add Reports to the Report Snapshot.
•
7. Add a Collection to the report navigation.
•
8. Setup custom Explorations for your business and add to the Library. These
include funnels, charts and tables.
More details on each are provided below. We explain these in detail and how this can be
used for digital marketing analysis in our Google Analytics Learning Path. Marketers
starting to use GA4 should read Google's introduction to Understanding Google Analytics
reports or watch this new (June 2023) video.
As a user of GA4 reports, it's useful to build up a mental picture and then check out ALL
the features. Likely you will change the dates (the new date picker is a big weakness of
GA4 in our opinion, the biggest bugbear is you can't pick the previous month in one
click). But you may miss some of the others unless you don't go through them
systematically. We certainly did.
The 5 main reporting features marketers will want to use are summarized in this
screenshot:
The functionality of these 5 and the corresponding location for help from Google are:
1. Apply a Filter to see a subset of your report data. Applies a report filter to see
a subset of the data in a report while hiding the rest of the data. Learn more
2. Apply a Comparison to see different sub-sets of data side-by-side. This is similar
to a Segment in UA. Comparison definitions appear at the top of your reports, and
remain in effect as you switch reports (unlike a filter) unless they are not applicable
to the data in the report. Learn more
3. Sampling. Identify how much of your data appears in the report. Learn more
4. Adjust the date range for all your reports. You won't find this option in the Realtime
report.
5. Customize the report (e.g., Add or remove columns of metrics) share (with account
users) or export the report (for anyone), and get AI-based insights about your data.
8. Learn how to setup and share custom
reports and Explorations
Q. Have we agreed on the standard reports that will be shared amongst our Google
Analytics users?
The type of customizations outlined in the previous step can then be shared with your
team alongside training for these and ad hoc analysis. Note that the Library and
Collections can only be modified by users with Admin and Editor roles.
Individual reports can be shared via the Share Link report available for each detailed
report.
Groups of reports can be shared as Collections in the Library by people with Admin
access (you won’t see this unless you have Admin access).
This example shows how the Google Search Console collection has been added so
marketers can understand organic search keywords which drive site visits.
9. Exploit platform integrations
Integrations we review in our Learning Path module include:
•
Google Tag Manager - to more easily use tagging to integrate with other
platforms.
•
Google Search Console - useful so marketers can track keyword impression and
clickthrough trends without loading up GSC. See Instructions for GSC integration.
•
Google Ads - to track paid search in more detail.
•
Google Signals - to gain more insight on your users include demographics and
cross-device behaviour.
•
Looker Studio - for business reporting and dashboards.
Integrations with other digital marketing tools may also be relevant, for example, we use
Intercom and Opt-inMonster for our lead generation and nurture that we have connected
to GA4, so we can see Events prompted by these tools or channels and the impact they
have.
Larger businesses may want to consider exporting to Google Big Query for data analysis
and integration with Business Intelligence tools.
All business may want to perform additional analysis in Google Sheets. A problem here is
that Google still hasn't updated their Sheets Extension which was used by millions.
Fortunately, Michele Pisani provides a similar free service and showing Google that it's
not too onerous - they seem to be encouraging paid solution. The Magic Reports
pluginmay be useful to you to if you analyze GA data.
10. Track and adopt the latest features
I’ll keep this last recommendation brief…
Q. Are we reviewing and educating users on the still emerging features of GA4?
To review the latest new features in GA4, take a look at the What’s New in Google
Analytics section update log from Google.
We do, as part of the updates on the changes that matter in our Latest digital media
updates tracker. This alerts our members to the changes that matter in organic and paid
search plus social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn.
If you have more than a ‘team of one’, it’s worth identifying someone to pass on the latest
developments and learnings to others in the team.