If you’re interested in checking out the activity on your website as soon as it happens then the new Realtime report in GA4 is exactly what you should be looking at. This report lets you monitor all of the activity on your website as it happens (within the past 30 min), and you’ll be able to see how the visitors on your app or site behave (what pages they are on, what events they are triggering, etc). We’ll take a look at what realtime reporting is, how it’s changed in Google Analytics 4, and all of the benefits it provides. What is Realtime Reporting? Before we get into the specifics of how realtime reporting has changed or how it can help you, we have to discuss what exactly it is.
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Custom Dimensions in Google Analytics 4 are a great way to add more in-depth data to the events you are collecting. They are basically a dimension (or a metric if you are setting up a Custom Metric which follows the same steps as below) that you have created yourself. Essentially, they are additional pieces of data that you are sending to Google Analytics 4 as parameters that you then configure as custom dimensions in your GA4 interface. Google Analytics 4 gives you the power to collect and analyze data that it typically doesn’t automatically generate itself. Custom dimensions are not only super simple to set up but they’re a great way to get deeper insights about the events being collected on your site. In this article, you will be guided
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What is the best Attribution Model?? Ah, the age-old question… Attribution is a big hairy topic, and I’m not going to write an essay on picking the best attribution model, because the best will always depend on your individual business… BUT, I’m excited to say that Google Analytics 4 now has Data Driven Attribution (DDA) available for ALL customers – both free and 360 customers! In Universal Analytics (aka GA3), DDA was only available to 360 customers, so this is a great addition to the free version of GA4! (Side note – DDA is available in the Attribution Beta in UA for free for everyone, but since this is outside of the main Universal Analytics interface, I’m not including that here) Let’s start with a few definitions: What is Data Driven
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The Pages report is a fantastic way of gaining a better understanding of your website’s performance. It allows you to monitor and track how popular each page and screen is with your users. Page reporting is one of the most important aspects of Google Analytics data analysis and should be one of your favorite features. We’ll fill you in on what pages reporting is, how it’s beneficial to you, and what it looks like in GA4. What Is the Pages Report? Looking at the Pages report is a fairly common way to analyze your data. Basically, it shows you a breakdown of how your website and mobile app pages or screens are doing. Pages reporting in Google Analytics 4 specifically measures the performance of a web page or screen based
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Bounce rate is a metric that’s mentioned a lot when discussing user engagement, but it’s not necessarily the beating pulse for a site’s health that it’s sometimes made out to be. This is in large part due to the fundamental changes with how websites are designed today (vs 10-15 years ago when GA was a much newer tool for website analysis) and how users interact with them. Google Analytics has recently replaced bounce rate with a new form of measuring user engagement. Here’s what you need to know. What Bounce Rate Represents A “bounce” is recorded whenever a user visits a single page on your site or app without interacting more deeply. But Bounce Rate generally only tells you that there is a problem, while deeper digging is required to
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Understanding Organic Search data is important for any SEO or web analyst. In Universal Analytics, you could integrate your Google Search Console property with your GA property. You can now also do this for Google Analytics 4 properties! I’ll show you how to get this set up in this step-by-step guide. Step 1: In your GA4 admin section, open up the Search Console integration tab Head on over to the admin section of your Google Analytics 4 property and under the property column, scroll down and under the “Product Linking” section you’ll see a new option for “Search Console Linking” Clicking in, you’ll be taken to an overview screen which shows your linking options. You’ll want to click the blue “Link” button in the upper right hand corner in order
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BIG updates have come to the GA4 user interface! Updates include new navigation, new reports, and report customization. These updates are live now in the GA4 demo account now, and should be rolling out to your properties soon. In this post, I’ll break down these updates piece by piece. First, you’ll notice that the left hand navigation section is now structured as a multi-nav setup with a main nav that groups reports and features into sections, and a secondary nav that slides out for each of the main nav sections. These new grouped sections are: Reports – a collection of all of the reports that previously lived under the Lifecycle and User reporting sections Explore – FKA “Analysis”, this renamed feature is now featured in the main nav as Explore
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Another VERY exciting and new addition to Google Analytics 4 properties is the ability to create events directly within the User Interface. Again, this is something you’ve never been able to do before within Google Analytics, and it’s a huge step forward to customizing your event and parameter data to get it exactly as you want it. It is also a great way to be able to create more specific conversion events as well! Let’s walk through it step by step. Creating new events (and conversions) in GA4 Step 1: Click to “Create Event” You’ll start in the “All events” report in GA4, and on the top right of the events table, click the middle button for “Create event” You’ll then be taken to the Custom events screen. Click “Create”
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Something VERY exciting and new to Google Analytics 4 properties is the ability to modify events directly within the User Interface. This is something you’ve never been able to do before within Google Analytics, and it’s a huge step forward for putting the power in the hands of marketers and analysts to have their data show exactly as they need it. Let’s walk through it step by step. Modifying events in GA4 I love Enhanced Measurement in GA, and have it enabled for all possible events it will collect. One of those events is Outbound Clicks. However, when the Outbound click event fires, it is actually collected as just “click” and shows up like the below: This bothers me because it doesn’t seem very intuitive to me, so I’d like
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