Do you know how effective your website is at generating business? Do you know how people find you on the internet? If you’re unsure, you might need to implement analytics on your website. GA4 is the latest iteration of Google’s analytics software and is a powerful tool that provides insights into how people find and use your website.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to gain insights into how visitors are interacting with websites. It provides website data such as where visitors have come from, which pages they browse on a website, and more. By having this data at our fingertips, marketers can make smarter decisions about marketing campaigns and website owners can refine their business offering using real-time data.
How Google Analytics Works
While it may seem complex, Google Analytics works in a simple way. It collects data from users who visit your website and then presents it in real-time reports. You can also look up and generate detailed reports using any date that has been collected since it was installed on your website. This can help you gain insights into a range of trends, such as how visitors are finding your website, how they engage with your website, as well as what parts of your website they respond to the most.
How To Set Up a GA4 Account
- If you haven’t already, create a Google profile and get set up with the Google marketing platform. Once set up, you can navigate to Google Analytics and click to create an account.
- Follow the steps by creating your analytics account and property following providing some information about your business and its objectives.
- Next, you need to set up a data stream for your website so that it can begin collecting data. There are 3 different options – web, android app and iOS app. Select web and complete what follows.
- This will now generate a tracking code that you will need to install on your website to be able to collect data. There are three different options to install this, and Google will provide instructions on how to do this. If you are unsure, you can pass this along to an experienced web team.
How To Set Up Conversions and What You Should Track as a Conversion
Now you have set up your GA4 profile, it’s time to set up conversion actions. This is important because it allows you to measure the success of your website, as well as get an idea of what pages or portions of your website are generating the most business for you.
To set up, go to the admin section and then go to ‘key events’. From there, you can set up any conversion action that you would like to keep track of or use in advertising campaigns as an optimisation. There are a few ways to set conversions up, and Google will provide instructions for each to make it as easy as possible, but if it becomes too complicated, you can pass the setup along to a web team to make sure that the setup is completed accurately.
To work out what you should track as a conversion, consider what the purpose of your website is.
Is it to get sales? You should set up conversion actions such as purchases, add to basket, initiate checkout or sign-ups to offers or newsletters.
Is it to get business leads? You should set up conversion actions for your contact forms, phone calls, or other ways that you prompt people to get in touch with you.
What To Do With GA4
Google Analytics offers powerful data-driven insights into how people might interact with your website. This allows you to gauge how effective your website is at generating business by predicting performance instead of reviewing data. You can use this to predict things like:
- Revenue generation
- Purchase probability
- Churn probability
Analytics is also great for building audiences for use in marketing campaigns. You can use the examples above to build an audience of people who are likely to spend over £200 on your website in the next 14 days or build an audience of people who have already purchased in the last 60 days so you can make sure you don’t waste advertising budget on them.
Analytics also provides a dashboard to view quick reports of all the data that matters most to your business. These are also customisable to only show exactly what you need to see at a glance.
What Metrics Should I Track on My GA4 Profile?
By default, the main metrics on your home page dashboard will be ‘users’, ‘conversions’, ‘event count’, and ‘sessions’.
- Users is the number of unique visitors your website receives.
- Conversions/Key events is the number of conversion actions that people have taken on the website. What these are will change based on the type of business you have, as well as the goals you have for your website.
- Event count is slightly different to conversions and tracks more of a range of interactions with your website that might not be direct business generators, such as how many people open a form or specific page.
- Sessions is the number of views your website has received. Because users can visit your website multiple times, this will often be higher than the number of users.
As you explore reports, there will be other metrics and performance measurements that you will discover. Here are some to keep an eye on:
- Average engagement/session time shows how long users are spending on your website. The longer the time, the better.
- Engaged sessions per active user shows the percentage of users that perform an engagement action when they visit your website.
- Key event rate is the percentage of users that take a conversion action.
Some Things to Try Using Your New GA4 Profile
Test the new search bar
Google has completely redesigned how the search function works for GA4, making it far easier to access and compare data. Try a test search such as “top users by device”. You can even search for comparisons such as “how many users visited the home page compared with 1 month ago”. Getting used to using the search function as a tool will greatly flatten the learning curve of using GA4 for the first time.
Explore the dashboards
The dashboards now work by displaying configurable cards of basic information, such as the number of users in the last month, the amount of revenue generated, or what countries people are visiting your website from. It’s a good idea to explore these and get an idea of how they work, as well as experimenting with different settings.
Explore the different reports
From the sidebar on the left-hand side of the screen, you can choose from a range of different reports, broken down into three main categories: Acquisition, Engagement and Monetisation. The most useful reports to explore after an initial setup will be the ones for acquisition and engagement. Acquisition shows where traffic comes from, and engagement shows how people interact with your website. Feel free to spend some time clicking around the reports to get an idea of what would be useful for your business.
Try path exploration
Once your page has collected some data, you can set up a visualisation of the kind of path a typical user takes through your website. Find this by going to the ‘explore’ section. You can use path exploration to see things like what pages people visit after viewing your home page, which pages lead to dead ends in the user journey (so you can identify which pages to improve), and see the kinds of actions that people commonly take after a page view. These are great for seeing what actions your most important customers, such as those who submit lead forms, take. Path explorations are configurable by changing variables such as age, gender, and location. Playing around with path explorations allows you to gain insight into what to use for potential landing pages and address any issues with your website’s layout.
How To Customise Reports
One of the most powerful new tools in GA4 is the ability to create and customise reports to show any data that you want. To one, go to ‘library’ in GA4 and then go to ‘reports’. You will then be able to create a new report from there.
If you’re just trying this section out, start by creating an overview report. From here, you can customise the date range and add comparisons, as well as edit the kind of information you see.
There is a lot of information that’ll be put in front of you that you may struggle to understand. To make this data into something more understandable, GA4 has a new insights feature using the search bar. You can ask basic questions based on the data, such as “How many users did I have last week?” or “How many users came from organic search in the last 30 days?” and it should provide you with the answers.
When you’re ready, you can start customising the report. Click the pencil ‘edit’ button to open the customisation menu and you can start adding cards in based on what you want to see. There are several pre-made ones that you can drag and drop into the reports, and you can also create custom ones using any parameters you need.
How to Use GA4 To See User Journeys
One thing that GA4 does so well is that it focuses on the overall user journey, as opposed to individual sessions or page views like Universal Analytics used to. It gives you an overall idea of how someone moves through your website, the touchpoints they come across, and how these contribute to a conversion or event. You can even track customer journeys across multiple devices, which allows you to work out what steps each customer takes before they make a purchase.
GA4’s Explorations tab is really useful for this sort of information. There are some pre-built reports within this section, allowing you to look at the behaviour flow of your website traffic in detail. For example, Path Exploration can give you an insight into exactly where visitors have arrived from, allowing you to adjust your marketing campaigns accordingly. GA4 really comes into its own with its reporting, as you can build custom explorations which include specific analytics that you can then track over time.
How to Connect GA4 to Other Platforms
You can connect Google Analytics to other Google platforms such as Google Ads and Google Search Console. For example, connecting to Google Ads allows for much more accurate data for what traffic you have generated from your advertising. You can also set up conversion actions and import these from GA4 into Google Ads to attribute specific actions that users take to Google Ads, which allows you to build a more complete picture of the user journey, as well as use that data to help you to optimise your ad campaigns.
To connect GA4 to other platforms, go to the GA4 admin panel and select ‘product links’. You will then be able to choose from a range of options to link your GA4 profile to. Choose to link to whatever product you’ve chosen and follow the on-screen instructions to set it up.
Harness The Power Of GA4
GA4 is a powerful tool for measuring and understanding website data. It can give you a deeper understanding of where your traffic is coming from, and if you’re investing in marketing, which channels are driving the conversions.
While setting it up may seem simple, the truth is that it can be complex. If you’re struggling to set up your Google Analytics account or would prefer to have experts handle it for you, get in touch with our team at DBS Digital today. We’re just a call away!
