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It has been an exciting few weeks in Premiumlandia. We've learned nine analytics principles to act as your True North to show you the path out of sticky situations, the awesome analytics flywheel (invent once, scale infinitely!) to foundationally
improve your analytics practice, and two editions on patterns extracted from why startup founders fail — and lessons we can apply in our jobs for professional success.
You can upgrade to TMAI Premium here - it comes with a money-back guarantee. All Premium revenue is donated to charity. | | TMAI #276: Got GA 4? The New and the Cool.
| A little while back, Google Analytics 4 was announced. It is an exciting step up - and it is truly stuffed with upgrades.
Pro tip: Due to all the changes and cool new stuff, tracking only starts the day that you explicitly implement tracking. For this reason, I worked with my peers to add GA 4 to all of our business sites. Even if I did not start using it that day, I wanted history to start building up inside GA 4.
Only 30 minutes later I start to see real-time data, and now, a few months later, I have enough history to play with all the new sophisticated analytical possibilities and start to get better insights.
For our extended team, the last few months have been a no-pressure time to play with the new interface/possibilities and learn. As we exit this year, it is likely while GA Universal Analytics (UA) will still stay on our site, we will primarily spend time in GA 4 because there is so much more we can do.
I highly recommend that you (immediately) follow this strategy as well.
Take this no-pressure timeline to ensure implementation is clean, your team starts to get familiar with the new interface, experiments with new Analysis Ninja features (more on this below), and as you head into the next year, you are comfortably set to win more with data.
It would not be unusual for new models to compute outcomes where gaps emerge, and more to only come to GA 4. [Absolutely crucial reading: TMAI 258 and 259 on implications from data/privacy regulations and seven strategies - beyond GA - you need to put in place Now.]
So. Hop on GA 4. Tomorrow.
[Go: GA4 Setup Assistant wizard.] | A Summary of the New and the Cool.
In the small chance you need a pinch of motivation, I wanted to lay out some things I’m excited about. This is not a definitive list (there’s a whole site for that), rather these are things that jump out at me, things I’m excited about.
As you set up your property and get a few days of data in, you can use this guide to plan your immersion/training/advantage taking.
Some changes with GA 4 are big, and others are small (my fave segmentation now sits inside the Analysis section).
Some exciting stuff like Predictive Metrics are new in GA 4, and we’ve already covered them in an earlier Premium newsletter, so I’ll skip that here. [BUT, do checkout that Churn Probability and Revenue Prediction! Email me if you can't find it.]
Visualization.
I am pretty proud of how the Google Analytics team has set the standard for visualization (I still see GA 2.0 visual language being used across so, so, many tools).
While not quite as revolutionary, there is a whole visual refresh in GA 4 that is wonderful and clean. You’ll see it everywhere, but jump to the analysis section to see some of the cooler stuff.As an example, you have a new ability to create ad-hoc funnel visualization - pretty and useful. Try the trended funnel. | | Cross-Device User Centricity.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about GA 4 is that you have both web and mobile app data in the same schema. This enables far better cross-device and cross-platform tracking — so much more reflective of how humans have been consuming the web. I cannot tell you just how super cool this is for any analytics tool. Future Premium newsletters for sure.
One side effect of the above evolution is that there is a lot more User-centricity across GA 4.
For example, you’ll look at the new richer set of cross-device reports, and observe they focus on the User. Same person delivering outcome x across different devices, now stitched together seamlessly. So nice.
I’m broadly excited about User-centricity in GA 4 because for the longest time, even for the long-term standard metrics, I’ve been a proponent of focusing on the User to understand real reality. Ex: I’ve shared that the real conversion rate is orders/users and not orders/sessions. | A New View of Engagement.
Understanding the impact of your performance is entirely unique in GA 4.
Bounce Rate is dead (I do not cherish this). Other metrics like page views are no more.
Instead, and this is good, you have:
1. Engaged Sessions
2. Engagement Rate
3. Engaged Sessions Per User
4. Average Engagement Time.
Definitions, delicious details. Click on Engagement.
They provide new nuances you had not considered in the past, this is good. Get your UX team this data, let them merge it in with the qualitative research they are doing.
These metrics can also be an unending trap of focusing on smaller things/investigations that don’t amount to much in totality — so be careful about that trap. | | Truly Empowering Analysis Ninjas.
A whole bunch of advanced analysis reports that were previously only available to paying GA customers are now accessible to everyone.
Welcome to Explorations. |
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Some of your sexy choices: Free-form exploration. Funnel Analysis, Segment Overlap, User Explorer, Cohort, User Lifetime. [Dive deeper.]
I’m happy about this because it is encouraging you to do much smarter analysis. This is how you and I will earn our Analysis Ninja badge.
I also love this for an underappreciated benefit: The kind of analysis Explorations enables is going to force you to work with cross-functional teams, bring in new data, understand strategy, and solve difficult process issues. All this will yield much smarter analysis from you, AND generally increase your profile inside your company.
Another Ninja empowering element... I’ve advocated for the value of custom metrics (not compound metrics, they almost always stink).
In GA 4, you can create custom metrics (50 per property!) using a new custom event parameter and identifying a unit of measurement. It is easy. For your first custom metric, implement: Gross Calculated Profit. | Data-in Goodness.
The measurement model changes fundamentally with GA 4. It is now based on events and parameters. A page view, as an example, is an event.
For events, the Category, Action, Label, Value is a thing of the past. For a good reason.
In GA 4, you can push through additional data via parameters. While this sounds intimidating, with enhanced measurement, GA 4 will automatically track for common events like (my fav) internal site search, tracking for videos on your site, page scrolling, exit tracking, and more. No extra work required by you.
[The long list of automatically collected events is worth reviewing — and being jazzed about!]
For those of you on the outer edges of sophistication, I’m watching you with envy, you are using custom dimensions. They work differently in GA 4 (you get 50 (!) per property). You create a custom dimension via a new custom event parameter. The scope now defaults to hit. | Data-out Goodness.
Over the last few years, my obsession has been with holistic corporate data analysis — everything that moves business outcomes vs. just digital/web.
Hence, it has become ever more crucial to get data out of GA so that I can play with it with loads of other corporate data sources. Ergo, it is with immense joy that I greet the arrival of the BigQuery connector built into GA 4. You can access raw GA data and SQL your heart out.
Oh. One more related thing. Some of you are sensitive about sampling.
I offer the opinion that in almost all the use cases, the worry/obsession is unwarranted. When you are at a scale that you are dealing with sampling, any small precision compromises for speed are almost always worth it. Ok. I’ve said my piece.
In GA, all reports you see in the tool are unsampled. Happy Birthday. Now depending on your explorations you might occasionally hit sampling. BUT for all of you Sampling Sensitives you have free export via BigQuery which include…. ALL DATA UNSAMPLED! Go to town. :)
[Bonus Tip: If someone tells you “you are working with incomplete information if you depend on sampled data”, that person is not your friend — or an Analyst.] | New Notables.
There is a new thing called Google Signals. It is turned off by default.
If you turn it on, GA 4 will collect cross device data for those users logged into their Google accounts AND have ads personalization turned on. You get demographics data (user age, gender, interest). You can do remarketing across devices, which — when done in non-smart ways — tends to have higher conversion rates.
On that note, you can still smoothly connect your GA Account to your Google Ads account.
I am a very big fan of this because of the features in Google Ads that can benefit from your performance data in GA4. It can help you have better ads created on your behalf, better bidding, and improve conversion rates, obviously. And more.
You do have a limit of 30 Conversions (oh, Goals are now Conversions, I have not gone back and made changes to both my best-selling books!). A Word of Caution: Please consider the possibility that if you have 30 Micro plus Micro Outcomes on your site, there are three possibilities:
1. Someone’s not really thought through what’s actually important. (Got DMMM?)
2. You are paying your consultants Per Conversion Set Up rather than per hour of impactful work. Not smart.
3. You are trapped in a Reporting Squirrel role.
All sub-optimal. It is super, super, super, hard to analyze, identify, and optimize for even one important goal. Please consider not trying to do it for 30.
[With all that said, in the time it took me to write this newsletter, 48 videos were uploaded on to YouTube telling you how to “hack” GA into setting up 100 goals! #heartbreaking] | Work in progress.
There are a lot fewer ecommerce reports in GA 4.
In part because 4 is early in its development cycle.
In part because the current truckload of reports had accumulated enough crud over time that it is good for the team to pause and rethink (and kill!).
Also, no attribution modeling yet. This is crucial. You know how much I love it. | | Lovely Bonuses.
I’m quite excited — for our tech team! — for the snazzy debugView report in GA 4. It helps validate your analytics implementation from inside GA 4. Things can still get messed up, but now you will know that way, way faster. Hallelujah!
Data retention/deletion have been upgraded with GA 4.
You can set data deletion within the admin interface. It can be scoped for a wide variety of data that is collected, including parameter values. You can set data to be deleted in 2 or 14 months. Give it a spin if you have needs in this area.
IP Addresses collected by Google Analytics are anonymized by default. More user privacy. A good thing.
I mentioned this above, worth repeating: As there is more regulation, developments by tech companies, etc., our analytics will have to adapt. A material amount of this will happen using advanced statistical modeling and machine learning algorithms. Good news for us, this adaptation will automatically show up in GA. 4. :) | Bonus Request.
Regardless of if you are starting afresh or have been with Google Analytics for a thousand years…. Use the Google Tag Manager (GTM) to tag your site!
GTM truly is the bee’s knees.
You don’t need to use Google Analytics to use GTM. It does so many more things. BUT, using GTM will make your GA 4 life so much simpler, in addition to making upgrades/changes dead easy.
For some Analysts, particularly in large companies, GTM often proves to be entirely game changing when it comes to: speed (no more begging to get in some prioritized pipeline that stretches over two years for a simple change) accuracy (auto-checking and debugging built in) and more data collection (new possibilities).
Don’t be lame. Use a tag manager. If you don’t like free tag managers, go buy one. But. Use a tag manager. | | Bottom line.
A foundational requirement for smarter analysis is access to smart data, access to smart tools, and (most crucially) access to smart analysts. Since you have the box checked on that last one, :), I highly recommend immediately moving to GA 4, if you have not, so that you can access smart data and smart tools.
When you have GA 4, if you have it already, create new stories from your data using explorations. What is cute about GA 4 is that it is stepping so far and beyond simply being a reporting tool. I love the emphasis on analysis. You will too.
Go get ‘em!
-Avinash.
PS:
The next TMAI Premium is my magnum opus on Television advertising. Isn’t TV dead? The obvious answer is not right, nuances being underappreciated on both it is dead and no it is not could cause career limiting impact. Oh, and why should you as a digital person give two hoots about TV? See you next week!
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