What DMOs Should Know About Google Analytics 4

Before we get into the platform specifically, I’d like to touch on two fundamental concepts that apply to any analytics platform: metrics and dimensions. You’ll hear these terms used a lot, and sometimes it sounds like they’re used interchangeably; however, they’re not the same thing but rather complementary to one another. 

• Metrics refer to quantitative measurements of a specific aspect of data. Metrics can be thought of as numerical values; these are what gets counted (i.e., total revenue, sessions, pageviews, etc.)
• Dimensions refer to qualitative attributes of a data set that help to categorize or describe the data. Dimensions are essentially used to provide context and additional meaning to the metrics (i.e., the date, URL, product category and customer type).

Think about it like this: Say that you had 1,000 users (metric) on your website. That doesn’t mean a whole lot without knowing the time period (dimension); if those 1,000 users visited the site in a single day, that would be incredible, whereas if those same 1,000 users visited the site over the course of a full year, that wouldn’t be so good. Context matters and dimensions provide that context.

Key Comparisons

Now, let’s talk about the transition from UA to GA4, what some of those platform differences are and how you can make the most of them for your destination.

In UA, we looked at our data from the “view” level, which allowed you to view your website data based on preset filters and segments. With GA4, the “views” were removed, so everything has to be looked at under “properties.”

The GA4 tracking code can be installed on websites and any other apps your organization might own. This means you can track how users are moving across all of your different touchpoints. Since UA was not installed in apps previously, there was very limited visibility into cross-device and cross-platform reporting. In GA4, we can view full cross-device and cross-platform reporting.

In UA, the measurement scope was done on a “hit” basis. There were four primary hits that could happen: pageview, social interaction, custom event and ecomm transaction. In GA4, everything is now just an event. One of the benefits of this is that the parameter structure no longer adheres to category, action, label and value. The new parameters can be user-defined and are much more flexible. 

Finally, GA4 uses machine learning in the background to constantly improve and simplify the insights discovery. What this means is when you log in, it flags different anomalies and insights automatically that you would have had to look for specifically without it.

Default Navigation

One of the biggest challenges for many in GA4 lies in the default navigation, mainly because the default view isn’t very useful for the general user. When we rely on default views, we don’t always see that we have the ability to customize things; however, now in GA4, we do. Users can now change the entire navigation by creating “libraries” of reports. For example, let’s say you’re a destination with reports that only your salespeople look at. You can now create a library for sales with different reports filtered to reflect the markets that each salesperson sells in. This can make accessing data a lot quicker, easier and more efficient. You simply need to set this up. 

Event Tracking

Like with navigation, the event tracking comes out of the box using default settings. Again, these are extremely customizable, so what you see isn’t exactly what you get. The events themselves will need to be triggered using either a tag management system or be coded into the website. Once they’re set up and firing correctly, you still won’t be able to see them until you set them up in the GA4 UI. In a way, events now have to be set up twice. This leaves additional room for human error, so you will need to be careful here. Make sure your event names and parameters are copied over verbatim, or else they will not reflect the actual event. 

Pro tip: use a standardized convention for event tracking. At Miles, we use all lowercase letters with underscores instead of spaces. Doing this makes it easier to avoid mistakes. For example, the event name for partner referrals is partner_referral.

Event Parameters

One major thing that DMOs should pay attention to is partner referrals. Back in the UA days, we only had three event parameters that we could track: categories, actions and labels. Unless you were savvy enough to understand how the analytics platform was set up, it was difficult to mill through those category action label parameters to decipher your data. 

In GA4, users now can label events outside of the confined categories listed above for specific parameters, so the data that you want ends up at your fingertips. Instead of having to look for an event parameter name that’s an action with a specific label tag tied to it, you can set up an event called “partner referrals” and give names to the parameters such as “business name,” “business category” or “link URL.” This straightforward naming convention allows you to more quickly discover the data you’re looking for. The key here is understanding how to intentionally set up these reports yourself based on your goals and needs. 

Custom Audiences

This is a fairly new component of GA4 and provides users the ability to set up custom audiences directly in the analytics platform and share them with outside sources such as DV360, GCM and Google Ads. What this does is allow you to target those audiences directly from within your advertising platforms, something UA did not offer.

For example, let's say a user is on a website and they visit a wedding page. That wedding page visit is directly followed by an outbound click to a partner. You’ll have a good idea that this person is very interested in weddings due to the wedding content they visited and then clicked out to a vendor. These actions allow you to classify the user as a wedding audience, which you could then retarget in Google Ads using wedding-related copy and advertisements.

Conclusion

While the rollout of GA4 has been a little rocky, keep in mind that this platform is still evolving. Some of the more recent updates we’ve seen have happened within the last month, even though the platform has been our primary analytics platform for nearly a year now. While this has caused headaches for a lot of us, this is the world we’re living in with Google at the moment. Stay tuned for more updates or feel free to reach out to our team of analytic experts for help with Google Analytics 4.