DrupalGovCon - Taming Your Data 2023.pdf
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The document discusses optimizing Google Analytics 4 (GA4) using Google Tag Manager and Looker Studio, emphasizing the importance of effective data tracking and reporting for website interactions. It provides detailed insights into GA4's metrics, events, and reporting options, contrasting them with Universal Analytics, and highlighting key functionalities such as form tracking and engagement metrics. Additionally, it outlines strategies for implementing and utilizing GA4 effectively for actionable insights.
DrupalGovCon - Taming Your Data 2023.pdf
- 1. Tame your data: Optimizing GA4 with Google Tag Manager & Looker Studio Nov 1, 2023 1
- 2. Overview ● Intro ● Google Analytics 4 in 5 minutes ● GA4 events in detail ● Form tracking in GA4 ● GA4 reporting options ● Conclusion 2
- 3. Intro 3
- 4. Stephen Pashby 4 ● DesignHammer Account Manager ● Over a decade experience in Google Analytics ● Oversee analytics implementations for most clients
- 5. Who are you? ● Project Manager? Site Builder? Developer? Communications? ● How would you rate your comfort or experience with Google Analytics 4? 1-5 ● Who has installed Google Analytics 4? ● Who uses Google Tag Manager? ● Who prepares/contributes to website analytics reports for your organization? ● Who uses Google Looker Studio? 5
- 6. Let’s level set: ● I’m not a developer, so you may have technical questions that are more in-depth than I can answer ● I will be outlining approaches that have worked for us, but there are likely other viable approaches ● I’m assuming you have some level of familiarity with Google Analytics ● I’m assuming you have already created a Google Analytics 4 property and potentially installed GA4 on your site 6
- 7. If you are not measuring, you cannot know if you are successful!
- 8. Significant Questions ● What should you track and how should you track it? ○ In your organization, who figures out what should be measured: project manager, developer, marketing/communications, leadership, no-one? ● Who needs to see the data (who do you need to report data to)? ○ Are they experienced with analytics? Do they expect to explore the data? ○ Would they rather have a bottom line report? ● I hope this session will give you a start on how to move forward no matter how you answered these significant questions. 8
- 9. Google Analytics 4 in 5 Minutes 9
- 10. Google Analytics Overview ● Free web analytics service offered by Google ● Implemented through adding provided JavaScript to website pages ● Was developed from Urchin on Demand, a previously popular analysis service ● Original Google service was released in 2005 ● Subsequent major versions were released in 2009 (Asynchronous), 2012 (Universal Analytics), and 2020 (Google Analytics 4) ● Google Analytics is currently used by 85.9% of websites whose traffic analytics tool could be identified ( w3techs) 10
- 11. Dimensions and Metrics ● Google Analytics generally presents data in Dimensions and Metrics ● Dimensions are labels that can be used for filtering and sorting, such as: ○ Campaign ○ Medium ○ Event name ○ Platform ● Metrics are quantitative measures (numbers), such as: ○ Purchases ○ Event counts ○ Conversions ○ Views ○ Engaged sessions ● Dimensions and Metrics are combined in reporting to (hopefully) deliver actionable insights 11
- 12. Universal Analytics (Google Analytics 3) ● Initially released in October 2012 ● A refinement of the base Urchin on Demand technology (from 1998) ● Since UA leveraged a decades old data model, historical data was largely compatible with previous versions so upgrades were fairly seamless ● Universal Analytics stopped* tracking new data on July 1, 2023 ● Google has only committed to support access to Universal Analytics data through December 2023 ● After December 2023, it is unknown if Google will allow access to hosted Universal Analytics data * Google says they are staging the end of collection for Universal Analytics. As of now, if you UA property is still collecting, assume it could cease at any time. 12
- 13. Google Analytics 4 ● Released in October 2020 ● Entirely new model for tracking and analysis ● Incompatible with Universal Analytics (or earlier models) ● No direct method for migrating historic data from Universal Analytics or exact historical comparison of Google Analytics 4 data with Universal Analytics data ● Most (if not all) Universal Analytics properties have stopped processing data. If you haven’t upgraded to GA4, now is the time! 13
- 14. Key Metrics in Google Analytics 4 Google Analytics 4 key metrics operate under the assumption that specific user interactions (scroll, click, file download, etc.) are more relevant measures of engagement than the number of pages viewed or the length of time a user interacts with a website (e.g. bounce rate, etc.). ● Engaged Session – Count of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had 2 or more screen or page views. ● Average Engagement Time Per Session – User engagement duration per session. Shows the amount of time the user is actually engaging with the page (e.g., clicking, scrolling, etc) while the page is the primary window being viewed on the screen. ● Engagement Rate – The ratio of Engaged Sessions relative to total Sessions. If you had 1,000 total sessions and 130 of them qualified as Engaged Sessions (as defined above), the Engagement rate would be 13%. 14
- 15. Goals & Conversions in Google Analytics 4 ● Conversions directly replace Goals in Universal Analytics (UA). ● While UA provided 4 models of Goals (including funnel tracking), only specific Events can be marked as Conversions in GA4. ● GA4 does not currently provide a built-in mechanism for Destination (funnel) based conversions. 15
- 16. Reporting in Google Analytics 4 ● Universal Analytics provided over 100 pre-defined reports, but many were deprecated or no longer reported relevant data. Most of the best known reports are tuned for reporting pageviews, bounces, etc. which are not core to the GA4 model. ● Google Analytics 4 provides less than 20 pre-defined reports. GA4 reports focus on engagement and which events are engaging users. Custom reporting is more visible and expected (either through GA4 Explorations or Google Looker Studio). ● Is this a good or bad thing? It depends on your point of view. ○ More isn’t always better! It was easy for users to get overwhelmed by UA reporting. ○ Many of the UA reports aren’t supported by GA4’s data and privacy models. ○ GA4 reports are more easily customizable and the Explorations custom reporting is more robust than UA. ○ If you have been reporting on UA reports, you may need to shift due to lack of equivalent GA4 reports. 16
- 17. Properties and Multiple Sites in GA4 ● Universal Analytics had a model of an assumed one to one relationships of a single UA Property to a single website or app. Frequently multiple views were configured on a property to allow analysis exclusion of some traffic for targeted analysis (e.g. internal traffic, blog traffic only, etc.). Combined cross-site tracking was possible, but difficult to setup and somewhat error prone. ● GA4 Properties support multiple Data Streams in a single property, with the aim of allowing for providing a 360 degree view of user behavior across multiple interconnected websites and apps. ● GA4 properties do not support multiple views for a single property, but a robust audience and segmentation system allows for similar targeted analysis. 17
- 18. GA4 Events in Detail
- 19. Events in Google Analytics 4 ● Events fuel GA4’s engagement metrics. ● GA4 provides several included Enhanced Measurement Events (enabled by default when setting up a new property). ● Google documents several Recommended Events for GA4. These serve as blueprints for common events that are not preconfigured. ● If Enhanced Measurements Events and Recommended Events do not meet your needs, GA4 supports fully Custom Events can be configured with desired Parameters. ● Enhancement Measurements Events and Recommended Events can also be extended with desired Parameters, if necessary. 19
- 20. Enhancement Measurement Events ● Enhance Measurement Events can be enabled or disabled in GA4 and do not require additional tracking code to implement. By default, they are enabled. ● Enhanced Measurement Events covers: ○ Page views ○ Scrolls ○ Outbound clicks ○ Site search ○ Video engagement ○ File downloads ○ Form interactions 20
- 21. Recommended Events ● Google maintains a library of Recommended Events for GA4. Recommended Events provide patterns for common website events that align with Enhanced Measurement Events and (it is speculated) that Recommended Events may be used by Google more explicitly in the future. ● Recommended Events include: ○ generate_lead ○ purchase ○ sign_up ○ share 21
- 22. Custom Events ● GA4 supports fully Custom Events, which allow tracking of highly specific site interactions. ● To ensure consistent data, Custom Events (and their Parameters) should follow standard GA4 Event nomenclature (snake_case). ● At minimum, Custom Events (and Parameters) must start with a letter and only use letters, numbers, and underscores and should avoid reserved event names. 22
- 23. Extended Enhanced Measurement and Recommended Events ● Enhanced Measurement Events and Recommended Events can be extended, either through the GA4 interface, through Google Tag Manager, or directly via JavaScript. ● To extend an Enhanced Measurement Event or Recommended Event, generally you will adjust when an event is triggered or what Parameters is contains. ● When extending (replacing) an Enhanced Measurement Event, be sure to disable the GA4 native instance of the event in GA4 to prevent double counting. 23
- 24. What Should You Track in GA4? ● Start with your organizational goals: ○ What website interactions contribute to your organizational goals? ○ Does your organization have any defined KPIs related to your website? ○ Who needs to be consulted or included to answer the above? ● When you have defined website interactions and KPIs, you can begin to implement appropriate GA4 events for tracking. 24
- 25. What is a Conversion? ● GA4 defines Conversions as user actions that are valuable to your business. ● Properly identified Conversions can assist in reporting and analysis about what traffic Sources and website content contribute to Sessions which include Conversions. ● While any GA4 event can be labeled as a Conversion, but over-labeling Events as Conversions can make Conversion reporting useless. ● Conversions should be reserved for high value Events or Events that end a funnel. 25
- 26. Form Tracking in GA4 26
- 27. Form Tracking is Important! Many common Conversion Events are related to some type of form submission: ● Contact form submission ● Newsletter/account sign-up ● Event registration Ensuring you have effective form tracking can be the difference between actionable insights in GA4 and hours of painful manual analysis. 27
- 28. Common GA4 Ways to Track Form Submissions Not an exhaustive list: ● Enhanced Measurement Form Interaction Events ● Thank You pages + Enhanced Measurement Page View Events ● Generate Lead Recommended Events 28
- 29. Form Interaction Events GA4 Enhanced Measurement Events track form interactions (if enabled) implement form_start and form_submit events. The form_start event is fired the first time a user interacts with a form in a session. The form_submit event fires when a user submits a form. The events have the following parameters: ● form_id: HTML id attribute of the <form> DOM element ● form_name: HTML name attribute of the <form> DOM element ● form_destination: URL to which the form is being submitted ● form_submit_text: text of the submit button, if present Note: If you wish to use the parameters in your reports, you will need to create custom dimensions for them. 29
- 30. Form Interaction Events Pros ● Built in ● Provides insight into form starts as well as form submissions Cons ● Some form implementations will not be tracked for the form_submit events ● If form_submit works for your site, all forms will be tracked as form_submit events, including search forms and login forms ● Depending on how many forms your site has and how they are configured, form_submit parameters may not provide sufficient granularity of reporting to see which forms are performing well 30
- 31. Form Interaction Events If you have Enhanced Measurement Events enabled, this should be configured by default. To double check, log in to your Google Analytics 4 property as an admin user. Navigate to the data source for your website and click on it to view its configuration. Confirm Enhanced Measurement is enabled and click on the gear icon to view individual Enhanced Measurement Event configurations. Confirm that the Enhanced Measurement Form Interactions Event is enabled. 31
- 35. Thank You Page Tracking If your form implementation supports directing users to Thank You pages, views of these Thank You pages can serve as a proxy for successful form submissions. This is the implementation that more traditional Universal Analytics “funnel” goals expected. If your form implementation does not support a Thank You page with GA4 code, you may not be able to leverage this approach. 35
- 36. Thank You Page Tracking Pros ● Almost built in ● If you have unique Thank You pages for all forms, you can leverage these to know which forms are succeeding Cons ● If you have a single Thank You page for all forms, you will not be able to easily report on which forms are succeeding ● Can be inaccurate as users can navigate directly the Thank You pages (reducing the Thank You pages accuracy as a form submission proxy) 36
- 37. Thank You Page Tracking As tracking Thank You Page views leverages the Page Views Enhanced Measurement Event (and these cannot be disabled), there is no Google Analytics 4 configuration necessary for this methodology. The bulk of configuration will be on your website and/or form implementation and in Google Analytics reporting. You can view all pages viewed under the Pages and screens GA4 report. Based on your website traffic, you likely will need to implement a filter based on your Thank You pages page path to allow you to see all Thank You page views in one report. 37
- 40. Generate Lead Events The Recommended Generate Lead GA4 event is defined for tracking website interactions that “generate leads.” As defined by Google, the Generate Lead event is not explicitly tied to a previously defined website interaction so its implementation can be flexible based on the particular form implementation of your website. 40
- 41. Generate Lead Events Pros ● Support different form implementations ● Easy to extend with custom Parameters Cons ● More involved implementation ● May require additional configuration as forms are added 41
- 42. Generate Lead Events While the generate_lead Recommended event can be configured solely in GA4, we will use Google Tag Manager to leverage GTM’s Lookup table functionality to match Webform IDs to human intelligible names. We will create a generate_lead event using the GA4 Event tag in GTM, but in order to create this event, we need to do a few things first. 42
- 43. Generate Lead Events We want to add a form_id parameter to the generate_lead event, but will need a way to populate this form_id parameter for each generate_lead event. In order to do this, we need to enable GTM’s built in Form ID Data Layer Variable. This built in Form ID will be populated by the Form ID in the DOM (not useful for reporting). We will configure a GTM Lookup Table to map specific Form IDs (or specific Form ID patterns) to useful names for reporting. You may need to use GTM preview mode or your web browser inspector to identify the specific Form IDs (or Form ID patterns, depending on how your Webforms are added to your content). If you have to work with Form ID patterns, you can use a GTM Regex Table instead. We will use this Lookup Table to populate a form_id parameter on our generate lead event. 43
- 46. Generate Lead Events Now that we have our Lookup Table configured, we are ready to create our generate_lead GA4 Event Tag. Create a new GA4 Event Tag. Select your GA4 Configuration Tag (which references your GA4 ID). Name your Event “generate_lead”. Add a parameter for “form_id” and select your Lookup table to populate this parameter. Add a Trigger for Some Form Submissions that excludes form submissions for your user login or site search forms. Save both your Trigger and Tag, test in GTM’s Preview mode, then publish. 46
- 49. Generate Lead Events While we are leveraging GTM’s built in Form Submission Trigger Type, one of the reasons to use GTM to implement your generate_lead event is you can trigger this event on other criteria: ● Page paths (e.g. Thank You page paths) ● History changes (i.e. when a form submission changes the page path but does not trigger a new page load) ● Form implementations that require Custom Triggers and listener code (generally supplied by the form vendor) 49
- 50. Generate Lead Events Now you have a generate_lead GA4 event that will be sent to your GA4 property when your Webforms are submitted. At this point, you may want to mark your generate_lead events as Conversions in GA4. In order to interact with the form_id parameter of your generate_lead event, you will need to register it as a Custom Dimension in GA4. In GA4, go to Admin > Custom Definitions > Create custom dimensions. Enter a dimension name (for GA4 reporting), a scope (Event), a description, and enter “form_id” as your event parameter (this must match the parameter your entered in GTM exactly). About 24 hrs after you save, you should start to be able to see your custom dimension in GA4 reporting. I recommend using GA4’s data explorations or Google Looker Studio to expose this in useful reporting. 50
- 53. Form Submission Tracking Summary Which one should you use? ● Do you have a single form on your site (no search and no login forms)? form_submit should work. ● Do you have a few forms with distinct Thank You pages (or you can make them)? Thank You pages should work (be sure to keep an eye out for false positives caused by traffic to your Thank You pages). ● Do you have a large number of forms, some programmatically generated or placed on pages by content editors? generate_lead and GTM may make your life much easier. 53
- 55. (Almost) Out of the Box GA4 Reporting Options There are many available options for GA4 reporting. Free and easy ones include: ● Default (and customized) GA4 reporting ● GA4 explorations ● Google Looker Studio Let’s look at what each of these offer for form submission tracking…
- 56. Default (and Customized) GA4 Reporting No default GA4 reporting directly reports successful form submissions. form_submit can be used to drill-down or segment default GA4 reports, for some insight on how many forms have had submissions.
- 58. GA4 Explorations GA4 Explorations are more advanced (and interactive) data analysis tools that go beyond the basic reports and dashboards included with GA4. Explorations enable: ● Ad hoc queries ● Switch between exploration techniques ● Sorting, refactoring, and drilling down into data ● Filters, segments, and audiences ● Share your explorations with other users of the same Google Analytics property ● Export the exploration data for other tools
- 59. GA4 Explorations GA4 Explorations are best thought of as a data exploration tool, not a reporting tool. Explorations could be a full day training in themselves, but we will go through a basic Exploration so you can see how they work. First, you will need to create a new Exploration. Generally starting with a Free Form Exploration is the most flexible as not all dimensions and metrics will be available in all Exploration types. Once you have created a new Exploration, you will need to add or adjust your imported Dimensions and Metrics. Imported Dimensions and Metrics can be used in your Exploration. You can search, check, and import multiple Dimensions or Metrics at a time. Important Note: Imported Dimensions and Metrics are different than active Dimensions and Metrics in your Exploration.
- 62. GA4 Explorations Explorations have many options, but for our purposes, we are going to import Session Source/Medium, Page path+query string, and Event name Dimensions and Sessions and Event count Metrics. We will add (drag and drop or double click) Session Source/Medium and Page path+query string as Dimensions and Sessions and Event count as Metrics to our report. This will give us Sessions and Events by Session Source/Medium and Page path. To restrict our report to appropriate form submission events, we will need to apply an appropriate filter for our form submission Event name.
- 66. Google Looker Studio Google Looker Studio is a mature data visual platform that can be leveraged for customized reporting of Google Analytics data (including GA4). GLS supports customized charts and visualizations with user controlled filters. GLS also supports scheduled email reporting, which is not supported by GA4 natively.
- 67. Google Looker Studio When creating a new GLS dashboard, you will need to initially set at least one data source that you have access to. For our purposes, select Google Analytics and select the appropriate GA account and property. Once you have confirmed, a default chart will be created that you can customize.
- 70. Google Looker Studio Similarly to GA4 Explorations, you will need to select appropriate Dimensions and Metrics available in your data source. Unlike Explorations, you will not need to imporate and add Dimensions and Metrics, just add the Dimensions or Metrics that you need. For our example, we will add Sessions source/medium and Page path as Dimensions and Sessions and Event count as Metrics. We will also need to add an appropriate filter to filter by Event name for our form submission event. Note: Not all GA4 Dimensions and Metrics will be available in GLS, though most are. Also if you add new custom Dimensions or Metrics, you will need to refresh your data source in GLS.
- 73. Google Looker Studio This will give us a equivalent chart to the GA4 exploration, but one that can be more easily shared and customized. We can add viewer filters for Session source/medium, Page path, and Date range. These can be used by users with Viewer permission to drill down in the report within prescribed bounds (unlike the full freedom provided by Explorations). We can also schedule periodic emails of this report to key stakeholders by using GLS share functionality. Note: The free version of GLS only supports a single set of scheduled reports per dashboard. If you want more control/granularity, you will need to go to the paid version of GLS.
- 77. Reporting Summary Which one should you use? ● Do you have a single form on your site (no search and no login forms)? GA4 default reporting may work for you. ● Do you (or your stakeholders) want to have full access to deep dive in all of your data? GA4 Explorations are the best tool. ● Do you (or your stakeholders) need professional looking reports with some interactivity or periodic email reports? Google Looker Studio is the best option.
- 78. Conclusion 78
- 79. Conclusion ● Identify and track what is important to your organization/website. ● Leverage common GA4 patterns (recommended events, conversions) to align your KPIs with what and how GA measures. ● Configure appropriate reporting data for consumption based on your audience. ● Have fun! 79
- 80. Questions? 80
- 81. Thank you Drupal GovCon 2023! 81