You Ask, I Answer: How to Set Up Tags, Triggers, and Goals in Google Analytics 4?

In today's episode, Tara asks, it seems pretty quick and simple to set up Google Analytics for, but do I need to set up all the different triggers in the tag manager separately? Or can I just set up one tag with all the triggers? Okay. So Google Analytics 4 leans much more heavily on Tag Manager than uh Google Analytics 3 ever did. In Google Analytics 3 or Universal Analytics, you could uh do everything in the one application.

Now it's broken up into a couple of different places. So to answer this question, we have to uh clarify the roles of the different pieces of tag manager so that we understand uh what each piece is supposed to be doing in order to make say a goal work. Uh let's go ahead and uh flip over here. Let's go to Google Tag Manager. We have three fundamental things.

We have tags, we have triggers, and we have variables. Variables are where data is stored in Google Tag Manager for things that you want to track. And initially, uh you're gonna rely heavily on the stuff that is uh built into the application. So for example, there's all these built-in variables that these are things that you can track, these are pieces of data that you can collect. Um the ones that I find we typically use the most for Google Analytics are things like uh the URL that somebody's clicking on, uh the page that somebody's on, maybe the page title, although that's really unreliable, um, the form that somebody is uh filling out.

So those are some of the the big ones that out of the box uh we tend to use things like scroll depth, etc. also. You'll typically also have uh like a Google Analytics for variable uh in here, which is your tracking ID. Uh it's a best practice to always have that just as a uh as a preset variable so that you don't ever mistype it, particularly since the new tracking codes are now letters and numbers and not just numbers. So that's what variables do.

Again, you probably won't spend a whole lot of time there. Triggers are what happen when uh Google Analytics, a Google Tag Manager listens for something, listens for some the user doing something, and when um the user does the thing, tag manager raises its hand and says, Hey, I see somebody doing the thing. So to Tara's question, can you set up one tag with all the triggers? Not really, unless you want to have all these different triggers go off at the same time, which most of the time is not going to be the case. You know, for example, in uh Google Analytics 4, when somebody completes a newsletter sign up, right?

They reach this page that has this URL fragment. I want uh this trigger to raise its hand and say, Hey, I see somebody doing the thing. Let's let's you know, uh, I'm letting you know somebody's doing the thing. Tags are what tag manager does. So it listens for the trigger, and then when the trigger goes off, it says, Hey, I heard the thing, and then the tag is what tag manager does with the thing.

So in this case, with the newsletter subscription goal, um, what we see here is hang on here. We see that it sends an event to Google Analytics 4, right? It says it it listens for this uh trigger, and then it sends this piece of information. What's the value of this thing uh and what is the newsletter subscription goal? So that's um how you uh understand the concept of the way tag manager sends data to Google Analytics.

So, in order to build goals, we have to have a trigger for it to listen to, we have to have a tag for it to do something, and we have to track the corresponding event and and make sure we understand that it's set up as a conversion in Google Analytics. So uh since I actually haven't gotten around to fixing up my own website yet for a lot of these things, let's build one of these uh sequences right now. I want to know when somebody uh let's see, let's let's uh do when somebody uh visits this page, my public speaking page, right? I think that's a an important page for for me to understand if you're visiting or not. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a trigger.

I want to listen for when somebody visits that page. So let's name it something intelligent. GA4 public speaking trigger. One of the most important things you can do is have a good lexicon, a consistent lexicon, so that you can understand so that your tag manager doesn't get cluttered up with stuff that's like, I don't know what that even means anymore. We're gonna do a page view.

I want it to be some pages, and I want my page to contain public speaking. Generally speaking, there are very few situations where you're gonna want to do an exact match or an equals. Very, very few, because for example, if you get to a page and uh from Facebook, it's gonna have that FBC ID on the end. And if it is equals instead of contains, tag manager won't raise its hand. Okay.

So we have contains, that's our trigger. We're saying, tag manager, raise your hand when you see somebody on the public speaking page. And here's what I want you to do. So we're gonna call this GA4 public speaking goal. I like to call them goals even though uh GA4 calls them conversions, just so that I remember, oh, that's a thing.

We're going to go to there's two GA4 tags, right? There's the configuration, which is the base pixel that you do once and then you never touch it again, and then there's the events. This is effectively a goal. We're gonna choose our GA4 tag here. We're gonna call this public speaking goal.

Right again, they're not called goals anywhere, but if you are trying to maintain sort of a lexicon, is especially if you have junior people on your team who may not have spent a whole lot of time working in in GA4, but they're familiar with GA3, call it something intelligible. Is there a value that goal goes with this goal? Um I'm gonna call this uh let's call it $25, right? Uh are there any user properties I need to add? No, not at this time.

Anything else I need to do with the sequencing? No, not at this time. I'm gonna map this to my GA4 public speaking trigger. So now, could I add more than one trigger to Tara's question? Yes, if I wanted to fire this trigger on a bunch of different things.

In this case, I don't. In this case, I don't want to know uh I don't I only want one specific condition for this to match up to. I'm gonna hit save. Actually, we're gonna copy this public speaking goal and then hit save. And now we're gonna submit because otherwise nothing ever happens.

And now we want to tell analytics, hey, listen for tag manager, and when tag manager says something, uh, here's what we want you to do with it. So I'm gonna go to my conversions in GA4. I'm gonna create a new conversion event. I'm gonna paste in the exact matching name from um Google Tag Manager. And now I've got this goal effectively, it's a conversion, and it's marked as a conversion already.

You'll note that you can set up just an event, and then once it appears, you can flag it as a conversion. I don't trust that. I want to make sure that I'm declaring it up front. So I'm gonna go ahead and make sure that that public speaking goal is in place. So now we've built this goal.

We've set it up in Tag Manager. We've got our trigger for the condition we wanted to listen in. And this is why Google has gone this way. There's so much more flexibility with the kinds of things you can listen for. You can listen for link clicks, you can listen for some kinds of link clicks, you can listen for form submissions, whatever triggers that you want that are that are supported here, because there's a whole bunch of different types that you can support.

Um JavaScript's time on page. If you if that was a goal in in the previous thing, uh you can you do all these things, how far down the page somebody get on, like say a key landing page would be a cool trigger to listen for. Um and then the tags that you have, of course, um give you again a lot of flexibility. And you're gonna send data to different places, right? So in my tags, I've got up some Google Analytics 3 goals in here, which here is marked with universal analytics, and I've got a bunch of my uh Google Analytics 4 goals starting to be put into place as well.

So that's how we we do this. It's a lot more granular, right? It's a lot more to keep track of. If there's more than one person working in your Google Analytics 4 instance and your Google Tag Manager instance, I would strongly suggest um using things like workspace environments uh to keep things straight. Having policies and procedures, maybe even the spreadsheet to track what each tag does so that you know who put it in and what they did with it.

Those are gonna be really essential for keeping this a sensible, clean environment. You can see that. Uh this is just my account. And there's still a fair number of things in here, right? This is just my account.

One person's in here, and it still can get a little bit messy. So if you've got multiple people in there, you definitely want governance of some kind. Maybe even having uh you know tags named uh not just with what they do, but maybe who put them in. Uh and maybe an expiration date to say, like, yeah, when this uh after this date, remove this tag or at least pause it so that you keep it clean. Because your tag manager account, uh as people switch to Google Analytics 4, your tag manager account's gonna get a whole lot more busy.

Because you can see for each individual goal, now I've got to have a tag and a trigger to make it work well. So it's gonna get crowded in here. So make sure you have good governance. If you got follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon.

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