You Ask, I Answer: Interpreting Google Analytics 4 Data?

In today's episode, Evelina asks, I can't find anything in the new Google Analytics 4. So what if you are not that good at reading raw data? Um Yeah, so you're not alone in this. Uh many, many people are having trouble, and it's because of the change in mindset about how Google Analytics 4 collects data and how it displays data. Um Google Analytics 4 has a very different philosophy about measurement and about the way it's structured.

It is a lot more freeform. The onus of configuration has been um in some ways put on the user. Uh well, let me show you an example. So let's let's switch over here. So what we're looking at here, this is Google Analytics 3 data, right?

This is in Google Data Studio. And one of the things you'll notice is that when you set up you know your first table or whatever in Google Analytics 3, classic Google Analytics, you're given all these different options for the different things that you can report on, right? There's a lot of them. Uh if you count through the API guide, there's 510 uh different dimensions and metrics out of the box that you can report on. And this gets to be a lot, right?

There's there's an awful lot of stuff here that, you know, granted, many people have spent a lot of time uh over the last 15 years learning, but from uh a configuration perspective, it's not very flexible. When you look at um Google Analytics major competitor, Omnature uh from Adobe, uh it's a lot more Adobe's Omniture is more flexible in that it tries to get um things like you know goals to be more flexible and have more options. And it's you really it it's difficult to do that in classic Google Analytics. When you look at Google Analytics 4 and what comes out of the box, you'll notice this list is a lot shorter, right? It is down to events, uh conversions, um you know, sessions users, some of the real basics.

So the question is, well, where did it all go? Where it all has gone is instead of Google saying, here's all the things that you have available to you, uh, Google saying you decide what is available to you, you decide what you want in your configuration, build it with tag manager, and then the things that are important to you put in here. So, for example, uh I put in uh just a value field, right? Even though that obviously there's an event value, um, but I can add fields and parameters. So in Google Tag Manager, I would go in and define if there's something really weird or unique about uh the way I want to be tracking a type of conversion, uh maybe a parameter that isn't included out of the box.

Uh now I can go in, for example, to Google Tag Manager and just set it up and and just run uh that conversion or that event with my thing or the thing that I care about. Uh whereas previously in the in the older version of Google Analytics, I couldn't do that. Right. So let's look at uh this example here. If I go to uh newsletter, right?

So I can edit this now, and instead of having to um you know mess around with you know categories and actions and labels and all that stuff in Google Analytics 3, I can specify what parameters I want to track. Is it a button click? Sure, I can put that in here. Is it uh the day of the week? Sure, I can put that in here too.

And so this philosophy is set it that Google has switched to in and Google Analytics 4 is that you decide what's important to you. Um you decide beyond the basics that it sets up out of the box, if there are specific values that you want to have, and then they appear um as fields and parameters in in Data Studio in in the back end, and you can report on them. So, for example, if you wanted uh if you had a website where you uh had users who are logged in, and it was something that tag managers already set up to track, right? You could in your goals specify a logged in user, right? So it's a lot more flexible.

In in Google Analytics 3, you'd have to jump through all sorts of kinds of hoops just to make that work. But in Google Analytics 4, you would make that available parameter that would be trackable, and then you could measure those conversions, the event uh the conversions, uh, and split it up between logged in user and not logged in user. So that's the trade-off that Google Analytics 4 is trying to make. Is Google has said your configuration is up to you. Instead of trying to guess what everybody wants and making 510 values, many of which most of us aren't going to use, um, Google has said you decide what you want to use, you program it into tag manager, and we'll display it.

That's one of the reasons why uh they can now offer uh big query, uh the database to everyone who's using a Google Analytics 4 account, because there's a pretty good chance that most of us are not going to try and replicate all 510 of the old fields, right? Into this. And so the the data storage footprint's gonna be a much smaller for for Google Analytics 4 in the beginning. As you add more customizations, as you add more uh stuff, it will get bigger. Now, to the question of you can't find anything, yeah, there's again what comes out of the box is not designed for uh the end user, uh the the business end user in Google Analytics 4.

It's designed for someone who is an actual analyst. So if we go into uh my GA4 view here, Google Analytics 4 is an actual analytics engine in the sense that uh there's a few canned reports. So acquisition is pretty straightforward. Where'd my stuff come from, right? Users and traffic, engagement is pretty straightforward.

Um what got people to stick around? So this is the the pages, and then these are all of the events that you could be sending. Again, everything is at the event level in Google Analytics 4. So you get the standard ones here, but you can program in more. You can program in return users, right?

It's not necessarily included out of the box. You can program in logged in users, you can program in uh users who have been on more than five pages, uh highly engaged users, any event that you could think of that fits within the event model, you can program in here and then you can report on it. Monetization's pretty straightforward. E-commerce, I think, is actually easier now for uh folks than it is in in GA3, and that there's less to turn on. It's a lot of the e-commerce stuff is baked right in, and as long as um your e-commerce vendor is using a uh a sensible uh structure and or an approved Google structure from GA3, it's gonna show up automatically um in GA4.

So that is uh equally pretty straightforward, and then retention. You know, how did you keep your users? Is all pretty straightforward stuff. But again, this is an analysis engine. So you can see at any point in the application.

Uh you can add in more stuff, you can uh remove stuff, and then if you go into the analysis hub, you can actually find individual templates. This is where some of the more traditional reports from Google Analytics 3 are now showing up. So you can start to look at uh specific use cases and have these essentially pre-built reports brought into GA4. But GA4 is not where you're supposed to be doing your reporting, you're supposed to be doing your analysis here. You do your detective work here, and then you report in Data Studio.

So the big question that you have to tackle with uh Google Analytics 4 is if you can't find something, is it because GA4 is has removed it, or because GA4 is now no longer the place to be doing that. If you've got a canned report that you used a lot in GA3, there's a very good chance that the intent is that you replicate it as a dashboard in Data Studio in GA4, and that's where you do the you look for those canned reports because analysis is different than reporting. Analysis is figuring out what happened, and then data studio and reporting is telling somebody else what happened and letting them have a consolidated view of that so that they don't have to repeat uh in the analysis process, and that's gonna be a big, big head shift for a lot of folks. Is they're used to GA being a reporting tool, and it's now an analysis tool. Uh so that means you've got to get really comfortable with Data Studio and start working with Data Studio, even with GA3, your existing uh Google Analytics account.

Get used to working with Data Studio. Get work used to building reports that fit your needs. And it will make working with Google Analytics 4 a lot easier. Because you won't have to be trying to force this interface to do things that it no longer does. Instead, look at your GA3 account and say, okay, how can I take this report that I'm very familiar with and replicate it in GA4?

It's a tall order. If you got follow-up questions about it, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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