You Ask, I Answer: Source/Medium Governance in Google Analytics?

In today's episode, Jake asks, with the switch to Google Analytics 4, Source Medium is becoming so much more important. Can you recommend any resources I can share with our advertising stakeholders to upscale them on the best use of these parameters? This is a good question. Source medium absolutely is now the way we're going to measure and do attribution. Channel groupings are gone, because as we discussed in yesterday's episode, uh they're mostly wrong most of the time.

So to make effective changes, we need two things. We need power and we need process. First, you need to have the organizational power to impose a change on stakeholders, whether it's vendors or partners or other departments in your company. And it's going to require some time to build. Now, with a vendor partner, that's actually pretty easy to say, look, we're going to be measuring via source medium, because that's the way of the future.

We're going to be building attribution models from it. If you want credit for the work that you're doing, if you want us to be able to reliably analyze your ROI, you need to get on board with our system. And that's generally a pretty easy case to make. tags and that you're using them properly. The thing that people don't understand is that they assume source medium are equivalent and they're hierarchy, right?

Medium is the broadest category, and it's the one that people need to figure out sooner rather than later. Source gives clarity to medium. Source explains medium. And sometimes when you're dealing with uh issues where there's a tracking problem, it's just because people don't know that they don't know the importance of those two and how they relate to each other. And that the medium is the least arbitrary of these.

There's these defined channels. So that's the first part is just getting everybody to understand. That requires education, a lot of education. Second, you need a process to do this to help manage this because if you don't it will remain a free for all because people get stuck in their ways. And the way we recommend this it can be a super complex system.

You could build a shiny web app all this stuff or make a spreadsheet right a shared spreadsheet. So let's flip over here take a real simple spreadsheet and do some things like a date owner maybe a campaign that it's part of and then a source and a medium right and that that's like the five big things oh and a URL that would help wouldn't it and then final URL. And what you're what you're gonna do is just put together a real simple formula that's gonna do things like equals concatenate we're gonna do the source URL with a question mark, and then UTM source equals, and then this and UTM medium equals and this. And if you want to get fancy, and UTM campaign equals, and then this. So that's the very very simple version, right?

You're just gluing all this stuff together. So if I put in today's date, which is 1029 20, put my initials, I'll call this you ask I answer. The source, in this case, I'm gonna be putting this on YouTube. The medium is going to be um let's do well. Let's do this.

Let's make a list of mediums we want people to be using, right? So we're gonna do referral organic display. Uh let's see, paid search, paid social, social, regular social email, affiliate, uh, let's see. Uh there are any other sources that we want to use uh mediums that we want to use. Let's call this mediums, and then we're gonna go here to this medium, we're gonna choose format and we're gonna do data validation, and we're gonna show a drop-down from a range, choose our range, and then reject input if you don't use what's in the dropdown.

Save, and now you kind of have to choose which one of these you're gonna be doing your work in, right? And that helps. And then let's put the URL here. And then let's fix my error. I where did I screw up?

Oh, duh. Let's see. There you go. And so what you see is it's glued together everything into one nice tracking code. Now, this is a very straightforward thing to do.

And you can there's you can get super fancy. We've done this for clients. We've actually built a JavaScript in the back end that will uh control all sorts of stuff going on, you know, we're doing removing spaces, changing punctuation, making everything lowercase, etc. Um, but this is this is the starting point. And then you share this with folks and say, hey, everybody enter your stuff, right?

So that it's in one place. That really helps. Um just something as simple as this really helps keep things clean, especially when you do stuff like with Medium where you control it, you apply some control on it and say, okay, you're not allowed to choose something that's not in the list. Uh if you need something that you know in the list that isn't there, you can put it in, but fundamentally, you gotta stick with what's in the list. Um, that's how you apply some governance to this.

Um the hard part is getting people to do it, and then making sure there's a system in place that gives them the flexibility they need to get their work done, right? You don't want to be a a bottleneck or stakeholder. Um, but it's easy, right? Um, and it's still less you go in and go, wow, you know, uh if there's an entry here, you know, Bob wrote something and just did it all wrong. You can then diagnose this and go reach out to Bob and say, Bob, that that's not what we talked about.

Um, we need you to be doing it this way instead. Um again, programmatically, you can control a lot behind the scenes to help clean things up. Um if you again, if you wanted to build a web app, you certainly could, but I don't know that that that's necessary. I think it's a little bit overkill sometimes. So that's how we do this.

Um like I said, it's education, it's process. So I don't really know. Be quiet. Um if you got follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.