You Ask, I Answer: Views and Segments in Google Analytics 4?

In today's episode, Reed asks, Are you saying that we should use properties in the same way we would use views in universal analytics? And if so, does that mean a separate tag for each property in Google Tag Manager? This is in reference to Google Analytics 4. So no. To understand the layout of Google Analytics 4 and where stuff has or has not gone, we have to understand the design philosophy around it.

So Google Analytics 4 really is like Firebase Analytics, which if you're familiar with Firebase 4 app measurement, Google Analytics 4 is basically extending Firebase to the web. It is a marked contrast to the way that Google Analytics 3, uh aka Universal Analytics functioned, which was uh still an offshoot of the really the old urchin analytics software from that Google acquired back in 2005, right? So Google Analytics 4 is not just a version change in software, it is a completely different piece of software. Uh it does not share the same code base, it does not share uh any of the the legacy stuff that has been with Universal Analytics really forever. Um part of that is that we have to understand there's a new hierarchy.

Uh let's go ahead and and flip over here. So this is Google Analytics 3. If you remember, uh you have sort of a hierarchy of the account, which is the logical organization, you have the property, which is a logical uh website, um, and then you have the view, which is the logical division within your company that uh would be looking at us at Google Analytics data in a certain way. When we look at Google Analytics 4 and the admin for that, uh we see a very different view of the world, right? We have the account, which is still the logical entity.

We then have the property, which is the uh logical collection of users. That's really important. And then within that you think have things like data streams, which are uh individual uh pieces of data about groups of users. Um, why this matters is that the view is administrative, right? There's nothing here that is unique to the user that uh you would be uh doing user level stuff with.

Whereas in GA4, they acknowledge that by saying, yeah, there's no view because all that admin stuff should be somewhere else. It's it doesn't belong in Google Analytics. So let's look at a few of these things and see where did they go. Goals, pretty straightforward. Goals has become conversions, right?

So if we go into analytics here, uh we have our conversions, and the conversions come from events, right? So we specify we can either automatically detect uh many events or uh build custom events either in Google Tag Manager or in Google Analytics and denote them as conversions. So that's a user-level thing, and that's now done in the main application. Um we have things like uh content groupings, that's administrative. That does not exist here at all.

That would be something that uh we would do in reporting uh if we wanted to in Google Data Studio, and to some degree can be done in uh in Google Analytics 4 by be building comparisons, right? Comparisons are kind of the in-application ad hoc way to build what we used to call segments in a lot of ways, right? Where you can look at dimensions and metrics and and and group things together for for logical ad hoc analysis. When we look at filters, uh filters are done at the data stream level now, and there are not many right now. Uh there are I believe I want to say like IP filters.

Let's take a look here. Um, that's just enhanced measurement stuff. Um I believe you can I don't remember where it is in here. Um, there it is, cross domain domain tracking. So modify events, create events, configure your domains, that's where you do your cross-domain stuff and define internal traffic.

So you can uh do modification of tagging stuff within there. Um you can also access some of the stuff through uh the API. Uh channels don't exist at all in Google Analytics 4. Um the the concept I guess didn't work out, and understandably so when if you've done any work with Google Analytics 3, um you know what a pain it is to get channels to function correctly. The default channel groupings have been such a hot mess for so long because people are inconsistent about how they do source and medium tagging, right?

Uh anyone who's worked with any agency, uh, any team of more than one, uh, you know that the UTM tracking, source medium tracking, uh is just a free for all. And that makes it really difficult to do any kind of analysis because there's no consistency, right? So half of the time, half your social traffic was miscategorized as referral traffic uh and things like that. So Google just got rid of it uh entirely. Uh now you have these choices, medium source, source medium combo, campaign, uh, and then a few other things here.

Which means that if you're looking at things like source medium, this gives you an awful lot of data. Now, is it as conveniently grouped together? No, not anymore. But is it something where you can look at it and see now logical uh clusterings? Yes.

You can see you know, Twitter and Facebook, uh LinkedIn and so on and so forth. So channel groupings kinda gone. E-commerce. Um e-commerce is a whole big bag of worms. Um there is uh there's actually a great post by uh Simo Ahava uh that is like 40 pages long on all the differences between Google Tag Manager, uh Google Analytics 3 and Google Analytics 4 when it comes to um setting up e-commerce and how much of it has to be done within Google Tag Manager.

So if you have not uh read Simo's blog, go over to SimoAhava.com. He's got a huge amount of stuff on it. Calculated metrics, again, mostly administrative segments uh were an administrative thing that uh still technically exist in Google Analytics 4. Uh, you have to go into the analysis hub for them. And inside the analysis hub, you can build segments, but they're unique to Google Analytics 4.

As far as I know, uh I've not been able to replicate getting them into Google Data Studio. So if you want to do, for example, social media traffic, you can still put together these you know these crazy regexes and and build uh all all your um you know let's see all your traffic comparisons. Let's do uh traffic comparison here. And let's put in our social media traffic as another segment. And so you can still do that if you want to be able to pass the data from application to application, meaning from Google Analytics to, say, Google Data Studio, that's no longer the case.

You used to be able to do that. But now if you look inside of Google Data Studio in the GA4 connector there, you really have a couple of different things. And it depends on how you used segments. Did you use segments to essentially be a type of filter? If so, now you just use the filters.

If you used it as a logical group of users, you would now build that in tag manager with events and parameters, event parameters and values, and then pass those uh parameters and values to analytics and then to Data Studio so that you could create those an analytical segments. So it requires you to rethink how you used a segment and decide is it just a filter? If so, you can replicate it natively in Data Studio. Is it a logical grouping of users that you need to have cross-platform cross-application functionality that needs to be denoted in the event at the time the event is created? So it's a very different way of thinking about uh these things.

But what used to be in the view is now uh in a bunch of different places, and a lot of that has been offloaded to uh other functions. If you used views for logical groupings inside of your company, you don't want to create new properties. That's just a mess waiting to happen. What you want to do is offload that segmentation of your internal use to Google Data Studio. That's where, you know, you create a dashboard for accounting, you create a dashboard for HR, you create a dashboard for the the inbound marketing team, you create a dashboard for the PPC marketing team.

And that's the logical uh way to handle what used to be digging into letting you know having 40 people have access to Google Analytics. It's really not intended for that anymore. It's now an analysis tool, and Data Studio is the reporting tool. A lot of people got used to using Google Analytics for reporting, and that's not its function anymore. At least from what I can tell.

Now, I also have no internal knowledge of how Google debated this, but based on what we can see in the application. So it's a good question. I would not set up more than one property for more than one distinct user base. Instead, use the different features and use the the applications that are there to make those distinctions now. If you've got follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below.

Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. We'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.