So What? 3 Easy Wins in Google Analytics 4

Happy Thursday and welcome to So What The Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. I'm joined by Chris and John as always. And this week, we're gonna go uh do a little bit of a deep dive into Google Analytics for. Um so Google Analytics Four is the newer version of Google Analytics that Google has been rolling out. Um our recommendation is always to be running four in parallel with Google Analytics Three or Classic, uh however you refer to it, and not to just completely jump ship onto Google Analytics Four.

Um so Chris, you're gonna get into a bit of a walkthrough of some easy wins that you can get with Google Analytics for. And John and I, as always, will constantly interrupt you and ask you lots of questions. Cool. We don't know how long, uh, to adopt it. So it's one of those things that we want to to make sure that we have up and running so that when Google does unveil, let's say, hey, now you you must use this, um, you're ready to do it.

As a bit of background, Google Analytics 4 is very much a completely different application. Every version prior to this is built on the same fundamental platform that Google bought from a company called Urchin Technologies way back in 2005, so 16 years ago. Um so everything you know and love about Google Analytics, uh the tracking codes, the uh the interface, the back end systems, all was fundamentally extended versions of that 2005 system. Uh, a couple of years ago, Google said, Hey, this kind of ain't working anymore. Uh, and the reason that they did that was because of these lovely devices, right?

These things are a totally different way of interacting with companies with the internet. And so Google said, We we know that people are using these for everything, like literally everything. You can swipe right on getting a car, getting a date, getting you know, wine dropped off at your house, whatever. It all happens through this thing, but that's not what the way analytics was was working. So they said, Okay, we we've got a separate tool that does in-app analytics called Firebase.

Um, and they I forget who they acquired that from, but it's a much more sophisticated system that that tracks every kind of interaction, like you know, touch up this, touch that you know on the screen, and you know, and record all these interactions. And a couple of years ago, Google said, Hey, let's just merge the two together, because one of the challenges that a lot of companies have is you have people who use this, and then you have people who are on their desktops, and we don't know who's who, right? So we have people who are using this, is it's the same person? Like Katie, is is this Katie on your phone? Is this Katie on on the on your laptop?

Who is it? And so Google said, Let's try and fix that. And and so they created this thing originally it's called uh Google Analytics app plus web. And then uh about uh what is it now, five months ago, uh they said, Yep, we're gonna merge it all together and call it Google Analytics for it. So that's where we are today.

That's how we got here. And so before you go too far, Chris, I feel like you also dropped a little bit of trivia in there around what UTM stands for and why it's called what it is. Exactly. Urchin tracking module. That's from the old, old 2005 uh thing.

So actually, Katie, I'm gonna ask you this as a question. When it comes to getting an organization, a culture group of people to change, particularly a big change, where you're saying, hey, you're gonna totally do things differently now. What are some of the things that you think about to make that change easier? Communication is a big thing. So people need to understand why.

Why are you asking them to change what it is that they're used to doing to doing something else? What is the benefit of doing something different? And how does it affect them personally? Because one of the things that I see in terms of you know larger change management initiatives is yeah, the company can sort of roll out and mandate, okay, we're gonna do this this way now, but there's a lack of focus on how this affects John, how this affects Chris, how this affects Katie. And in order for people to get on board with a big change, they need to understand how their job personally is going to be impacted by this change.

And so that's one of the places that I would definitely focus, you know, switching uh software providers or switching platforms or upgrading to different systems, it's not an easy change, but it's easier in the sense of there's a little bit more predictability, you can document it, and the software doesn't have feelings and emotions to say, I don't want to do that, or I'm nervous if we do it that way, then my job is in jeopardy. So that's really where I like to focus is helping the teams understand what that means for them each individually and making sure there's a clear documentation for how you get from A to B. And also making sure you set up those those milestones and small wins so that people can continue to see progress along the way, and it's not this big black box five year initiative. Yeah. One of the things that I like to look for is easy wins, some kind of easy win to give people is like, hey, if you just try this thing out and can see an immediate benefit of some kind, any kind, I feel like that makes it a little bit easier for people to swallow the the change management pill, as opposed to saying, hey, you got to do this thing because it's required, but it's not going to be fun and you're not going to see any benefit, or there's the benefits gonna be so obtuse that you know, five years later, like, oh yeah, I guess that was better, but it really sucked for the last five years, you know.

Um, so let's talk about Google Analytics 4 and its role, because this is one of the things that you will make your journey to GA4 easier or harder. Prior to uh using Google Analytics, um, prior to this version, Google Analytics was sort of an all in one, right? You set up your uh tracking, you got your tracking code, you put your goals in, and then you had your interface and you were you building all your dashboards and you would build reports and have it send PDFs. So it was kind of an all-in-one tool. And Google has fundamentally changed how this how this part of the Google marketing platform works now.

Google Analytics is now, you can even see it in the interface here where there's a few canned reports, but there's really this thing called the analysis of they want Google Analytics to be the BI tool, the business intelligence tool of your marketing department, which raises the question well, what about all those other things we used to do in it? So one of the things that is is a big change now is that a lot of your configuration is going to be done in Google Tag Manager. So if you want your journey to Google Analytics 4 to be easier rather than harder, get away from every type of goal that you use, even in GA3, except events. Events are what you want to do because the new model in GA4 is that everything's an event, a session, a user, a customer, a visit, a product. It's all events now.

So let me show you a very quick example here. Um you have a just a simple thank you event. And so instead of having a uh a goal where you're saying, okay, I want the page to be uh, you know, a specific page to be fired on, I just uh create events now, just a very simple event. Uh and what's really cool about this is that you can use the same events in tag manager for Google Analytics 3 or Google Analytics 4, the same triggers. Uh so you can reuse your existing GA3 goals that you set up if they are events and tag managers.

So that's easy win number one. Move to an event model, and then it becomes much less painful to set up uh new goals in in Google Analytics 4. So, Chris, I have a question about events. And so in going through uh a Google Analytics audit with a lot of our clients, I know that um a lot of the goals are, you know, someone lands it on a page or viewed a page or viewed a video. Um, you know, and so can we be a little bit more clear about what qualifies as an event and what are some of the goals that won't easily transfer over to Google Analytics for?

Everything's an event. Little literally everything's event. So if you have a goal that's a page as long as it's actionable. Yeah, as long as the user does something, you know, here's a real simple example. This is a page view-based event.

If somebody lands on a page that contains, you know, thank you in the name, but doesn't contain, you know, the the uh the the thank you for contacting us, uh, because we don't want that in here, and doesn't contain, you know, thank you for subscribing to our newsletter, um, we want to fire this goal. There's specific types of you know uh of fire uh uh tags that go with that. So this is a page view event, but there's so many different kinds of events. If we set up a start a new trigger here for fun, uh I want it to be a triggering event, you know, you can choose do you want it to be a uh a click on a link? I'm in actually tags here, let's go back.

Triggers new. So do I want it to be a page? Do I want to be part of the page that's loaded? Do I want uh to know that a windows loaded? Do I want to track someone's clicking on a part of the page, even if it's not a clickable link, just you know, knowing that someone's clicking, that can be a goal.

Do I want something to be seen? If you have a publishing website and your job is to show ads, you might have as a goal, hey, my ads got seen. I I displayed the ad. Uh form submissions, uh you can have as a goal if your job is content engagement and user engagement. Hey, I need to get people to get 90 of the way 90% of the way through the page.

If you've got a video on your site, yeah, a YouTube video trigger is a super powerful event because you want to know how much did somebody watch our video? Like you've got a landing page with a sales video on it, and you know, people watch five percent of the video, like maybe that that video is not doing its job. Um, and you can do even really complicated, uh interesting things happening with like scripts and custom events. So you can actually build uh your own custom events totally from you know bare metal if you wanted to. So there's no shortage of different kinds of things that you can now turn into goals.

And that's one of the more powerful examples of what you can do to make Google Analytics 4 work for you. Is now instead of you know destination, you know, pages per session, things like that. Uh, because everything's an event now, any event can become a conversion. So speaking of which, uh, one of the uh really nice things, if you remember in Google Analytics 3, uh, we would enjoy things like this, right? Where you would have your goals set up and you have 20 total, 20 goal slots, and lots and lots of people you know would use them all up and then have to start new pro new views to add more goals, and it was really silly.

With the event model, now in Google Analytics 4, you get 30 goal slots. But here's what's really cool. There are 30 goal slots, but because of the way events are layered with you know names and parameters, you could set up one master event, like thank you page, and then have dozens of sub-parameters under it that you could let you slice and dice later on, but you don't have to burn you know 20 goal slots just to track like one campaign. You can actually have a a meta goal with all these little tiny uh variables inside of it, almost like a basket of activities that a user could complete, and if uh and then you can open up that basket and dig around, say, okay, in this meta event, like a purchase, like a newsletter subscription, like a uh a contact form, what are all the parameters, the different things? Was it a from this page or that page?

Was it after a show? Did it come through a certain type of tracking? Like so, one easy one number two is if you think about how you change, uh think about how you think about goals in Google Analytics from being individual one-time things to being a container in which you put different kinds of user actions. Not only do you get 50% more goal slots in Google Analytics 4, you actually could make hundreds of different goals inside of each one, hundreds of different events. In any Google Analytics 4 count, you are now capped at 500 different events, right?

So you could have 500 different subtypes of conversions, which should be plenty for most companies uh in most cases. And if you need more than that, you might want to do some governance to figure out like do we actually need all those, and or can they be made into sort of a hierarchy where you can track the big headlines? So, how does that work for the goal? Then I mean, if you have a goal and then you have 20 parameters under it, does it just if any one of them has tripped, the goal is considered tripped, but then you can still drill down and see the parameters, or how does that work? Yeah, you can you can either create or modify an event that would have those things in it.

So uh, for example, you have it an event name, you can add you start adding all these different parameters um uh based on what type of of data you're sending. And remember, because you're using Google Tag Manager to send the events, you can create custom fields, you know, tons of custom fields, as long as it comes in with some kind of name that's recognizable, you would then be able to plug that in here. So, yeah, you could make very granular events that roll up into you know bigger goals. Discard changes. Okay.

Next thing that I think is is valuable in and useful in Google Analytics 4, that is easier than it was in three is path analysis. So one of the challenges with Google Analytics 3 is that it's path analysis tool is a little hard to use. Um and it didn't really get you the ability to dig deep into what's going on. So let's go ahead and go to the analysis hub. And let's go into a new path analysis.

I'm gonna go ahead and wait for this to load. There we go. I'm gonna change from event name to page uh title and screen name. Now remember, because you're using multiple data streams with Google Analytics 4, you could actually see hopping back and forth between the website and an app, which it in itself would be cool. But just in this alone, here is, for example, our Google Analytics for readiness audit.

I click through that and I can see you know how many people click through to the to the thank you page on that, and I can see where they went after that and good, see where they went after that and so on and so forth. So I could actually do an almost infinite amount of path analysis uh through my web through our website and see where did people go? What were the things that they checked out next? And you can even use this data to start kind of building models to be able to say, like, okay, if people go to this page and then they go to this page, what happens next? Where do they go next?

Um, if people, you know, if you want to look at like the services page or the even just the home page, where do people go after the home page? You know, what are the important things? Like, hey, 29 people went to the contact page, you know, starting at the home page. What happened after that? Did they all hit thank you?

No, they didn't. They actually went um back to the homepage. So they didn't find something that they were looking for. So you can see you could spend a lot of time in the analysis hub just looking at how users transit through your website, transit through all your content. And what I think is a lot easier, if you wanted to get fancy, you can start to add in filters, right?

You can start saying, I only want to see certain kinds of you know, event counts, for example. Um, do I want to see? Let's see, it's like match type. Uh, I want to see something with greater than one event, right? So I could filter out stuff where an event like a conversion maybe didn't happen, right?

And start slicing and dicing down the data, boiling things down. If there are specific kinds, I could filter on certain uh social channels. What does just my Facebook traffic do on my site? Um, so all of this is inside the path analysis tool, which is part of the analysis hub. Like I said, I think it's a super easy win for people to look to be able to slice and dice and say, what things are really happening on our site?

How do we use this information to make better decisions? I could say if my Facebook traffic's coming in from a certain way and they're just not reaching, they're not going where I want them to do to go, maybe I need to change what I'm sharing on Facebook. Maybe I need to run some ads on Facebook. So, Chris, this is, you know, I'll be honest, like I've seen Google Linux for a lot, but I'm already a little bit overwhelmed with the amount that you've shown us in the very short amount of time. Um, so I wanted to sort of pause for a second.

We did have a question. Um, let's see if I can pull this up. So the question was do you recommend setting up a new separate container or account in GTM for your new GA4 property or just adding GA4 tags to your existing container? And so I think can we break that down a little bit in terms of what even is the Google Tag Manager container and sort of what this all means? Because I think there's a lot to unpack, especially if you're not as familiar with Tag Manager.

That's a good question. Um, and the answer is gonna depend on how many conversion events you have. So inside Google Tag Manager, the container is a bucket, right? It's the physical piece of code that goes on your website. I guess it's not really physical because it's virtual, but it's it's the logical entity that goes on your website.

And you put stuff in that bucket, like tags and triggers. So essentially, you know, what are you telling tag manager to listen for? And then what are you telling tag manager to go and do? Um that's a trigger and a tag. Because all of your goals and configuration you know for sending these events happens in Tag Manager, if you have a modest number of existing goals and things right now, um, I would say keep it all in one Google Tag Manager container, right?

On the other hand, if you're an organization where you have 15 Google Analytics accounts that are all properly set up, and yeah, you know, there's 22 views and this and that, and everybody needs their own thing, then yeah, logically you might want to separate out and have a GA4 uh container just for GA4 because you're gonna have a lot of event tags in there. You're gonna have a lot of triggers in there. And so I would say if you're using more than one property in GA3 right now, or if you're using more than five views in GA3 right now, you probably would want to think about you know setting up that separate GA4 container just at least in in the initial stage because you'll wanna do some testing. Kate Katie said at the top of the show, do not just go turn off GA3. You'll be really unhappy if you do that.

Um but you would want to build maybe a test environment even in a separate container, just see how things are working without blowing up your main account. One of the most awesome tools uh is this little Chrome extension. Um trying to remember the name of it. Uh GTM copy paste is the name of the extension. You'll find it in the Chrome store.

And one of the things that you can do with GTM copy paste, which I think is absolutely brilliant, is you can take existing tags and triggers uh and copy them to a clipboard and then copy and paste them to another Google Tag Manager account. So if there's a list of things that you know that you you'll eventually want to port over to like maybe a master environment, um you could do it that way. You can also export the entire container and import pieces of it, but that's a little more technical. Um, and you better be good at JSON. Uh this is allowed to just copy and paste from one account to another.

So that would be my advice. You know, if you've already got a complex GA3 setup, you're probably gonna uh A, want a testing environment for GA4, and you may want to have a totally separate GA4 container. Got it. And so this this report looks a lot. So the path analysis report looks a lot like the behavior flow in Google Google Analytics 3.

So it looks like it's functioning roughly the same way. One of the challenges with that behavior flow is that it doesn't translate well into something like Data Studio, which is a question that we're often asked is how do I get that information emailed to me or in a more automated way or regularly. And you know, this might be your win number three, or it might just be a curveball question that I've asked you. You still can't do that. You still can't put it in Data Studio.

Um that's one of those things that that is it's just a limitation of the interface, right? There's just no good way to put even something that seems pretty straightforward like that. It just for whatever reason, Data Studio does not support those types of diagrams. Um I kind of understand that in the sense that the path analysis really is an exploratory tool, right? Um it is not when you're handing someone reporting in Data Studio, you're not necessarily asking them to explore on their own.

You're asking them to review the results and then take an action. And so it's a kind of a different use case uh in Data Studio where you might want to build it as a couple of tables. I know for clients we've had to build this, you know, a replica of it with a series of t uh tables uh tied together. But really, if someone wants to do that level exploration, they should be doing it in the BI tool itself. Now, that said, you can do a little bit of um, you know, you can download the the PDF of the this flow itself.

You can also add people to your visualizations here to so they can go check it out. Um it's still not, you know, go go pop this into Data Studio and have fun with it. Is it just there just is no functionality for that. Got it. And which is which is a frustrating thing for people because that's probably one of the top questions we get.

Yep. And and Google has said no. You will not get that. Um there are plenty of templates in the template gallery too for stuff that you can explore, different types of use cases and simulations and things. So if you want to go poking around, um, there is a lot to see in here.

Uh it's worth spending some time uh just enjoying the uh enjoying those uh templates. But win number three has nothing to do with any of that. Win number three is this. Have you ever had the experience? I know I have, uh, where Google Analytics just stops working, right?

And then you go into GA, and you know, a week or two weeks later, you're like, hey, look, all my traffic says zeros. That's weird, right? Um I don't love that. I don't you know love when that happens. Uh I also would like to know on a more regular basis, like, hey, is something happening that is worth paying attention to?

Like, did I did my site suddenly get a whole bunch of new traffic, or do I did you know my my books just start selling a whole bunch of new copies? And there hasn't really been a good system for that in place uh in GA3. There's been plenty of add-ons and ways to write code to do that with the API, but nothing for the average end user. Well, in GA4, you now have these automated insights, which you can find on the home screen. And go to these automated insights, and one of these is the create button.

And the create button is where you can build your own automations, and this one I think is so much fun. Let's create a brand new one here. I want to create something that's evaluated daily. I could even do hourly if you wanted to. Um, all users, and I want to look at things like let's do sessions, and I want to look at a percentage decrease more than 90%, right?

Compared to yesterday. Uh and what we want to call us name, we're gonna call it hey, who broke GA? It's gonna notify me. And this very simple custom insight's gonna run every single day and will raise its hand and alert, like, hey, it looks like 90% of your traffic's gone. Right?

That means I should probably go check to make sure that we didn't push a new version of the website or something and totally blow up Google Analytics, right? So from a data quality perspective, that's it, that's a huge win for just for somebody to be listening, go, oh, look, I got an email saying the website's not sending any data. That that sucks. Um, and as you can see, because these are uh all customizable, you could do something like uh if you have revenue, for example, it's like on my uh on my uh personal website. Uh I want to know if uh I've had a you know maybe a greater than 25% increase in revenue since yesterday.

Maybe did somebody start sharing my book? Um bought this. Okay, and so it notifying me of any of my KPIs, and you know, is there an anomaly? Did something happen that I need to know about? This just very simple.

It'll it'll send you an email. It'll also, if you have the Google Analytics app on your phone, it'll ping your app to with a notification saying, like, hey, your automated insight fired. And it's super handy to go, ah, something's up. I would like to know that something's up. So one of the keys to do is to make sure that you have all your goals and events set up properly in GA4, and you have a few of these automated insights, just general best practices, make sure your site's not down, and then have an anomaly alert on your KPIs to let you know, hey, something's up.

Go go look at the website. Couple questions for you, Chris. Um, in terms of this uh KPI alert, do you think that it makes sense for when companies and marketing teams are planning larger campaigns, you know, especially around the holidays, it might make sense to set up that hourly alert, you know, if they're set if they're spending a lot of money and are hoping for an influx of traffic to their website. That might be, you know, a really easy way to make sure things are still working and working as expected. Um so is it something where you can turn on and off and create um these alerts like pretty easily?

Is there a limit to the number of alerts? Uh I believe you're limited to a hundred of them, which again, you know, is uh if you've got a hundred notifications on your phone, you're gonna be really unhappy. Um but no, I I I think that makes total sense to to say uh, yeah, there's some if you know, you know, for example, you're about to spend a million bucks on an ad campaign, probably not a bad idea to have some monitoring, you know, at the hour level, go, yeah, you're you're spending money, you're not getting anything for it. Makes sense. Um the the next question is probably more of an opinion question, um, because I don't think we have any data to support any sort of like actual uh statement about this, but what is the likelihood that someone has a Google Analytics account on their phone and they're checking it regularly versus a marketer who's just going in to Google Analytics maybe once or twice a month?

It depends. I mean, it depends on how important it is to you. And um, you know, one of the things that we always say with KPIs is uh a KPI is a number for which you get a bonus or not, right? And if you are uh if you really care about that number and it's something can be measured in Google Analytics, I don't see why you wouldn't want to know about that. Now that said, I'm probably in the minority of marketers who have this on their phone uh and have notifications turned on.

Uh but I also am a nerd, so I'm I'm totally okay with that. Well, the big take too is it's you know, what can you do with that? I mean, I think that's the thing. You know, if you get that 80% traffic down, you know, you that's because you need to run to a server and see what's going on. Um and same deal if you're in communications, if you get a social media fire alarm, you know, then yeah, you you know it's time to start rustling up the troops and see who said something stupid.

Um but if it's uh you know, if it's just like raw traffic is up or down, that kind of stuff, maybe you're only checking once a month. Yep. And that's a really good point, John, because remember that the Google Analytics measurement protocol allows you to send any data to Google Analytics and have it be tracked. So you could absolutely take something from like your social media monitoring system, tie it to the GA API, and then set up an uh an automated insight and say, like, hey, it looks like your it looks like your executive said something stupid on Twitter again, you know, the little bell goes off, and you're like, ah, heck. Uh aren't you guys glad that I am not that executive?

Uh on a daily basis. Um Brian has a really good question from um YouTube asking if there's any is anything that's critical in GA3 that GA4 doesn't. And the answer to that is sort of. Um, there are some things that have been left by the wayside in GA4. Um, channel groupings, for example, gone.

Uh channel groupings have been replaced just by medium. Uh Google said, yep, you're just gonna use medium from now on because fundamentally that's what you've been doing anyway. Um, and and so that's gone. Um, those individual aggregates like users and sessions and things, those are all gone because everything's an event now. Um, so that's kind of uh one of those things where if you have reporting that exists today on features that have been deprecated, you know, one of the things you're going to have to manage is uh the process for getting that data and bringing it back in.

So uh just to give you a short list of things, yeah, views are gone, most filters are gone, uh, channel groupings, the old event tracking with category action label value uh is gone. Um I'm trying to think of this other things that are gone. And everything now exists in uh in GA4. And if you are a tech savvy shop, um there you may have the big query database set up on the back end that allows you to look at your raw Google Analytics data, which by the way, it's not an easy win, but it's a huge win. If you if you have the technical capability, uh you can dig into the raw hit level data for Google Analytics, which uh is just a data nerd's absolute dream.

Um a lot of the reports that you've built for GA3 obviously will need updating and you know, not only connecting to a new data source, like in a data studio, but the fundamental metrics themselves have changed. So you'll have to to to mess around that uh up until about a month ago, uh you couldn't get source medium in data studio for GA4, which is kind of a big problem. But Google has since fixed that, which is good. But I would say anything where you have does that get rid of all that weirdness then where you would run a report where one was session-based and another was event-based, and like the report would just zero out because it was different data sets. Exactly right.

So those those scopes of user session hit and product are gone, right? Everything is an event now. And so you you have now have unified data, which is a big deal, right? It allows you to actually uh look at your data, you know, in the same scope. And that that part's really nice.

Uh the part that's not really nice is that it is also just really painful to look at the raw data if you're unaccustomed to doing it. So just to give you a quick sense of what that looks like, um, let's go ahead and shrink this down. So this is Google's big query. You can see now everything is literally just rows in a table. Um, you can see what people have been doing, their source, their medium.

Um, and you scroll over here, and you can see there's uh hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of data fields that you can, you know, depending on your GA setup and how many custom parameters you've set up, um, maybe in here, but it is all in one big flat table. So to your point, John, the idea of user level metrics and you know versus page level metrics are gone. Yeah. Um, so again, I would classify this as a big win, but not an easy win. It's you know, it's one of those things where there is a lot of information to take in and it can be super overwhelming.

I mean, Google Analytics 3 is overwhelming if you're not familiar with the system. And so now Google Analytics 4 is so different that I can see where this is going to be, you know, a bit of a struggle to get people from one system to the other, or even just getting GA4 set up. Um, you know, so little plug, you know, one of the things that we do at Trust Insights is that we will help you on that journey. So we will do a full audit of Google Analytics 3, tag manager and get Google Analytics 4 set up and running in parallel to your three systems. So it can just run in the background and collect data.

As we mentioned, the benefit of doing that is that you know you can start to see is the data matching up? Am I collecting the data correctly or do I have disparities between the two systems? And this is a great time to work that out before Google Sunsets, Google Analytics 3. So if you need help with that, definitely, you know, reach out to us, ping us, find us in Slack. There's no shortage of ways to reach any one of us if you have questions or want help with that.

One of the other things I think is important is to keep in mind that architecture change, right? Tag manager is where you do your data collection. Google Analytics is where you do your actual analysis and data studio is where you do your reporting. So to the extent that you can start a change management process in your company to get people used to the idea like yeah you're going to be using Google Data Studio to get your reports. Here's your dashboards here's this things then the transition to GA4 will be a little bit easier because you won't have users of the previous Google Analytics three suddenly jumping into four going, ah like everything's gone.

Because that was everyone's first reaction when they went in whereas if they're in data studio you can change the back end data source and you know with some adaptation to the report for the connectors it'll still be the report they're used to seeing and so and Google has made it pretty clear that's where we as marketing analysts as marketing technologists should be putting reports for the end user to say, like, hey, let's let's just go ahead and make sure that you know the users have a friendly, easy environment to work in that doesn't have too many buttons that they can't break, um and that they get the information that they need to make good decisions. Yeah, how's that for the user management? Will all GA3 accounts just automatically have access to GA4? Or is this your chance to house too? They already do.

Yes, you you you probably should. Um looks like Brian has another question in here. Uh recommended all our teams department to set up GA4 properties so they'll start gathering data from the rest of using. Do we also need them to set BigQuery as well? If you want the BigQuery data, yes, you do, because as with all things, Google, nothing is ever retroactive.

Um, so it is something that you must uh just set up if you think you want to use that data later on. Bear in mind, once you start using BigQuery, there is a cost to it, right? BigQuery is pay as you go, um part of Google Cloud. And you know, the costs are not overwhelming, but they you know, as the database gets bigger, um, you get you get to pay more. Now, for a company like Trust Insights, where we get you know 10 or 15,000 you know visitors a month, it's you know, it's gonna cost us like a buck, maybe.

Um, but if you are Amazon, right? Uh you're gonna be talking about hundreds of millions of visitors a day, and every action and event they take, that's gonna add up. Same with events and and things. The more events you set up, the faster your your database grows. So if you don't want to incur that cost, you may not want to set up BigQuery.

But if you want access to the data because you know for sure you're gonna be doing data analysis, um, then yeah, you'll want to set that up earlier sooner rather than later. One of the things that we haven't talked about a whole lot, and I don't know how relevant it is, um, is what does that mean for users of Google Analytics 360? So Google Analytics 3 slash Universal, there's the free version that the majority of people are on, but then there's the paid version, the very expensive version of Google Analytics 360. What is that? Where does GA4 fit in with that?

And you know, what is the difference between free and the 360? You know, I don't actually know. We'd have to go ask our friends over at Google what's new in the Google marketing platform for 360. Because one of the nice things about the previous version of 360 was it was unsampled data. I mean, you got access to all the raw data.

Um, and now if you set up BigQuery, you still have access to it now in the free version. So I don't know. We would have to go check the uh the product listings. All right. We are on it.

We will get back to people with some kind of an answer. Um okay. So, folks don't have any more questions. Um, we'll be doing you're gonna be seeing a lot more of GA4 in the next you know 12 to 18 months as companies uh pivot. And you're gonna see more good use cases of it right now.

You know, it was released in October. People are still getting their feet under them on this thing and trying to learn how to use it. And be careful of the mistake of trying to make GA4 into something it's not, right? It is an analysis tool, it's not a reporting tool. You know, make sure that you're move your reporting to G to a data studio, and you and your users will be much happier.

Uh any final parting words? Get GA4 set up. And if you need help, contact us. Good luck. Get rolling.

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