So What? Google Analytics 4 Migration

Happy Thursday, everyone. This is so what the Marketing Analytics Insights Live Show. This week our uh fear of the CEO, Katie is taking some much needed time off to go, I think it was uh stalking like small rabbits or something in the in the backwoods. I don't know. Deep woods somewhere, yeah.

That was the story, I guess. Deep woods. So uh while she is off enjoying her time, this week we're going to have some fun with Google Analytics 4. Specifically, we're going to migrate uh one of our websites, the Marketing Over Coffee website, uh from GA3 to GA4, leaving GA3 in place and stuff. So uh before we begin, we have to have a quick birthday shout-out.

Marketing over coffee, the podcast that John and I do turned 15 this week. Dude, we're way too old. That's just all there is to it. We've just we are dinosaurs in this world. So um so with a Google Analytics for uh migration, there's like eight or nine major parts you have to go through.

There's uh users, goals and conversions, legal stuff, uh platform infrastructure, business infrastructure, uh your GA3 instance, your tag managers, your GA4 instance, a Google Data Studio, and then an alternative analytics systems and stuff. So let's get started. I'm gonna go ahead and just pull up the marketing over coffee uh website here in a second screen while we chat this through. So one of the first things that we'd have to do with uh any uh kind of website is figure out what the goals are. So John, what are the major goals for marketing over coffee from a a you know primary and secondary perspective?

Yeah, I mean the ultimate goal of course is our sponsors getting leads, right? I mean that's actually what pays the bills. But as far as the web traffic, we've you know just generic traffic in getting to the pages. And then we do have newsletter signups, which when you mentioned last week we're gonna do this, I imagine are probably broken because we've changed vendors a couple of times on that. So it'll be interesting to see how bad that off is um but yeah that's really you know traffic, newsletter sign up and then of course traffic for sponsor hits.

Gotcha. So would you classify as a goal something like uh people going to click on, you know, get get marketing or coffee on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts. Would those be goals too? Yeah and we had back solved a little while ago and uh eight dollars uh a lead was the price that we had come up with we kind of knew that you know based on what we've made in previous years that if we get qualified traffic those people are usually worth about eight bucks to us. Okay, got it.

Um so from a goal perspective then we want we obviously do care about traffic. We do care about uh the newsletters let's take a quick look at the newsletter ooh so this is i framed in yeah that's um to be that's a stopgap because we just transitioned off dot digital about three months ago and so that's up there until I get um Ghost up and running. Um so yeah right now I'm just collecting them on a a Google spreadsheet for now. Gotcha. Okay.

Um well this is something that can't easily be tracked because it's framed in so that you can't measure that. Uh the the site does have gravity forms. You can always put up a gravity form uh on site and then you can track that natively. Yeah, that would be uh in fact yeah that would probably be better because I could get notifications that actually make sure it's working as opposed to me not looking at the spreadsheet that's being filled up. So once again it's the cobblers kids have have no shoes absolutely yes I mean it works come on thumbs up for the I am collecting email addresses it works fair enough okay uh other parts of the Google marketing platform uh the site does use tag manager right it does yeah yeah that's not configured uh what about Search Console?

Yeah it's on uh I haven't looked that long but you know last time I looked it was clean but it's been a good five or six months since I looked last got it okay let's see do I have access to that Search Console account because if I don't I can't do we may have to I have done href site health that one was last done like about two months ago and we got the health way up in the 90s so that was solid but got it looks like I do have Search Console access to the to the site so we're we should be all set with that there too. One of the big things um with GA4 migrations is you need to have admin on any of the systems that you want to tie into it. So other parts of Google marketing platform like tag manager search console, Google ads and stuff if you want them integrated with GA4 you uh you've got to have access um to those systems so uh I feel like other than the newsletter show being kind of in a wonky place what is the contact form is that is that of any value? I mean I know a lot of it's people just pitching. Yeah yeah we get pitches so it's um yeah I don't put any extra value on that so no need.

Okay. So not necessarily a I mean, I guess you can just leave it as it's not bad to have that as a goal to see you know if people are still interacting, but um certainly not something we're gonna stick a dollar value amount on unless it's to uh fund the comedy episode of terrible pitches. Okay. So first things first, um, and these are considerations for your company. Do you, as the marketer, have the ability to sign legally binding documents with Google um around data protection.

If you don't, um you need to make sure you get legal looped in sooner rather than later. Second, uh, what governs uh your marketing data collection? So uh marketing over coffee is technically a US corporation, right? Uh yes. Okay, but it's not like uh like uh a French corporation.

Yeah, no, we're not like anything sketchy based out of some part of the world. We are a the the classic um Delaware LLC. Okay, so that would mean that while there aren't any data agreements that directly cover marketing over coffee um as a as an operating business entity, there are some data privacy ones that do apply. So California's laws would apply, obviously, because we have listeners in California. Uh GDPR would apply for any listeners who are physically located within the European economic area.

Um and then uh PIPL for any listeners who are who are based in China. Um, but from a legal perspective, um, you would be the person who'd uh agree to things. Uh let's see, other stuff, platform stuff. Uh the site does use SSL, so that's all set. Any other domains that we would classify under the marketing over coffee family?

Uh not anymore. No, there was an email domain for the email provider, but that's it. So we're back down to the single site. Okay, cool. Um, are there any systems and referrals that we know we should ignore?

So again, the for some companies, if you have Zen Desk, uh, you probably have uh a lot of traffic coming to and from Zendesk, and it's not for marketing purposes, not terribly helpful. For obviously for customer service measurement, that's something you'd want to do separately. Yeah, no, I don't even bother with my own IP, uh dynamic IP here. So, and it's not like I'm pounding the site more than five times a week. So, okay.

Um in Google Analytics itself, what reports do you focus on? So if we go into the marketing over coffee, uh I mean you see the lovely GA4 warning there. Where do you spend your time in the app as the primary user? Yeah, I you know, the behavior um tab is big because I like to see which content is actually pulling and and doing things. I do look at the conversions just for some raw numbers, but really that's about it.

You know, we're not so huge that the real time gets a lot of action. And yeah, uh you know, really I just spend more time over on hrefs trying to clean up errors and broken links. That was kind of like the project for the last year. So I don't spend a ton of time over here. Okay, got it.

So in terms of things that m you you might be sorely missing, probably not a ton that you'd be like, oh my gosh, you know, this this obscure feature from GA3 that's going away is is you know my beloved uh insights. So okay. Yeah, no, no, we're we're definitely getting you raw traffic, and that's the that's 90% of it. Got it. All right, so let's do this.

We need to get started. The first thing we have to do is we have to create the new GA4 property. Uh, I'm assuming the accounts that have access to this, does everybody who is in here still need to have access to uh Scout? Like this one, I don't think needs to be in this oh that's that's the overall must lane scout. Okay.

Um I think that looks good for the site. There's the trust insight stuff. That's a t yeah, TI token. Okay, so yeah, I know everybody else we know, so that's okay. So let's go ahead and create a new property.

Uh this will be we called this MOCGA4. Fun. Uh we're gonna go with New York time. US dollars the currency. Uh we don't want the advanced uh option.

We don't need that. Uh we are a small business, and we're doing this mainly to uh measure lead generation, uh optimize by site, uh measure customer engagement. That sounds good. Okay, now the next part is to set up our data stream. Do we still have mobile apps?

Yeah, that's another that actually just happened three days ago. I was hitting the mobile app and I got the classic iOS. Hey, the developer this app is fallen woefully behind and needs to figure out their problems. So uh actually let me check on a newer platform because that was an older device. Um yeah, no, it still says it needs to be updated, and it won't even let me open it, so it has to be like four or five versions or we don't we don't have a mobile app.

Yeah, no, because it used to be like you could down, you know, you could open it up and they would just say like, well, it may or may not work, good luck. But this is the full on, like, yeah, no, we're not even gonna let you start it. Okay. All right, so we're gonna do just web now. Uh if we'd had the mobile app uh working, we could have talked about that again set up, but not so much.

All right. Uh we do have SSL in place, so marketing over coffee.com. We're gonna call this MOC web moc web stream. Uh enhanced measurement is turned on, just make sure everything is here is is all set. We're gonna create that stream.

Okay. That's interesting. Good job, Google. Let me just turn off all the ad blocking widgets here. Normally I would be doing this on a different site, but uh okay, there's our measurement ID.

So let's copy that. We're gonna come back to Google Analytics for it in just a bit, but we need to move over to tag manager because now we have to start creating all the GA4 stuff. So first things first. Uh let's check our built-in tags, make sure they're okay. Yep, they're all on, which I personally like, doesn't slow things down.

Uh there's the MOCGA, which I'm gonna rename to GA3. And let's create ourselves a new constant. M O C G A4. Constant. Um, because the way Google Analytics 4 is set up, there's no longer a um a built-in setting here.

Uh there's one here. This applies only to GA3. So for GA4, you just gotta use a constant and you put in put that in. Hit save. Okay.

Next things uh next we need to create the base tag. So GA4 works by having a base tag and then having uh event tags that tell GA4 to do stuff above and beyond the base. So let's create our first so GA4 base tag. And this is our GA4 configuration base tag. And our measurement ID, this is where our constant comes into play.

I always do that because otherwise one day you will fat finger that and then you'll have data and be wondering why. Um let's see. Do we need anything else? There's no additional consent required. Uh and this is gonna trigger everywhere.

Okay. So now the the base tag is in, which will count your basic page views and stuff like that. Um we now need to look at our trigger collection and and our goals and figure out what stuff do we need to set up. So we've got our Android and iTunes uh link clicks to take you to those relevant apps. We've got it something we'll track any click that goes off of the website.

We've got download the MP3. Uh let's get a placeholder in here for newsletter subscribe. And this is gonna be a form submission. And let's go to the site here. Okay, so it's newsletter.

Some forms on the page URL contains this won't work until we switch it over to gravity forms, but um we got that in place. Uh let's see. One, two, three, we've got these three things. We've got contact form needs to go in. Let's get the contact form thank you page URL.

Okay. We actually don't have a thank you page. We just do a uh in page change. So let's do thank you contact form. Thank you.

Now we're gonna do our form submission on subforms where the page URL contains contact. Alright, so we now we've got our major goal completions, our conversions uh tags set up. Now we have to create the corresponding triggers. We're not gonna mess with any of the GA3 stuff. We're just gonna leave that to be for right now.

Uh I'm gonna rename this GA3. The one of the things that people do the most wrong is they don't delineate between GA3 and GA4, and then your your tag manager is just a huge big mess. Cody asks, is it best practice to send a page you in the GA4 configuration tag uh tag loads? Yes. Um I've not seen a use case for not having the base configuration tag uh also fire a page view.

You can obviously set it up as a separate independent event, particularly if there's places you don't want page views to fire. Uh you don't want the GA tags to fire at all. Uh like for example, if you were doing marketing and you had a uh a log and a page for existing customers uh and then the existing customers portal, it would make sense to you know just not fire page use for your marketing uh data stream. Okay. So now we need to create uh those goals, uh those those conversions.

So let's call this GA4 contact conversion. It's gonna be our event, our configuration tag is the base tag, and we're gonna call this contact conversion. Uh and this will trigger with our contact one. Thank you. Let's do the newsletter next.

G4 conversion event base tag, and this is newsletter conversion. Save. Next we're gonna do let's do the um iTunes. iTunes click conversion. What two years now?

Okay, call this Apple conversion and outbound iTunes an Android version version event. Okay, and outbound Android. Okay, and we also want to track outbound clicks. Uh we may not necessarily want to be a conversion, but we I do want to track outbound clicks, GA4. Because we have a lot of links in the show notes and stuff to different vendors and partners and stuff, and I'd like to know who they are.

In fact, now that I think about that, let's add uh to that event, let's add a value, and then add the click URL. And that way we know we'll be able to tell from the event data what outbound the clicks are getting clicked on. That's huge, right? I mean, there's no way to do that in GA3, is there? Oh, yeah, there's.

You can do that in GA3. Well, you set that up as an event just to grab it as a event based stuff. Um the event model is not super different, except that the naming is a lot more flexible now, but it's functionally not super super different. All right. Uh the other thing that we need to do is inside tag manager is now a it is now a best practice to enable the consent overview that allows you to review consent for all your tags uh and stuff, which is is really really important.

So we've gone through now is set up our conversions uh for GA4. We're gonna come back to tag manager in a bit where now we need to actually start configuring this sucker. So we don't currently use any connected site tags. Uh if we did like Google Optimize or something, we would want to put that in here. Um let's see for measurement protocol.

If we were um going to do stuff with the measurement protocol, like push data into it, we would want to look at that. Um, you okay if I hate say yes, Google? Sure, sure. All right. We're signing legally binding agreements on the air.

That's great. Um let's see. Universal, we do want to click universal analytics events. This one's a really big deal. So there are some vendors, like with Calendly, for example.

Calendly will send a like a an appointment booked GA3 event. Uh, they don't send a GA4 event right now. So if you turn this on, you can collect um those uh those GA3 events and have them passed into GA4, which is really handy. Will that stay even past sunset? Or probably because they like I said, there's a ton of services out there.

Um, I would hope those services, or at least the more modern ones would uh they would come around, yeah. That's a good point. Exactly. Let's go ahead and turn on marketing over coffee as for cross-domain. Okay, we don't have any in internal traffic.

Uh don't have any unwanted referrals yet, I don't think. Um session timeout. We 30 minutes is the generally best practice. We're gonna leave that alone. So this data stream, this web stream is now all set.

Let's look into our property settings. So industry, I what do we do for the industry? Business and industrial? Yeah, yeah, because I don't think they have a marketing tech or anything. No.

Okay. Save on that. Uh let's see. Access should be. Yep, looks good.

Okay, let's do our data settings. Data collection. We need to turn on Google signals. Signing more legally binding things. Let it rip.

Yep. All right. So we've got that. The user data collections acknowledged. So there's a whole long paper about how the client ID in Google Analytics can then be paired to other stuff.

That's worth reading. It's in the support documents. It's really awkward. Google has so much useful documentation about GA4, but it's in the developers portal. So where your average marketer is not going to see it.

Like here's a long list of metrics in GA3, and here's their equivalence to GA4. That's not published anywhere. Easy to find.ai/slash analytics for marketers. We're sharing stuff there. All right.

So we've got collection on retention. As far as it'll go, which is the 14 months for event data. So if there's stuff you'll ever want to look back on, this will give you 14 months. And then if you want more than that, you have got to set up the BigQuery integration. You go to BigQuery, yeah.

Yep. So we don't have any filtering to do right now. Let's check our reporting identity. We want to make sure it's by user and device attribution settings. The default should be cross-channel data driven, and then with the Windows uh wide open there.

Uh property change histories, that's just us tooling around. Do we have a Google Ads account? Uh we do. I don't know if it's linked though, because like I have my own personal Google Ads account. I think that's the one that I'm actually using.

Okay, that's fine. Um we don't use ad manager. BigQuery. Let's put a big query project in place. Um let's use there is one there.

Oh yeah. Look at that. That's random. Question is do I have is billing set up on it? Billing may not be.

Uh okay, total estimated daily events. So a one million daily limit, uh, including advertising. I think we're gonna be okay. We want daily okay. That looks good.

It looks like I don't have billing turned on that project. So there's a marketing over coffee project in GCP, but it's not it's not set to bill. Right, right. Um what that means is you get two sets of tables in BigQuery. You get um the previous day's captured data and you get a live table as well.

So if you're doing stuff with real-time analytics and big query, you'd want both turned on and it's double the cost, which you know, for a site like marketing over coffee, the cost of this is gonna be somewhere out between a dollar and two dollars a month. Uh it's it's not a huge bill. Now, if you're like CNN, it could get really expensive. Right. Okay, so we've got BigQuery all linked up.

Um, if you don't have administrative access to your company's uh Google Cloud platform account, you're going to need to get it if you want to be able to do this integration. And again, this is to get you event data past the 14-month you know, a rolling window. Uh let's see, Search Console. Uh let's link up our search Console here. Marketing over coffee.

Next. Select the web stream, this one and submit. So now Search Console data will be linked into Google Analytics for as well. Okay. So that's all of the configuration for GA4.

So we've now got it in place. And while we're at it, let's go into preview mode in Tag Manager. Okay, so the page is loading. Allow that. Let's retry.

There we go. Tag assistants now connected. Alright, so what's fired? GA3 tag is fired, GA4 base tag is fired, stack adapt and clarity. Let's go.

We open the debug window. Yeah. Let's go ahead and click on newsletter. And accept our cookies. That's our curiosity.

Let's do a test. Okay, yeah, so it did not register at all. Okay. Right, yeah, until that switches to gravity, that's not gonna fire. Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so we know GA4 is there. And look, we've got some traffic, which is good. Okay, next thing we need to do is we need to actually put those events and conversions that we we that we did in tag manager into the interface. So we're gonna go to configure. Uh we have our events go away.

Okay, and we're gonna declare um just for thoroughness, we're gonna declare those events. Apple conversion event name. Um event name equals that, right? That's I'm gonna do one for Android. One for the newsletter.

For the contact. And what did I call that other one? It's the outbound GA4 outbound clicks. I call it outbound click event. Okay.

Copy parameters of the source event. That's correct. All right, so now we've got our conversion events declared. We now need to go in and designate those. So we're I'm gonna go ahead and do the same.

Anything that's can has conversion in the name, we're gonna recycle here. We're not gonna do the uh outbound click one as in a conversion event. All right, save, go away. Okay, so now our conversions are set up. Um do we have any audiences that we decind in the old site?

Any specific audiences or segments? No, I don't believe so. All right. Um I think to uh set up a couple of audiences. Um let's do one.

Let's create a custom audience. Uh I'm gonna set to maximum limit and let's call this Apple audience. I'm just out of for fun. Uh if we have an event. Where's my custom events?

Oh, they're not they're not here yet. Once they they're here, then we could set up a um events. So like if you click on the Apple uh iTunes button, uh then you would we can enroll you in an Apple audience versus an Android audience and designate the different users that way. Can't do that now, it's not there yet. Okay, uh we don't have any custom dimensions and metrics on the old site.

I don't think I don't think, so it's just the new site. Uh and then let's go ahead and I don't have the the Chrome debug extension on here. I was gonna say so that you have to have an extension on to make that stuff trigger. Yeah, you have the Google Alliance debug extension, but then you can see what's happening. But given that we are seeing stuff in the real-time environment here.

Yeah, we know it's at least working, yeah. Yeah, we just got some stuff working. The Seth Goden Podcast episode is always doing well. Um trying to think if there's anything else on the check the checklist here. Um that all right, so we don't have any filters, no service out tracking.

Um next thing to do is in the uh website itself. We want to install a backup system. Because one of the things that is kind of an issue. Oh, wait, Cody has a question. For events to have parameters to see parameters in GF4 in larger time frame, less than you have to create custom dimensions.

You should see the event parameter data accompanying the event itself. So it's it's tied to the event record within the backend data structure. Now that said, you have you essentially have you know a sort of session level uh event scoping and then user level event scoping. If you want to I think have a bit more flexibility, it wouldn't hurt to make it a custom dimension. Okay, the next thing we want to do is in the uh the website itself um installing a backup system because one of the things that has happened, obviously you know, a lot of folks are like, well, this is a challenge, um, is to have a parallel analytic system of some kind.

So if you're using WordPress um and your WordPress hosting company uh is is a pretty solid company, um, like we use uh WP Engine uh which can tolerate uh all sorts of abuse. The uh one of the things that you may want to do is install another analytics package. So I'm gonna install the uh open source uh Matomo Analytics. This is um not only is it free as an open source, but it runs on your server, so it's not hosted elsewhere, uh which means that all the data stays on your server. Um and all you know, from a privacy perspective, the data never leaves your control.

Alright, let's enable tracking. All right, the privacy page. Okay. So we should have. If we go into the reporting engine now, this takes us to the Matomo 4 marketing over coffee.

Let's go into settings. Let's see, system, general settings. We don't need let's do star com save that there. We don't use their tag manager. The nice thing is we don't have to use their tag manager because it's physically installed on the server itself.

Let's go back to our there we go. Add tracking code, uh default tracking. And we do want to track, we do want to track 404s and save. Okay, privacy stuff, exclusions. If we want to exclude like administrators like us, we could exclude them.

If we want a geolocation more accurate, we could install uh MaxMind, uh, which we probably should do at some point. But now that means we have a second web analytics systems running in parallel with Google Analytics. Um, so if, for example, in a year and a half, the EU says you know, we're we're disallowing Google Analytics completely, um, which is a non-zero possibility because of GDPR compliance, um, then you definitely want to have a system that is not Google also tracking your site as well. Um they can uh put things together as people's ad blockers get better, you also want to have something that can pick up the data. Okay.

Um let's see, go down the rest of the checklist here. I think the only other thing I guess we we could do is would be this a dashboard for it and stuff. Uh if you wanted to put together a dashboard, uh let's take a look at creating one here. And we're gonna connect to Google Analytics. We're gonna connect to our GA MOCGA4 account, which where did that go?

Let's see it in here. What can I do with it? Huh, it's there. I just can't see it. Oh, there it is.

Okay, add that in. All right, let's some basic stuff. Let's put up turn on the grid, set the grid to 12, and snap to the grid just because I'm obsessive like that. I like my things to be neat. So you said traffic, John, right?

Yeah, traffic is definitely the leader. Okay. Uh what kind of traffic? Do we do you care about sessions or do you care about human beings, users? You know, we've always cared about sessions, not users, but I'm trying to think users would actually be more useful.

Well, yes and no. I mean we make our revenue models based on sponsorship, so it wouldn't hurt to have you know more uh act times of activity, people using their eyeballs on the site, regardless if it's the same person or not, because of the way people, you know, the buying cycle goes. I think sessions is a fine metric. Yeah, yeah, I'm definitely that is definitely that is what we share with advertisers, that's for sure. Exactly.

The other thing is that from a an analytics perspective, uming where a session came from is is useful because you know, again, if we get somebody to come back over and over and over again, I would like to know the all the different channels that that user is coming from. Yeah, where they come from, definitely. All right. So let's go into what we've got here for our accounts. So uh users has amusingly enough been renamed.

Um well, you can there's active users and there's total users. Um for the purposes of these reports, we're gonna go with active users. Um, and the API documentation does detail the difference between the these because there's a lot of things that now have these like really weird nitpicky granular things. Um, and let's do let's do this as a time series chart. We've got our date.

Uh and I don't need event name breakdown, I just need the date and the active users. So that'll be our active user counts. Let's there's obviously nothing to show yet because just literally just turn GA4 on. The other thing I tend to like to do for simplicity's sake is to take a clone of our charts and always make them little scorecards. Makes it easier for people to read what's going on.

Okay, and then what other measures of conversion we care or should be on this dashboard? Uh you know, channels that you'd mentioned my channels are they have been corrected. I mean, UTM management's an issue, but it's still good to know where stuff is coming from. Okay, so let's do that as a table and bar. Uh and so it's interesting.

Source medium used to be the sort of the standard reporting, and now it's two separate fields. Google's has separated them out. And again, this is one of those things where um there's like three different sources here. So you can see session source, source, and user source in the documentation, which is um again in the developer section, session source is the source of from that particular session that you're looking at. The one labeled plane source is the conversion source.

So if a conversion event happened, the source is is the the you know that was in play at the time of conversion, and then user source is the first touch user source. So it's kind of funny that you almost have like a miniature attribution model, just in the way the data's broken up. Um, but for this, for our purposes, we're gonna go with session source. And then let's get rid of date because we don't necessarily need that governed by the overall here. And then let's then add in our medium as well.

And then our channel grouping can be thrown in. Okay. So once again, once we get data in there, then we'll have a nice little table telling you where your traffic is coming from. Um anything else. I don't know.

Those are you know, that's like again, the lines here. The stuff it's pretty much how many people are there, and then you know, we did this last month, did it do anything? Those are the kind of the big question. Anything else you suggest, other stuff that you've seen that should be in there? Well, normally if the conversion events were money makers, you would definitely have them front and center.

Um but obviously we know we make our money differently. So these are you know, the the active users really is you know essentially what you show the advertisers. Yeah, we got scads of people. Right, yeah, yeah. This is where it's at.

Um does uh Libson have a connector for Google Data Studio. No, not that I'm aware of. I mean, let me take a look and see if there's anything new there, but yeah, they really don't have any outgoing stats as far as I know. Okay. For those listening, Libson is the um podcast hosting company that hosts the MP3s.

This is good because as I'm in there, I can open up a ticket to say when are you gonna fix the app. Oh, you know, that's something that we forgot to put in. We forgot to put in um a tag for people clicking on just the MP3 links. That was in the old. Let's put that back.

G4, two, three. Like click. And again, that's because we put the actual show URLs right on the website. I'm going to mark that as a conversion because we're getting people to listen to the show. I'd push that.

And then go into GA4 and go back into our configuration menu. I hate these little sliding side names. And declare that as a conversion as well. Now the other thing you said that we value listeners at a value of about $8. What can do any of these conversions be things that you would attach that dollar amount to?

I mean, we it was always just um because it that's the average amount. You know, the reality is there obviously the people that listen to every single show every week are worth more than the ones that only pop in once in a while. Right. Um but that was it. I mean, I guess we could argue that the newsletter subscribers are worth more.

I've never done any. I guess it would the way to do that would be we would take the newsletter subscribers, just figure out how we want to portion the total income. So if I said, well, I think newsletter subscribers are worth twice as much, we could make them 16, and then the general listeners would fall to like six bucks or something like that. Right. Okay.

Well, let's let's set a newsletter subscription uh value then. So in here, um, unlike GA3, um, conversion data is set up in in tag manager now. So event parameters, we're gonna add in our currency, which is USD, and we're gonna add our value, which is gonna be sixteen dollars. So now every time this tag fires, it's gonna fire that that um value data with it. Yeah, that's good to track.

And then that will show up as essentially as revenue in GA4. All right. So as of right now, marketing over coffee is is now set up. Uh GA4 is running. We've got our tags and our triggers and stuff uh all up to date.

Um typically as you would as we would if this was a a commercial client, we'd then go to the different stakeholders, present the dashboards, um, review it the the last time through with different users, uh, make sure that the user stories that we've acquired from uh the folks uh match up with uh what we've actually built, uh the the goals are all in there, uh, and that the data's flowing properly. But that's the the I would call it this the actually the easy part of of GF4 migration though because the hard part for us doesn't really exist because it's literally just the two of us. But that is like who needs access? What kind of access do they need? What are their user stories?

You know, the all the different business cases, uh the the reporting structure internally in the organization, the governance around UTM tracking codes, all those things would be stuff that typically takes the longest for clients to get to the pushing the buttons part is less it is less time consuming as long as you know what buttons to push in in which order. Um but it really is working out the configuration of who should get what and any other integrations. Like this is a very vanilla setup. Um there's no integrate needed integrations with Hubspot or Shopify or any other crazy stuff. It is just stock uh GA4.

Yeah, yeah, getting that straight is a huge deal. And then how about as far as the UTM codes too? Because we've already been dealing with that with a bunch of clients, as far as you know, the old schema does not work, so you do need to retool that whole process, right? So the it's not that it doesn't work, you the source and medium codes are the two most critical ones. Uh and there's only three UTM codes that are shown in the interface, which is kind of obnoxious, uh, and which is available in the API.

If you look in Data Studio, um, if we look at the you know, sort of what's available, uh you have source, you have medium, you have campaign, but um other stuff like keyword and stuff which used to be in the older GAs is no longer here. So your three the three UTM codes that are available in the API for tracking are source medium and campaign. So your name and convention has to conform to those, and then for you'll when we talked about the sort of session default channel grouping in uh let's resize this to uh just do it evenly. So you have session default channel grouping, in order for traffic to be to be correctly classified, you have to use Google's approved list of mediums, uh, which is really what governs that so you can't just kind of wing it. So, like you, for example, I've seen people do stuff like you know um banner ad as the source and uh Facebook as the medium, and Google will not uh uh put that in uh in a a channel grouping because it it it should be uh you know Facebook and then either social or paid social uh as you mean and you couldn't maybe name the campaign you know Facebook banner, but it there's a lot more uh rigor around what you do with source medium codes now.

And so what happens if those are wrong? It's still in the data set, but it just doesn't show up in the interface at all, or is it actually get ignored? It shows up, um, but it won't show up in the right channel grouping. It's like if you're using channel groupings in the built-in attribution report and you don't have the good governance, the that report will be wrong. Uh yeah, it doesn't have the data.

So what's what's next steps for for you, John? Now that your website is is all uh tagged up properly things, it's all clean and shiny. Well, obviously, the email thing is the next big step that we need to do. I gotta get uh switch those over to Gravity Forms and actually send some email too, because that's been dragging as we've gone through this vendor process. But uh yeah, that that's top of the list to get cleaned up.

All right. Um, if you've got uh any questions about the stuff that we did uh in this this very rapid walkthrough, because we didn't actually sit down and explain in detail a lot of the different settings. I suppose at some point we probably should. Uh but if you've got questions and you didn't ask them in time, go to trustinsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. And if you just want somebody to do it for ya, then go to the contact page on the site.

Any final parting thoughts? No, just you know, you've got the clock is ticking. You have about 14 months. So and a big thing too is you know, this announcement's now so that you can have it on. At least get it turned on so you're gathering data so that come June 2023 you have a year's worth of history, because otherwise you're not going to have history, right?

Because the history that you can't do any cross compare back to GA3. Nope, you cannot. I would bet that some enterprising person will probably figure out a way to make a connector to do data import, but don't bank on it. Um, that's only gonna last for like three years. That's a that's a finite uh that has a fuse, that product.

So exactly. Exactly. So all right, well, in that case, let's head on out of here and we'll talk to you all next week. Take care. Thanks for watching today.

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