You Ask, I Answer: Google Analytics 4 and Lead Scoring?

In today's episode, Marcio asks, can you connect data from Google Analytics 4 into a lead scoring model via marketing automation? Well, the answer to this question depends on what marketing automation software you're using and whether or not it integrates with Google Analytics 4 or not. Google Analytics 4 is essentially Firebase. So if you've got a marketing automation system that in the past has integrated with Firebase, uh chances are it's going to integrate just fine with Google Analytics 4. If you've had a marketing automation system that's integrated with the previous version of Google Analytics, Google Analytics 3 or Universal Analytics, then I would check with the vendor and ask, hey, is this something that's going to be supported?

Are you going to offer support for Google Analytics 4? If the answer is yes, then hopefully you'll get the integration sooner rather than later, since there is a deadline of July 1st, 2023 for everybody to move to Google Analytics 4. And hopefully uh this vendor will do so sooner rather than later. If you would like to get started doing this today, then check your um marketing automation systems uh back end and its APIs to see if it can talk to a Google BigQuery database. So one of the features in Google Analytics 4 that is pretty killer is the ability for the software to write its raw data to a BigQuery database.

Now, BigQuery is one of Google's cloud database systems. It is not free. Uh, there is a cost to use it. It's pay as you go. And for small websites, you know, 10, 15,000, 15, 20,000 visitors a month, you're gonna spend maybe like a dollar, two dollars, maybe five dollars a month on uh storage and usage.

If you've got a site where you're talking millions of visitors uh a month, the costs are gonna rack up faster. But what BigQuery allows you to do is see all of your raw, unedited, unchanged Google Analytics data in a big, really big table. Um, and so if your marketing automation system is able to ingest data from BigQuery, then there's a very good chance that you'll be able to bond the two together. So you will tell Google Analytics for yes, write my data to this BigQuery database, and then you'll tell your marketing automation software, connect to that BigQuery database and pull the data out into um your marketing automation software. One of the pieces that you're going to need to do is turn on and link up user ID.

So in your marketing automation software, you will have your prospect IDs, your lead IDs, and you will need to connect that to Google Analytics 4 to say, okay, here's where we're getting these identifiable IDs so that that data makes it into BigQuery. That way you can match up known identified leads from your marketing automation software with their activities in Google Analytics 4 and bond that together by those tables. So it's not a super easy, you know, one button and you're done kind of thing, but it is possible to do today as long as your system supports it. Check with your vendor. There's a obviously very good chance that the major marketing automation software packages either already do support Google Analytics 4 integration or uh are going to be announcing support for it relatively soon, ever since Google's big announcement.

Um, and they obviously don't want to be left behind. With a lot of what um existing packages do on the market today, they will look for Google Analytics tracking codes, the UTM tracking codes, and bring those directly into the marketing automation software. Uh, for example, Marketo does this, HubSpot does this, Pardot does this, where those UTM tracking codes can go in. So if you're sending out at least campaign-based stuff like uh emails or tagged social posts and stuff, you'll have those UTM tracking codes embedded directly into your marketing automation software. And UTM tracking codes function the same mostly between Google Analytics 3 and Google Analytics 4.

The major difference uh as of right now is that the term and content tags, I believe don't work yet in Google Analytics 4, not as built-in UTM tracking codes. Um, it's source medium and campaign is what's supported in the interface. Now that said, it can Google Analytics 4 can see those uh other codes, but they won't show up in the interface, it's only source medium and campaign. So that's the circuitous answer to this question. It's not one button, but it is possible today, and it will probably be more possible in the near future.

Thanks for asking.