You Ask, I Answer: Google Analytics 4 and Triggers for Unwanted Items?

In today's episode, Marcio asks, how do you create a trigger in Google Analytics 4 where you don't want to track something like a login page? When people visit a login page, you don't want to track uh those things. The short answer to this is that if there's an event that is trackable of some kind, then you can simply configure within a tag manager to say don't fire the Google Analytics 4 tags when this these conditions occur. One of the big changes between Universal Analytics or Google Analytics 3 and Google Analytics 4 is that Google Analytics 4 is highly reliant on Google Tag Manager for its the majority of its configuration. So if you have a login page, and that login page creates an event that is visible inside the data layer, which is the uh metadata that it is created anytime you're visiting a page.

There's a number of Chrome plugins like Data Slayer that you can uh see what's in the data layer. The way I explain it a lot is it's like a piece of plexiglass you put over a page and then you write notes and stuff on the plexiglass. It doesn't, you you know you can't see it on the page, but there's extra notes there. So when somebody, for example, clicks on a login button, that button can have a JavaScript attached to it, and the JavaScript can say, Hey, somebody click this login button. And when that happens, there's now a trackable event in Google Tag Manager, and Google Tag Manager can then be set up to have a trigger looking for that event, and that trigger can then be mod added to the tag.

So you have a Google Analytics for event tag, like page views, and you would say, as an exception, don't fire this page view tag anytime you see this login page trigger, right? Those triggers can be configured again with any trackable activity. Now, there's some events and activities where you can you don't need those extra pieces of code like the JavaScripts on the page if it's something that's pretty straightforward that Google Tag Manager can already see. So let's say you have a page, like Christopherspen.com/slash login, and there's a form on that page. You can say a trigger that looks for a form submission, which is built into Tag Manager on the login page.

That would be your trigger. When when someone is on the login page and fills out this form, raise your hand, tag manager. Raise your hand, that's what the triggers do. And then on your tags, you would say Google Tag Manager is looking for pages to tell Google Analytics for someone's visiting, and up here comes somebody, and it looks and says, Huh, there's a trigger here that says login page trigger. And then in that tag configuration, you say, Don't track this if that login page trigger goes off.

So the things that are built in to tag manager are things like click URLs. If somebody clicks on a certain link by name, uh fills out a form, visits a page, visits a portion of a page, clicks on some kind of thing that is detectable. And even you can even be restricted down to to say, Oh, I want it to be uh a click only in with this certain ID if you've got IDs embedded into your your web content. So it's very flexible outside the box. And then for anything else where maybe you've built your own custom CRM, which uh we've had uh clients do, those are cases where you would want that JavaScript creating a custom event and tag manager would listen for that custom event when he hears it triggers, raises its hand, and then tells Google Analytics 4, don't track this.

So that's the easiest way to not track something in Google Analytics 4 using Google Tag Manager. And the debate is this: if you tell tag manager, don't track this, Google Analytics 4 will not have that data. As opposed to saying, I want to see everything that everybody's doing all the time on a website, but I want to create a custom dimension that tells me if a user is logged in. And then I can on my on the reporting side, I can exclude any session that has that that custom dimension set. So you're not losing any data.

So that if, for example, marketing wasn't the only group of people that was using Google Analytics, maybe a customer service was as well. And customer service is like, hey, we want to know when people are logging in as a user. We want to see how many people that is, you know what kind of volume is. If that's the case, then you're gonna want to create a different approach, and that different approach is same general thing, right? You have that your your trigger that says someone's logged in, but now you you would modify your Google Analytics for tag to say when this uh page you fires and we have that logged in user event send a custom dimension uh event to Google Analytics for and record that so that you know that the person is logged in that's the more data complete way to handle uh this particular situation my personal opinion uh is that I would go the data complete route so that you're getting an accurate you know views page use and stuff um for everything and then exclude it on the reporting side rather than willfully excluding the data up front because again you may have multiple departments in your company where uh people need information that marketing isn't just marketing's and frankly sometimes you just want to see what people are doing right and so having that information uh still be available but uh appended with the correct custom dimensions or metrics would that to me is the better way to go so really good question uh it's a relatively straightforward setup you've just got to be handy with Google Tag Manager because again with Google Analytics 4 that is the preferred way the strongly recommended way to do any kind of configuration for Google Analytics 4.

Thanks for asking