So What? Pivoting Your Agency & Clients to Google Analytics 4

Well, hello everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. This week, we are answering your questions about pivoting your agency and clients to Google Analytics 4.

Um, we want to talk through what the deadline means. You know, we've been talking about Google Analytics 4, you know, week after week because it's actually really important. So we want to just dig into some specific questions. Um I know I've started to see, and I think John, you pointed this out too, is I've started to see wizards and you know transition tools and things that are meant to make transitioning from Google Analytics 3 to Google Analytics 4 easy. I think there's even, you know, some sort of you know, a wizard tool in Google Analytics.

Is it really that easy? Are these tools gonna make more of a mess of things, or are these tools really gonna help people? It depends. The the answer to that depends on the complexity of the install. So like marketing over coffee, for example, there's one goal, right?

Exactly. The um the conversion to a GA4 count is pretty simple. Uh, even the official conversion tool from Google, I have issues with because it goes against their best practices. The best practice is that you do your configuration and tag manager, you use GA for analysis, and you do your reporting and data studio. And what's inside of GA4 for some organizations is a scaled down version of tag manager for people who just want to force GA4 to do everything.

It's not a best practice. It's it's more, I think it's more difficult to use. Um, and it causes, I think, more governance issues. But if you want a one-button solution, if your goals are simple enough, it will attempt to migrate them. It will, and there's a bunch of warnings on it.

Like this is going to try to migrate everything in this view. So if there's stuff that's turned off, there's stuff that you don't want to bring over, but there's stuff that doesn't work, it's going to try and bring those things over too. And there's obviously the possibility of duplicate goals, uh, goals that don't work correctly and stuff. I would be very, very hesitant to use that for anything except the simplest of implementations. You know, like my martial arts teacher school.

There's two goals. Call us and email us, right? That's it. For marketing over coffee. We have one goal, which is contact us, and honestly, we don't even want people to do that sometimes.

Really selling it. Yeah, well, the good news too is like if it gets screwed up along the way, you've got Google's call-in lines and customer support that's world famous that I'm sure will walk you through and fix any problems that you'll have. So that's that's the biggest red flag to me is like, yeah, it's great if it works, but if it goes wrong, you're totally on your own. So I think the consensus is be wary of tools and wizards and widgets that tell you that transitioning from universal analytics to GA4 is simple click of a button. Yep.

It is it is moving is simple, but not easy, is the easy is the best way to put it, right? It is straightforward to move from one to the other as long as you follow all the best practices. It doesn't mean it's easy. If you've got a huge tag manager instance, if you've got you know all 20 goal slots filled in Google Analytics, and you've got different kinds of goals. The other hesitation I have with that is so with that's a platform answer, right?

You push this button, run the software, and your problems are solved. You still haven't fixed any of the people or process problems, right? So you still have not addressed any of your governance issues, you still have not taken the opportunity to reboot your analytics, and especially for agencies, you haven't fixed the people problem. And the people problem is the biggest problem of all. You know, Katie, when you and I worked in an agency, we designed an entire multi-course uh training program for employees around analytics.

We it was like a two-month course that employees could take. Uh, and even after employees went through it, it they they were better off certainly than they were before, but it was they still had to lean more heavily on our team for for you know the complex questions. None of this stuff addresses the fact that using Google Analytics 4 is a people problem. Teaching people how to use teaching people how to change their work habits um and getting people skilled up. I mean, that's that to me as for agency seems like the biggest stumbling block.

What do you think? I would agree with that. Um we know that so far Google has not released any good documentation on how to use Google Analytics for. But we also know that it's very different from Universal Analytics. Um these agencies, these companies are relying on their teams to get skilled up on their own.

And you know, I know the basics of tag manager, I can kind of figure my way around, but to set up more complex goals to set up a whole, you know, marketing funnel worth of goals to, you know, make sure that I'm, you know, we were talking with a client earlier about setting up tags that make sure you're not showing ads to people who are actually customers versus not customers. That's the kind of thing that I would be nervous about trying to set up if I didn't really understand it. But those are the expectations of a lot of companies of don't show ads to current customers. Just make that happen. Go ahead, make that happen.

And the way to do that is through, you know, proper tagging on tag manager and setting up the correct goals. And that to me, you're absolutely right, is it's scary because if you don't have people who understand how to do those things correctly, it could go very wrong. The other thing I think is important to and in, you know, uh, we one of some of the questions have been like, well, how do we how do we get started with this? Uh, really is understanding what you as the agency need the data for, like what decisions you use to inform that. So again, we were, you know, we were going through a clock with a client earlier today, and you know, their focus was solely around ads.

Like we are running ads, and we need to see our ad performance. Like, okay, that makes it pretty straightforward to understand like what's in GA4 that's impacted by the ads you're running, uh, and where do you need to go to get that information? And that to me is I think an even bigger stumbling block than just the configuration of migration is the moment you have your account coordinator or your account manager sign into a client's GA4. Do they know what to do to get the information they need for their reporting? Right?

Do you know how, for example, content doesn't exist um in GA4? That uh that menu item for GA3 is gone. You have to go to page and and screen class name, right? Um, in in the acquisition and it's it's the engagement menu uh for that. So do you know do they know how to do that?

Do they know how to use the Explore Hub to assemble the the right pieces of data they need? Or I think the better idea is for a lot of agencies are your people skilled up enough on data studio that they can sign into GA4 and assemble the reports that they need. Because a lot of the time for agencies, you're not creating custom ad hoc analyses all the time, you are literally just handing a template every single month. Here's this month's numbers, and it's a lot easier if you get people skilled up on data studio and just have them generate the dashboard. Here's your client numbers for this month.

Yeah. Um, on the agency side, then that's interesting. I hadn't thought about it, but it seems like it would make sense to have one person that's a subject matter expert on data studio. Like that would be great if you then have the data studio person verifying that all the GA4 people spread over all the accounts are actually setting things up right because you should hopefully be able to copy and paste the reports. It's absolutely true because and and this is you know, I I suppose just a state of commentary on the industry.

Agencies don't do a lot of analysis, right? They do a lot of reporting, they do a lot of copy paste, screenshot, PowerPoint, etc. You know, here's your live dashboard. Nobody ever sits down. Well, not nobody, very few people sit down and say, why did this happen?

And when you listen to you know, calls with uh from agency team members with their clients, a lot of the time the client will ask why does this happen? Like, we'll find out. And then you know, that's that's you know, so they're not doing ad hoc analysis live. So to that point, getting somebody really proficient at Data Studio would definitely be a huge boon for any agency to be able to say, Yeah, we can crank out client dashboards, we can build dashboards that are intended for you know limited ad hoc analysis, and then it reduces the reporting burden on the team because it's like, yeah, here's the you can either look at the dashboard client anytime you want, uh, or we will just take a screenshot of every every month and and copy and paste it into a PowerPoint for you. Either way, the client gets what they want.

But they agencies tend not to do analysis. I agree that having a data studio person would be helpful, but it doesn't it doesn't take away the need for that person to understand the data and how it's collected in Google Analytics. Like that you it's like I can be a really good Excel person, but if I don't understand the data that I'm putting together, maybe I'm just putting together, you know, charts and graphs that look really cool, but I don't necessarily understand the data behind it. And I think, you know, what we what we talked about last week was the different definitions of the metrics between the two systems. So it doesn't remove the need for people to understand how that piece works.

Just because they're really good, like Chris, you're really fast at putting together data data studio dashboards, but if you didn't understand the underlying data, that would be completely irrelevant. And that's where yes, a lot of the configuration work uh is going to be important to make sure your conversions are set up properly and and so on and so forth. So there it definitely is that level of skill needed. Also understanding the limitations of the new system. Like if you don't do the big query integration, you will be constrained to have a maximum of 14 months of data to be able to do breakdowns, right?

You can get aggregated data uh as far back as you want, but 14 months will be the essentially the limit of how deep you can dig. Uh it's basically enough to do year over year for a one-year period of time. Obviously, if you are a company that needs to do multi-year year over year stuff, which a lot of companies are, um, you're going to need to do the big query integration. And that's again one of those things that from a configuration perspective. I know one of the folks was asking, uh, you know, what is some of the um key things that people would don't know?

That's one of them. Like you've got to get that implementation in place. And that is something that I would be very hesitant to ask an agency to do that on my behalf, right? Because you're now into like big IT. You're talking about cloud computing environments and stuff like that.

And so agencies will need to have somebody on team, not who specializes in that, but who knows the right questions to ask. Um, and can liaison with a client's IT team and not just the marketing team. Yeah, I think that that's definitely something that's going to be overlooked a lot because one of the questions that we are getting asked a lot is, you know, when I move to Google Analytics 4 and I lose access to universal analytics, how much historical data should I be keeping? How, you know, Google right now is saying you can access that data for six months, but after that, unless you've exported it, it's gone. You can't get to it.

So that's one of the common questions is how much historical data should I be keeping? And what the heck do I do with it? It depends on what you're going to use it for. And that's really where the user stories and the inventory come in handy. When you, if you know what data you need from the past, you know how to query it.

And then, yeah, you got to go extract it. So for uh Trust Insights for myself for marketing over coffee, one of the things I'm looking at is writing a piece of software that will extract essentially hour minute day, uh, hour minute second level data, source medium, user session, um, and you know you know, source medium campaign, user uh session uh page view. So the major dimensions to go back and be able to do traffic analysis. Um, because I have 15 years of data to extract. It's gonna take a little while to do this.

Um, but that's the information that I would want. Oh, and it has to be page level. So even if we're a relatively small site like mine, this is probably gonna be a 30-day project to extract 15 years of data at that level of granularity and store it. My plan is to store it inside of uh either a big query database or just a standard SQL table. Because I can always go back and query it that way pretty easily.

Um for other companies, I it it's gonna depend on what their environments support and and also are you actually going to use that data? Um that's the other thing is or you're gonna be like hoarding it like this is creative data that just sits in the closet and nobody ever looks at. Well, that goes, you know, way, way back to earlier episodes of this show of dark data. And so why are you collecting it if you have no plan to look at it? And so John, I'm gonna pick on you for a second because it's fun, but it's also easy.

Um, you know, so but that's a really good example of so you know, you've mentioned the the marketing over coffee website, relatively small site, mostly just to house the podcast, which is really the asset. You know, I would imagine that you don't necessarily need, you know, 10 years of historical data for marketing over coffee from the website itself, from the podcast, yes, but from the website, probably not. But as Chris is describing, it sounds like the longer history you have, the longer the project could be, and it could be just a waste of time. Like what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, that comes back.

That's more, you know, in line with the traction analysis that we do. It's just that I know that you know the website is not in the top five marketing programs for the podcast. You know, that we don't dump enough assets and effort into the website, and the website just doesn't generate the traffic. You know, people find the podcast in other places and they subscribe and download from other places. So yeah, there's there's really no upside to me adding to the data junk drawer and you know, exporting a bunch of GA data.

Um we would just pass on that. I I think one thing that's critical with this is the the big deal of we've been given this 12-month window, so you need to be turning it on now so that a year from now you have GA4 data. Like the worst case you run into is you forget to turn it on, and a year from now you're trying to compare GA3 to G A4 because you don't have any GA4 data. So, yeah, as far as we're concerned, you know, Chris has got GA4 flipped on, so I'm that that's pretty much the end of it for me. Because once GA3 shuts off, there'll be some history in GA4 if I ever do need to go back.

And yeah, literally by then we'll be a year into it, and I won't have to worry about it. So another question um that we got was how do we make leadership not only just aware, but how do we impress upon them the importance of going through these activities, prioritizing these projects? So again, Chris, you're just describing this, you know, data extraction project, which depending on how big the company is, could take 30 days or more and requires a skill set to go along with it. Again, it's not just a here's the easy button, extract all the data and boom, magic, it's done. It does definitely does not work that way.

I wish it did, but it doesn't. Um, you know, so how do you have that conversation with leadership to impress upon them the importance of prioritizing this work now? Again, that goes back to user stories. If leadership never sees any of this data, then you're gonna have a really hard time convincing them because they're like, I don't see what this has to do with anything. If on the other hand you can say, hey, you know that quarterly bonus that you want from the board?

It's relying on this data. This data is going away, unless we do something about it. Would you continue to like to get your bonus? If the answer is no, that's fine. But I would imagine most people would be like, I would like to continue getting my bonus, or I'd like to continue to be able to show that I should still have a job here.

So yes, let's please go ahead and do that. It is, I know it sounds so cynical, but if you could figure out how to make it all about the person, um, there's a better than even chance that they're gonna sign off on it and say, like, yeah, your bonus is dependent on this data. Um, you know, so that that that house in the Hamptons you're trying to buy is directly dependent on this data. If you don't have it, you can't prove that you should still have a job here. Um, you know, Mr.

CMO. That's usually pretty motivating. I don't see why that's cynical, though. That's just human nature. People need to be able to do that.

Because we'd like to think that we are more uh I guess lofty in our goals than than that. But most people would would like to think that about themselves. Yeah, the that's a hard pass. That's that's not true. They're not coin-driven.

Yeah. No, and and it doesn't have to be money. The one of the core successes of change management is needing people where they are. And so, you know, sitting on top of the mountain and just decreeing, we're gonna move to Google Analytics for everybody, their first question is gonna be why and how does this affect me? And so, in order to set people up for success, you, as the driving force behind this, need to meet people where they are and say, Hey, Chris, this is how it's gonna affect you.

Good, bad, whatever. John, this is how it's going to affect you. And give people the option to play a part, to play a role, to get invested in this. And that's how you start to see success is, you know, if I come to you, Chris, and I say, okay, we're gonna move to Google Analytics 4, and you knew nothing about it, your first question would probably be like, Why? What's in it for me?

What do I what do I need to do? And that those are natural questions. So yes, it's not a cynical thing. It's part of the change management process to help people understand how the team as a whole will be impacted, but then how the individuals will be impacted. And that's why a lot of change management projects don't go well because it's the people that are forgotten about.

It's we're just gonna do this. Don't ask me to questions like we're just gonna do it. And you can't get people on board, you can't get that support. I was watching the World of Warcraft um new expansion announcement yesterday. And one of the things that the the developers were asked was, you know, when are we getting player housing?

And the developer says something very i interesting. He said, It's one of those features that people always want, but the development time on it is so much that we always ask players, what are you willing to give up in exchange for it? Are you willing to not have another expansion for two years to get this feature? And people generally say, No. When you look at Google Analytics 4 or any major IT project, one of the things that you have to say uh and be prepared to answer as an agency, uh, is to say, okay, well, what are you prepared to give up?

Because if as your agency we're gonna spend 20 hours this month, you know, setting this thing up for you, those are 20 hours we either can't spend somewhere else, or you have to pay for an existing an additional 20 hours to cover that work that otherwise was not budgeted for. So I think for agencies, a big part has to be what is the opportunity cost of doing this, right? And then the I think the pickle agencies will run into is with clients to say, hey, we need this data. And the client says we don't see the value in this data. And when the agency says, well, then we can't report on it, and the client says, That's not our problem.

You need to fix it at your cost. Um, we're, you know, we're not gonna do it for you because we have other priorities. And I think that's a very sticky situation to navigate. It is. And I don't have a good answer for that one.

Um, you know, it's you know, as Chris is you always say, it depends. It depends on your relationship with the client. It depends on the skill set of your team, it depends on where we are in the calendar. Like if we're having this conversation today, we can start taking slower steps to get there. If we're having this conversation a year from today, we can't take as slow steps.

And the cost is gonna go up because the urgency, the dedication, dedicated time, the skill sets, all those other things. And so there's gonna be a lot that goes into having those conversations, is not as simple as saying, okay, Google made this announcement, so you have to pay for us to do that. It's definitely not that simple. And I think that's one of the questions too that you know, like you said, it depends. If the client in question is a strategic client and you're earning, you know, 20, 30, 40,000, $50,000 a month for them, you might just say, Yeah, you know what, we're gonna eat the cost on it.

Um, because we want our reporting to continue to make us look good so that we don't lose our our uh our contract. On the other hand, if the client you know is paying $500 a month, you're like, you know what? Then fine, you don't make the transition, then you get no reporting. Um, you know, insert additional coins to continue. So I think I think there's from an agency strategy perspective too, you have to prioritize which clients will be most impacted and which clients um are strategic investments that you're willing to eat the cost on it.

I feel like it's gonna be a different podcast episode or a different uh live stream, but I feel like the announcement by Google is definitely gonna create some inequities between the size of companies. So small businesses having the resources and the budget to make this transition, to have the time when they're not wearing all 10 hats to scale up to do this thing. So I think that is that's a different conversation because we could go down a rabbit hole there. But I do think that it's gonna create a lot of challenges the smaller the company in order to get up to speed where everybody else is. Exactly.

And I think one of the knock on effects of that that we have to be prepared for as an agency ourselves and dealing with uh clients, is with those complications, you may have folks who choose not to make the investment. And as a result, the importance of data-driven marketing for those organizations will decline uh because they won't have the data. So they're they will say, we're just gonna go back to winging it uh and hope it works out for the best. Um I think that's a there's a legitimate risk. So again, as you evaluate your client base, looking at them and saying, who assume you have the capability to migrate a client from three to four.

Who would benefit from that migration even if you do it at cost, even if you don't make money on it? Um, because in the long term, you think that that client is a potential growth client, right? You know, they may be paying $2,000 a month now, but you see a way forward where that client could be making $20,000. You're paying $20,000 a month in two years. If you do that work for them, uh, if you invest in them, then you may be helping nurture that that that client along.

Other clients, you're looking at them go, this is a dead end, right? Or we want this client to go away. So let's let's just uh say, all right, off goodbye. It's unfortunate too, though, that there's really no upsell from Google. You know, I mean, this is they're losing some technical debt, and it's basically a transition.

I mean, it would have been much better if we could at least say, hey, here's five things you can't even do in the old you know version that you're going to have access to if there was some kind of happy meal package that people could see on the horizon. But really, it's been they have that. Well, what kind of stuff? I mean, you do the one big thing is gathering all hit level data, right? I mean, that's a huge ton of data.

But uh, well, so the a better question that is what like what are the three biggest um improvements that you'd see then out of making this transition? So the three things that you will that are definite improvements to the reasons to upgrade to GA4. Number one, if you if you do any kind of Google ads, the accuracy of reporting between the two systems will be finally on par because the ad system is all event based. And up until now, Google Analytics has been kind of all over the place. And now it too in GA4 is event based.

So your ad accuracy gets better. Second, the machine learning built in to do things like anomaly detection and insights is I think huge for especially the smaller businesses where you don't have a full-time analyst on staff, where the software just raises its hands and says, Hey, your conversions are going down, you know, do something about it. Uh, I I think that part is really important. And three, this is the big one, and the one that people love to talk about um the cookie list future and all that stuff. Google is going to be providing inferred things like inferred conversion data.

Because you know that 30, 40, maybe 50% of your data is going to go away because of things like consent forms and privacy and stuff. Google's machine learning on the back end is going to guess essentially, based on all your data, how many conversions you actually got to try and get to a realistic number uh in the software uh to deal with that cookie list future. And that's something that no other company, no other analytics company can do because Google owns search and Gmail and YouTube and Chrome and Android and all these things that give you them a digital footprint that nobody else has, they can infer you in your traffic and say, yeah, we think this is actually what probably happened. Even when privacy signals are, you know, privacy tracking is turned all the way up. If somebody is, you know, sort of tracing around these activities, and you see there's a black hole in the middle, but you can see the border of it, you can guess, okay, there was a conversion in there based on what Google's data has.

So those would be the big three reasons why you you should be using GA4. The fourth would be um the new data-driven attribution model, which we talked about in last week's episode. Uh, I think there's a lot of value in that, um, as long as it's properly explained to people. Here's the funny part though, that yeah, I think this reflects uh on Google, John. You didn't hear about any of this.

Like this was in the documentation, this was in the release notes. You know, and this was actually in the the presentation they gave at Google I.O. and their Google Marketing Platform conference last year. Nobody heard it. Always a good idea like that.

Any recommendations on setting up a master analytics account for very silo business. So the architecture of GA4 is different from a processing perspective underneath. But here's what's sort of similar. So in the old version of GA, what you would do is you'd have a master property, and then you have all these different views. In the new version, what you would want to do is provision a uh a again, a master property.

And then you can have more than one data stream uh feeding into the uh the property. So you can have a data stream, not just for one website, but two, three, five, ten different websites. So for like some of our clients where we have, they have 10 different websites. Each website will have its own data stream, and that can still flow into one property. And because of things like the page location variable within Google Analytics, you don't have to, you know, say put the domain name on.

Um, it will it it can do that uh behind the scenes. And so that would be my recommendation is having that property and then having the multiple data streams flowing into it with it with the appropriate modifications. You will still want to keep it separate from a property focusing on one specific website because um uh again, you're limited to 30 conversion events. So you would have your most important conversion events in your roll up, uh, and then you could have more granular ones in the individual web property itself. You get all that?

Oh yeah, all over it. Um the questions uh that we get, and I I can guess the answer to this already, is um many of the many of our clients are looking for uh a base level setup or shortcuts. Uh do those exist. Yes, no, big no. All right, moving on.

It is like you have to walk to China. Well, yeah, there's no shortcuts. You've got to walk. Yeah, there's there's no it's like, is there a shortcut to learning how to use a frying pan? You know, if you've only ever made soup.

Well, no. I mean you have to learn what you're doing with the thing. You know, read read the manual. It's like any new thing. You gotta read the manual.

And in the beginning, and again, we're we will beat this to death. There is no substitute for doing those user stories and and doing your inventories and figuring out how you use the software today and what you need it to do tomorrow, and then translating between the two. That's part of the I think the the people and the process part of the migration is somebody has to be able to translate to say, like, for example, source medium and GA3 is session source medium and GA4, uh, and knowing when to use which of the variables, and that only comes through you know, training uh and through through experience. Um, and just as a refresher, we keep mentioning user stories. So a user story is a statement, it's as a persona, I want to sew that.

So the persona is the audience, and so it could be you know, as you know, as John Wall, the owner and operator of marketing over coffee. I want to, the want to is the action. I want to understand the historic website traffic to my website so that I can decide whether or not I need to do more with my website or not. And so the so that should always be some kind of a measurable outcome or an action. And so what Chris is saying is these user stories are going to help you prioritize what you need in Google Analytics 4 versus what you had historically in Google Analytics 3.

Use this time as an opportunity to reset the strategy, the expectations, the tactics, the data that you're collecting, and these user stories become the foundation of your business requirements because you can write as many as you need to, and you can you know have every single person in your organization who might be affected by the data change create one of these, and that's where in change management you're starting to address the individual needs because then you understand the perspective of a Chris or Katie or a John because we're all gonna look at the same data three different ways, even if we are we work together every single day, you know, we're always aligned on decisions, we're always gonna have a different perspective on what we need from the data. So this use this simple statement to figure out the audience, the action, and the outcome. Exactly. The other thing that I think, you know, this is something that again, we did a lot uh when we ran a team uh at an agency, and it is one of the simplest things to do. A, as an agency, you should be running Google Analytics 4 on your agency's website.

Right. And if you're not make that the number one thing that you do this week. Number two, for all of your staff that are on staff, make sure that they anybody who's client-facing that would need to use Google Analytics has access to the agency's GA4 account. Make sure they have full access so they can see everything. If you don't trust somebody with it, then they probably shouldn't be working at your agency because you have deeper issues.

Um, then you know, if you can't trust somebody to look to that, look at your web analytics, you know, you got an issue uh with that person. And then every week in your staff meetings, assign one person, a different person every week to look at one aspect of GA4 and do a five or 10-minute lunch and learn or whatever at the staff meeting, explain okay, here's what we see in this report, what it tells us, and what if this was a client, what we should do. So in this case, I'm looking at the acquisition overview report, and I see there's two options there's user acquisition and traffic acquisition. So in a 10-minute lunch and learn, I would say user acquisition is all about first touch to understand how we acquired a new user to our website and traffic is what happened in any given time in our our um our traffic. And we see here uh that email is our uh our highest traffic acquisition channel.

Uh and that means that you know, if we're doing a lot with with organic search, uh, we're not seeing the benefit. So our our takeaway from this luncheon loom would be we need to figure out what else to do with organic search to make it work uh for us better. Five to ten minutes a week, getting every person in your agency who is customer facing to do one feature in Google Analytics uh in Google Analytics 4. We'll get everybody using it and we'll get everybody um sharing information about different ways to use the application. And if people are just like, I don't know what to do.

That's well, you could try this other part of Google called Google uh and Google it and see what tutorials you can find. Well, and it's also going to bring up questions that you may not have thought of. Again, that goes back to the user stories of don't just assume you know how other people are going to be using the system. Um, even just yesterday, Chris, we were working through some dashboards, and we were both coming up with just different kinds of questions about the exact same data because we were just thinking about it in two different ways. Um, and so now we have you know a final very important question, and John, this one is for you.

Was that Steve Austin, the six million dollar man on your off Zoom photo? Absolutely. In fact, actually, we can show in the background here. Yeah, there's Steve and Oscar. They you normally can't see them, they're hiding behind me through the whole entire show.

So, yeah, that's my uh 70s upbringing there using technology to solve problems. That's why I'm here today, because of Steve. So I I have no idea why the hell that's my photo, though. You know, that's the other thing that's ridiculous. I'm supposed to be logged in on the Trust Insights account, but I think I came up in my personal browser.

But I yeah I still have no idea where the hell Steve came from. That's okay. My off-camera photo is John Wall. Why isn't it Steve? Like I how the hell does that know why it's you either yeah that makes no sense at all you want you I want me nobody wants Steve.

I think this is a good place to call it Chris. Well I was going to add one more thing on a on a slightly more serious note. If you are an agency manager you need to be inventorying your team skills asking people what do you know how to do have you even use Google Analytics for and then Katie what is a professional development plan look like with you know you've got your results back and and Timmy knows nothing about Google Analytics and Sharon is intermediate and Letitia is as expert and Bob's just going to get fired next month anyway so you don't have to worry about Bob. What do you do then once you know what the where people's skill levels are and how and how do you fairly inventory their skill levels um that's a you know complicated question to end the show on. So uh as simple as I can I think the first thing is you know everybody could use a refresher course on tag manager.

We know that tag manager plays an integral part in the setup of Google Analytics. So I would start there. That's probably the most fair is you know is everybody up to date on their tag manager certification? If not, great, go ahead and start there. You know, it's not a bad idea to get recertified in universal analytics either, because a lot of a lot of how you use universal analytics is still relevant in GA4.

And so everything you know isn't suddenly going away. So I would start there with the Google Analytics Academy, uh, the Google Academy, just to make sure everyone is at least on the same page with what currently exists, and then you can go from there. And so, you know, it it's gonna come down to who has time, who has aptitude, who has motivation. And so you don't necessarily have to get everybody to the same skill level. You may decide that um, you know, Sharon, who's the expert in what currently exists, maybe she also wants to take on being the expert in the new infrastructure, you know, so you can find those moments to give people the opportunity to really, you know, stand up and stand out.

Um, but yeah, that's that's a bit of a complicated question, which may be a whole different episode. But I would start with getting everyone re-certified on the existing platforms. Okay. And I would say also, again, the sooner people are using it, the better. Uh if your your agency, this is something that uh again, I think is important.

Your agency should be the guinea pig for for your staff to train on. So that they're not doing it live on a client's production account. Um they can stumble across all those questions that you know Katie highlighted. Yeah, they know the things people are gonna want to know how to do. And honestly, agencies, us included, don't spend enough time on their own marketing anyway.

So it's uh it's a three-way win uh for you to be using GA4 on your own agency stuff and your team and getting people to ask questions and figure out how the thing works. I would agree with that. And you know, don't forget about the people. There's going to be a lot of people who are impacted by this change. So include them.

Ask them questions. How to how do you use it? Use it as an opportunity to start those conversations. You know, and so if even if it's the business units or different websites that are all siloed, the people don't have to be siloed. Exactly.

Stay tuned in the next month or so. Uh Trust Insights, we're working on our own Google Analytics for course. Um we have got five of like 30 lessons done and recorded, so we we have a ways to go. Uh, but it in the next month or two, we should have uh some information about that. But any final parting words before you roll out this week.

Just have Trust Insights do it. Don't even bother, just call us. We'll take care of it. Switch all the time. No problems go away, they go away.

All right, folks. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it.

For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast and our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.