So What? Social Media Advertising and Attribution

Well, hey there everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. Juggle them around.

Um in this in this week's episode, uh, we're covering social media advertising and attribution. So for the past few weeks, um, we've been talking a lot about Google Analytics for and the Google marketing platform and all of the changes um that are gonna be coming and happening and that are already happening. Um and so what we wanted to focus on this week is specifically social media advertising and attribution uh with a little bit of a focus on Google Analytics for, uh, because that's where a lot of people turn to to get their attribution models. If you're looking for those past episodes that we've recently done, you can find them on our YouTube channel at Trust Insights.ai slash YouTube. Um so Chris, social media advertising and attribution, where would you like to start this week?

I sat in this week on uh a friend's private Facebook group. Uh uh they did a training on Google Analytics uh for social media advertisers. And what struck me was these folks are all you know, professionals. They're all mid-career, I would say none of them, you know, like uh are the the stereotypical social media intern or whatever. And they were just so incredibly resistant to using Google Analytics for, period.

Um the the host did a uh a credible job uh covering the bare basics and then said something which made me grind my teeth which was a Google Analytics 4 is basically the same as Google Analytics 3 so you don't need to use it. Like well that big blue banner at the top of Google Analytics for it says your data will stop working on July 1st 2023 kind of is negates that statement. And so before we dig in Katie I want to ask you what can we do from a change management perspective even as individuals like what's stopping you or me from just saying okay from this day forward I'm using GA4. I'm gonna pretend GA3 is not even there anymore. I think the big thing is that historical data and so having that baseline of well what happened?

What have we already done? Um you know I think what and we've talked about this uh in different episodes and podcasts is a lot of companies spend a lot of time only focusing on what happened because it's the only thing that they really understand and know how to do. And so if we suddenly decide to switch gears and move from one system to another then there's a whole learning curve there's no there's no notion of what happened historically. So we're starting net new which in some ways can be really good to have that clean slate but not everybody's comfortable with that. Like we could probably manage with that but we have the benefit of being such a small company that we really know every moving piece at any given moment, whereas a large enterprise sized company, they're still scrambling to figure out what happened at the end of last year, and we're already, you know, halfway through April of the following year.

So, in my opinion, from a change management perspective, that's the big thing holding people back from flipping that switch is it's a whole new skill set, it's a whole new set of data. We know enough to know it's not apples to apples, and so there's a lot of that fear and insecurity involved because there's still a lack of confidence with the data that exists. So, what's going to make this new set of data better? Okay. So the the thing that, like I said, the thing that really struck me was that statement that it's basically the same thing.

And in some ways, that is correct. In some ways, it's not. So let's talk through that. To make Google Analytics 4 work for your social media advertising, um, you're gonna need a couple things. First, you need to have a conversion of some kind set up.

And uh again, if you uh are looking for help with that as a basic, we have an entire 15-minute tutorial on our YouTube channel on how to set up a GA4 goal, right? Uh, with all the different options. So please go watch that because you need to have conversions. If they're not set up, uh you can't do any of this. So that would be uh part, I think part one.

The second thing, and this is not different with GA4. You need to have source medium and and campaign tags on the URLs that you're using, organic social paid social, you name it, anything that's sending traffic to your website, you have to be using UTM tags. Google Analytics 4 has a an entire sort of hierarchy of how it attempts to guess what uh a source, medium and a channel that a um a uh piece of traffic is is coming from but you don't want Google guessing. Google's okay at guessing, and GA4 is actually substantially more sophisticated than uh GA3 in terms of being able to guess and guess moderately well, but at the end of the day, if you have the opportunity to specify these are our sources and mediums, uh that is the way to go. And the thing to do with that is to have some kind of of tracking, you know, a basic spreadsheet that says on Facebook, these are gonna be our Facebook paid URLs, these are gonna be our LinkedIn uh ad URLs.

You name it, whatever the tracking mechanism that you use, there's paid services you can engage, you've got to use those tracking codes. One thing that you know we've done recently, we've started posting our our company newsletter on LinkedIn. And so we've had to make separate tracking codes just for that so that we can differentiate what's our regular email newsletter from what's our our LinkedIn newsletter. And if you do that, then things work really well. If things, if you don't do that, then uh you end up with a lot of mixed up conflated data, and then nobody's happy.

Yeah, I think that that's I mean, that's that's the challenge as well, is that I think that attribution in general, mixed up conflated data, you know, all those things that you were just talking about, that's also a real concern. Exactly. So let's go ahead into Google Analytics 4 and say where would we even find uh this stuff? Well, the first place that you're gonna want to go is you're gonna want to go into your configuration. You're gonna go look at your events, and you're gonna make sure that the events that are important to you are marked as conversions, like our thank you pages, or uh we've gotten new users.

Whatever your your goals are, um, this is where they have to be set. So you want to check the events list first to make sure that you're even getting the correct data, and then you can look at your conversions to see okay, which of these things are conversions? So we have new user, booked a call, uh, any thank you page, first visit, all these things would be the different conversions that we would want to check. If you're doing social media advertising campaigns, uh you're gonna want to have an event name, uh, you know, an event provision for the those ads. So they have to be doing something, right?

They have to be uh purchasing something or filling out a form or booking a call or scheduling a demo, and it's gotta be in here. If it's not in here, you can't go any further. And I'd actually say if you're if you're watching this on replay, pause it and go go fix that. What if what if the goal of the ads is just to drive awareness, just to drive people to your site? Do you still need an event setup?

If it's to drive people to your site, then you can use one of the built-in events like first visit uh or you know, new user as a way to measure that. The other thing I would think I think would be worth doing, and it would require some fancy dancing to do it, but you could create um uh a conversion, particularly for something like um search, where you'd have a new user from search as a as a conversion. Um, that way you could limit the scope of those new users to it. Hey, these are the people who are finding us somehow by searching for us. So, with that, we're gonna assume that you have your conversion.

The next place you're gonna want to go uh to do this attribution is the advertising tab. Now the advertising tab is a bit of a misnomer. It's really the attribution software that's built into GA4. But Google, in its uh attempt to get everyone using Google Ads, has named it as such. And what we see here in the snapshot is, you know, pretty straightforward stuff.

Where we want to spend our time is in conversion paths. So conversion paths, the first thing you would do is you would select the conversion event that you're trying to analyze. In this case, I'm doing form fills for the Trust Insert's website. But we could do any of these other things as long as they are all uh valid conversions. For the time frame, the question you have to figure out for yourself is you know, how you know what it how long does it take somebody to convert?

So, what's your sales cycle typically, or at least what's your your MQL generation cycle if you are uh a B2B company? I've gone back to the beginning of March here, but you can uh stretch that time window, you know, uh as far back as you have data. The first thing we're gonna look at is the conversion models available to you. You have data driven last click, first click, linear position based time decay, uh, and ads preferred last click. This one here, the data-driven is Google's preferred default model.

And Google does a I would say incredibly poor a job of explaining what that model does or how it works, or well, I mean, anything. Um anyone want to hazard a guess as to how this model works? Well, did they they didn't have the data-driven model option in universal analytics? Um, I think the preferred model in universal was time decay, since it most closely mirrored sort of like the human interaction throughout like the different digital channels. Um, you know, the one thing I do know is that the icons uh next to the title usually give away a little bit uh of what the model is supposed to do.

But this one to me looks sort of like a blend between first, last, and time decay. So I'm not really sure. Yeah, is it just statistic relevance? Are they just doing a you know a normal bell curve? No, although you would think so.

Though what they're doing is math. Um a lot of math. The model that it that Google Analytics for uses is something called time to event uh data-driven attribution. And without digging into the mathematics, because nobody wants to watch that for an hour. Um essentially, let's see if we make this a little bit bigger here, zoom in.

This is the way the model works. You have you know things happening over time, and then you get a visit and you and you assign a certain amount of credit to that. And then as time goes by, that loses, that decays, that credit starts to decay. Then another uh thing happens in that campaign, and then we get some more credit, and so on and so forth. And so, what they're they start doing is with all the different sources and mediums, all the different channels in play, um, they're building this really, really, really large machine learning model that says how much um of this conversion can be attributed to activity over time from all the different channels.

Um I'm not going to go into the math because I barely understand it on a good day, but essentially it's similar to um the the models that we've used in the past, like Markov chain modeling, but this one focuses on adding uh a different measure of time decay. Um when you do something like Markov chain modeling, um, you assume that the time between steps um is roughly equal. So, you know, from uh a webinar to an email to a tweet and so on and so forth. You assume that these phase transitions all are essentially equal. With time decay, you're looking at the actual timestamps.

So there may be a two-day gap between when that person went to the webinar and then when they opened an email, but there may be an eight-day gap between the email and a tweet. And so you would say, well, that email should get less credit because it took longer for the person to come back than it did from the webinar to the email. And so that's what this model's trying to build. Now, what that means is that in Google Analytics 4, it really rolls up all that math into just this very nice simple bar chart, which says this channel in this cross channel data driven model, this channel has done the most to help you convert, followed by direct organic social referral, organic search, et cetera. And if we had paid search, uh paid social in here, which we didn't uh for this this data, that would be in here.

If that's not clear enough, you can break into by source medium or campaign. So you can see those same things. So if I switch into campaign mode here, I see direct, I see almost timely referral, and so on and so forth. So, you know, it's interesting. So there's a couple of things.

One is we can cover UTM codes, which I believe that's on the agenda for today. But in terms of the the model, when I talk with other marketers, when I talk with people who are in uh advertising social media advertising um and other different um skill sets, a lot of times they say, well, you know, my default is the last touch model because it's the easiest to understand, it's the easiest to see, you know, the results. And it sounds like Google also defaults to the ads preferred last touch model because it's the one that's gonna give the most credit to their ads, to Google ads. And so the same is true for social advertising. Um so, you know, I think that having an understanding of how the different attribution models work is good, but also understanding the right model for your organization is even more important because if you have an agency come in and they're like, Yeah, we're just gonna use last touch, it's always gonna make them look best.

And but it may not be the most representative. So it sounds like people using Google Analytics 4 who want to use the out-of-the-box attribution modeling, should be looking at the data-driven model to get the most the I guess the word is fair, the most representative picture of how the data's coming in. To Google's credit, it represents, I think, a reasonable view of reality, right? Because time does matter. Uh you know, if staying present of mind, you know, we do a weekly live stream to stay relevant in people's brains.

We have a weekly newsletter. And many of the companies we've all worked at in the past, they do you know monthly or quarterly newsletters. But one of the things that you know we learned very, very early on in email marketing is that and sales, the more at bats you have, the better off you're gonna do, right? So if you have a quarterly newsletter, you have four chances a year to convert somebody by email. If you have a weekly newsletter, you have 52 chances uh to stay in front of somebody and to remind them that you still exist.

And so the Google model, um, you know, this model here for uh a time decay event-driven model makes logical sense in that, and if you're you if you are doing advertising, social media ads in particular, this model makes a lot of sense because you are doing ads that are doing double duty, right? You're even if you're doing conversion-based advertising and you're on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, you are still also staying in front of your your audience's eyeballs. And having this kind of you know, conversion decay model makes good sense for trying to figure out what are the impacts of the different ads, um, and which ad channel keeps us keeps refreshing our the our share of mind. Really, when you think about a time decay model like this one um which is uh event driven you're thinking this is in a way a proxy for awareness right if we keep running ads and I keep showing you new ad after new ad and you keep engaging and stuff and you eventually convert I want to know are my ads continuing to nudge you along right or do they stall out you know you stop thinking about it just like I have a podcast I want to make sure that you're listening every week and you know if if there's some shows that do less well than others you know okay that show would have a lower conversion intensity it didn't do as well and so for this really helps us as marketers particularly advertisers because it helps you understand like this ad didn't land right this campaign did not land it did not move people forward let's pull and and maybe not do that again so it goes back to I guess my original question of what if the purpose of the ads is to drive awareness as long as awareness is an event in you know if new users or the website you know whatever the thing is is an event then you can run an attribution model against the events in Google Analytics for which is essentially set up very much like a goal. Exactly in fact I'm gonna switch to us to first visit what got somebody to make their first visit and then let's see switch this from uh to default channel grouping here and so for our default channel grouping for our first event in that data-driven model, it is email search social.

Right. But it is email by a substantial margin, which we know from our own attribution modeling. But what's different here is that organic social didn't show up in the other event, which was the form fills, whereas organic social is doing some of the work to drive people to our website. Exactly. And had we um uh you know spent a lot more on our Twitter ads, we might have seen uh a greater we would have seen you know Twitter show up as a paid source in here.

Uh again, if we switch out to our sources, you know, you have Google, you have uh that uh junk referrer there. We switch to our campaigns. We have our Google Analytics uh Google Search Console course emails were uh a driver of those first visits. That's actually very good for us in a lot of ways because uh it means that even though that was a it was a conversion focused campaign, it did also spur 582 first visits to our to our site within this time period. So and if you want yours, get it cheaper.

You're welcome. Remind me why you don't work in sales. I that's another episode. That's another episode. So yes, if you can measure it as an event of any kind in Google Analytics, you can then set it as conversion, and then you can have things be like you know, top funnel, uh funnel conversions, mid-funnel conversions, and so on and so forth, all the way down to you know somebody buying the thing.

Uh the only thing you've got to make sure is you have enough data for Google to be able to build a model on it. Now, the one thing I will say here that is um is uh tricky to understand is this tells you the overall efficacy of the channel, but it doesn't help you understand the position of the channel in conversion. And for that, you're gonna want to take a step back to the traditional time uh decay model, which says essentially the same thing, that same half-lifing. Um, but when you switch to time decay, you should be able to see uh you know when a thing's happening. So here we see there are conversions there very early on, they're just really small because um almost everything is happening at the end of the funnel for this particular conversion event.

Let's switch this to any thank you. And just make sure we're on the right event. Yep. Okay, and I'll switch to time decay. And now for filling out forms, we can see the progress of those different channels throughout.

Uh organic social uh here, and obviously if it was social media ads, hopefully it would be uh here, is is higher up. You know, you can see as we step through, it starts, it drops further the further into the funnel we go. Which again, for the way that we use social media makes logical sense. We use it as an awareness mechanism. So if that's an early touch point, then you know it's clearly working.

Would I like to have it be generating more late touch point conversions? Yeah, but I'll take what I can get. Well, and I think that that's something that as our company grows and we have more resources dedicated to each individual channel, that's an achievable goal. The the deficit that we have right now is that it's just the three of us trying to run every single channel, which as we know is not as sustainable uh as it could be. It doesn't lend itself to growth.

So that's why we see the data that we see, but we're completely aware. Exactly. Brian has a question. Brian's question is how long do you continue running social ads if they're not converting into sales? Do you attribute any value to them for basic brand awareness?

In my experience, I mean, I get very impatient. And so if it's not converting immediately, I shut it off. But that's obviously the wrong answer. So I just want to get that out of the way. So there's a lot of different factors that would go into it.

So we ran uh Twitter ads and Google ads to subscribe to our newsletter uh for one month, one month each, just to sort of do a test. And we didn't get a lot of conversions from them, but we did see it driving traffic to the website. So it was sort of doing half the goal. Um, so in my opinion, it wasn't a complete waste. We may have opened up the door to an a few more new audience members.

Fortunately, we didn't spend a lot of money doing it. Uh Chris, John, what do you guys think? There's there's two parts to the answer. One is if it's a conversion-based campaign and it's not converting, then the campaign's not working it. Like you go do a brand awareness campaign.

If you want brand awareness, do a brand awareness campaign and then add measured appropriately. So you know, don't try to make a campaign do something it's not supposed to do. The other answer um is we generally advise as a rule of thumb to go 2x your conversion window, right? So if you are wondering if the campaign is working, make it 2x your conversion window. And helpfully Google Analytics 4 puts that right here.

If I look at my you know in my default channel grouping summary, uh we have a an average of 9.3 days um to a conversion. So I would say if we were going to run a new campaign tomorrow, say we're gonna wait 18 days to see if there's any results. Because if we can't get people within essentially, you know, 2x the normal conversion window, the campaign's not working. Now, that said, uh tools like Google Ads have a lot of AI built in, so they will automatically start optimizing. But there is, you know, a certain amount of test window built into that, which is I think roughly about two weeks before you can really expect to see anything.

So you also have to factor that in by platform of uh is it trying to you know figure out what's the best way to run these ads and then will it auto optimize for you? So again, it's you know I think there's no one like here's the hard and fast rule because it depends on how big your audience is, how much you're spending, how long your days conversion are, all of those different things. What we've seen in the past is that um your your training window time shortens commensurate with your budget, right? So we saw, for example, when we did a we we ran a a basic Google Ads campaign for ourselves, and it took almost a month for training to occur. It took for Facebook when we back in the days when we used to spend money on Facebook, it was like you know, three to four weeks for a minimal spend.

You know, we're talking, you know, fifteen dollars fifty dollars a day. Um when we did a campaign for a client and they were spending ten thousand dollars a day, we were hitting training windows in two and a half days because the system had enough data to train on. Yeah, I think one big thing with this too is you do what Kristen said there as far as basic brand awareness versus sales. I mean if you're running sales campaigns and you're not getting any traffic, then you know that's a complete failure. So at least start at brand awareness to see if you can drive traffic towards free resources, you know, newsletter subscriptions, whatever, and dial down there.

And again, you do reach a point where it's you know you'll never have anything in the funnel if you don't get just raw traffic at the very top. So anything you can do to get any kind of resources looked at in earlier, you know, brand awareness traffic is worth doing unless you find that you know organic SEO or some other campaign does a better job of getting people on the front door. But it basically if you're sitting there saying hey we just don't have enough traffic at the front door, then you know you've got to start throwing money at ads if you don't have a better way to do it. The other thing that's really important about brand awareness campaigns is it's a calibration tool for your ad strategy. So every ad strategy has the same basic three elements, right?

Audience offer creative. You know, this is since 1968. Do you have the right audience do you have the right offer in front of the audience do you have uh the right creative to compel the audience, you know, landing page, uh ad copy and all that stuff. If you're running a brand awareness campaign to essentially free low, you know, low effort stuff like you're talking about John, and you're not getting anybody to engage, that's a pretty good sign your audience is wrong. Right?

You're you're just not having if I can't get you to sign up for you know to read a free PDF, you know, or uh to you know follow my YouTube channel, then I've got the wrong audience. So I think that starts to bring us into uh UTM tracking so that we can see properly where our audience is coming from. So if we decide we need to do ads, we can either do search ads or display ads or social media ads, but starting with the organic of where people are coming from in the first place to see where is that audience, where do they live, and then we can you know start putting money behind those things. Exactly. And the easiest place to find that um is in if you go into Google Analytics, just the stock reporting, uh, which admittedly is you know is a little rough around the edges spots.

Um, and we look at our traffic acquisition, uh, looking at our session default grouping, which is you know where we're getting people from. And then you instead of using the session, you can switch this to uh session source. And I'm gonna plug in. Oh, let's see, where's my acquisition? Session medium.

Oh, here it's session source medium. That's not cool. I'll just use session medium now. I can look down at my different channels and see you know essentially where people are coming from. Now, there's two things that are uh really problematic here.

Number one is this not set, not set, right? That means that uh we incorrectly that's a I believe in GA4 that indicates you screwed up your UTM parameters, right? So they're there, but they're wrong. Uh and as a result, they come in as uh malformed. And then there's direct none, which is Google's like, I don't know.

I there's there's no data for me to make a decision about this. So I'm just gonna say I have no idea where this came from and call it that. Um and Google is does have some decent uh documentation. So one of the things they have in their developer documentation, which is helpfully hidden away from the general public, uh, is they list out here all the different URLs that you know we are caught we commonly encounter, and here's the categories that we assign them to. So if you get traffic from one of these sites and there isn't UTM tracking in place, it will attempt to assign it.

So like Daily Motion will say your source category there is video, right? And so that will be your you will assign a default channel group, deviant art, you know, social. Uh now we one of the things that is important here is that if you see a site in here that you use and you think it's miscategorized, um then it is an indicator you must use UTM codes, right? This is Google's guessing list. Um, so for example, Twitch, they have listed as source category video.

I might take exception with that. I I see Twitch as equal parts video and social network. Um, but they've classified it as video. So if I'm running a campaign on Twitch, I might want to use UTM codes to override that and say, no, no, no, I want this classified as social, especially if it's coming out of your social media budget. So if you have um, oh that was interesting.

Um when you look in the traffic acquisition here, you take and take a look and say, okay, well, where what are the sources and mediums that I'm getting my traffic from? And are they are they correct? Um are there ones that are problematic? Like we know there's this bizarre email bot that uh throws uh some junk data and we can probably should go and filter that at some point. Um but what else?

We have uh some affiliate stuff coming in, which is correctly tagged as affiliates. We have uh this one here, this uh ad to bidder uh API, that is appears to be miscategorized uh paid social, right? So that that's uh one to go dig into figure out what happened there. Um we know that t.co links are classified as referral. They're social.

That's Twitter's link shortener, but there's nothing you can do to fix that. Well, you have LinkedIn and Facebook also uh categorized as referral and not social. And so those are um those are the let's actually I'm curious now. Let's look in acquisition here and see if we can see how Google thinks about those things. Okay, so Google helpfully, if you look, even though the source mediums are are we think are incorrect, Google's correctly classifying them because I'm guessing they're going back to their guessing list and going, no, that's that's not what that is.

Right? T.co is correctly bucketed as organic social, which is great. Inbox insights linked in, that's interesting. That's classified as organic social. So our UTM tag is being uh our UTM medium uh tag is is correctly assigned there because we when we do those links in our newsletter, we specify uh inbox insights LinkedIn is social, it's not email.

So is this a report that we can use instead of uh the first one that you had pulled up? Yeah, because this is just the acquis. Oh, you mean for for attribution? No, this is just traffic acquisition. This is where your traffic came from.

Yeah, not for attribution, just for traffic acquisition. So for example, in universal analytics, we don't have any idea what Google thinks this stuff should be. So this version of the report doesn't exist in universal analytics. I think it does. I think you just have to add it in the interface.

It just was never made quite as clear that you could just add a whole bunch of extra things in. They used to have that ridiculous like tiny mini drop-down saying add your secondary dimension. Um this one makes it a little bit easier to do that. It's just more obvious in the interface. Right.

I know you can add the secondary dimension, but it would still so for example, the first version of the report that you were looking at still had it as LinkedIn Facebook as referral traffic. This one corrects it to what it should be. And that doesn't exist in universal analytics. Right. So I guess my question is this is a report then that you can use instead of the first version.

Yes, that's right. Or better yet, if if you if you're working with stakeholders, replicate this in Data Studio so that they're not stumbling around trying to find all the the widgets. Um but of course, your best bet is to have strict governance around U UTM codes so that they are being tracked correctly. Exactly. So that uh brings us to well, so what?

Yeah, what the heck can you do with all this information? Like, that's great, but what do you do with it? So I think the thing that I'm looking to understand and that other marketers are likely looking to understand is like, okay, so I can look at this bar chart. What do I do with it? How do I take action on it?

And that's a perfectly valid question. The answer to that question is do you see results proportional to what the effort that's going into them? Right. So we know, for example, and we're gonna switch this to this medium here in conversion paths. We know we invest a lot of time every week in our newsletter.

You know, we spend time on it, we write decent copy, um, we put we put a lot of effort into it, and we see a good amount of effort that goes into that, rewarded with you know a high level of conversions, right? So we you know from that perspective, things looks good. Where we have a we I would see some issues would be like you know, we spend a lot of time creating content for the web, and organic search is not the high up on the list. So we know that there's a mismatch there between the resources we invest in that and the outcomes we get from it. And we know we were running Twitter ads at some point in this period, and we don't see them at all on here for this conversion type.

Now, this is the the any thank you page uh which excludes newsletter thank yous. Um so it was a newsletter, which was why you wouldn't see it here, exactly. So, which is good because if you saw here it would mean that our our tag manager was set up wrong. Uh right. So you would want if you were looking at the newsletter, thank you, then you should see Twitter ads.

Exactly. Um so if you you know on a on a percentage basis, let's say if you're putting 40% of your budget into Facebook ads and 40% of your conversions are not happening from Facebook ads, you've got a mismatch. And you need to either take, say, do we need to we they need to fine-tune and you know and re-optimize our Facebook ads, or we need to stop running them because we're we're not we're getting disproportionately worse returns than we are for something else. So the so what of any attribution model always is what should we do less of, what should we do more of? I think the other thing with that with the caveat that you're not just arbitrarily setting date ranges for your attribution models.

Uh you need to be thoughtful around like I'm going to look at it every single month over month and understand what I was doing in that past month, or I'm gonna look at the date range in which I was running a campaign to see, you know, if it shows up there. But if you're like, I'm gonna look at January, but I was running the campaign in March, you're you're kind of out of luck. Exactly. So that's what you do with this stuff. And again, you can look at it in your conversion pass if the conversions are set up, and as we saw with traffic acquisition or user acquisition, you can look at those ways as well.

Are we acquiring new users from our campaigns? Um, one of the big things to understand is that Google Analytics still creates this division between um users and accessions. So you have users again, essentially traffic acquisition is is session level acquisition. And the data will look different. Um so uh user acquisition focuses essentially on first touch to say, like what is the first channel that brought these users in?

And again, we see you know, email, organic search, organic social, and so on and so forth. And if we switch this up, uh, we can see uh first user source. And we'll add in our acquisition. Let's see our first user default channel grouping. And so we see here uh interestingly, the affiliates did not get correctly assigned by Google Analytics.

So we have to go back and check that out to see you know what happened there. Um but we could take a look at this and go, okay, well, where what's the first thing somebody does to get to know us? You know, organic search is decently high up at this list. Um the the Twitter ads stuff got misclassified as organic social on that first user touch, which is interesting. Okay, let's the elephant in the room.

We keep saying that it was my screw up. I've owned it already. I probably screwed up the UTM code, so let's just stop asking the question of what happened. I happened. Yes, but for everybody else who's looking at this in their own data, you're gonna run into these things, and you will have to ask who did it, who did it, right?

Like what happened, why did this happen? And that's where you know, from an analytics governance perspective, that's the hard part about analytics governance is when it becomes pretty obvious you kind of screwed up and and you don't have supportive uh supportive work environments, there and we'll go, yeah, that happened, you know, move on. Instead, you get you know yelled at for an hour in a staff meeting. Yeah, well, the one go ahead. Well, I was just gonna say the one thing with that though, is you know, now that you see it's wrong, you can still go dig into those channels and you can still get to the results.

You can see if it actually moves the needle, which is much better than just going through life thinking that it did zero because it didn't show up in the proper channel. Exactly. Now, the question I have, Chris, so when you were looking at gosh, and now I'm getting all these reports confused because the interface is so different. I think when you were looking at the attribution models, you had switched this version of a report to something that Google had each of these sources categorized and what they want them to be categorized as. Yeah, well, that's that's the developer documentation.

No, I know, but you had switched a version, you'd switch to a report in here, I think under attribution. Does that work here? So if you pull down, I guess the second column. Well, so this is on the default, these are the default channel groupings that Google thinks these belong to. Okay, so in a different report, so we were traffic acquisition did the same thing in traffic.

The affiliate, like so row nine, for example, the affiliate as uh the channel was correctly labeled. So that was a medium. So that was the medium. And Google, for whatever reason, we got to check the documentation to figure out why that medium is not appropriately did not get classified correctly. And I guess this is where I'm totally confused.

And I don't mean to completely derail the episode, but in a different report, the medium was correctly assigned, and now it's saying it's unassigned, and that's where I'm a little confused. No, this is channel grouping, not medium. Okay, I think this is not a problem that we can solve on this show. Um, because I'm not actually thinking I just found it. So if you look in the documentation, it's singular, it's not plural.

So it's for Google to classify something as affiliates, it has to be affiliate singular and not plural for the default channel grouping to work correctly. So you're saying for the UTM code if you have that. So look in there, you can see. If I switch this from default channel grouping to medium now. It's affiliates.

It's plural. I see. So one letter difference has screwed up our attribution. So again, we are what the we should have done is had a spreadsheet or something with a drop down that you can't edit. So that's that one's my fault because that was what I sent over to the folks at Convince and Convert.

Um it should have basically said, no, you can't use plural affiliates. It has to be affiliate singular in order for Google to classify it properly. Man, all of these rules are just dizzying. Dizzying and Google is a lot less flexible in this version of analytics. Yeah, but I feel like every time we go through this, as frustrating as it can be, the three of us collectively, along with anyone who's watching, we're learning a lot because you know, the three of us here, we're trying to figure it out as we go along with teaching.

So like we're we're a little ahead of the game in terms of we're in it every day, but there's still a lot that Google hasn't made transparent. Yeah, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that their their best documentation is in the developer portal and not in the uh the regular support portal because of a place to go look. Um well again, this is as we've said with many Martech tools, it's not just Google with many Martech tools. They're made by engineers and very often are they made for engineers. So let's uh I'd like to close out with this.

Katie, what can what are you going to do to increase your use of Google Analytics for? I am going to number one create a UTM governance spreadsheet with the updated Google Analytics 4 UTM codes that you can't edit, and that in the formula auto-corrects things uh if possible. So there's that. Uh and number two is I'm going to start challenging myself to build more data studio dashboards using Google Analytics for data versus my comfort zone, which is universal analytics. John, what about you?

Yeah, the thing for me is you like you have to decide when you're gonna pull off the band-aid and do it, you know, because this is one of those horrible projects that there's really not a lot of upside. You know, it's like if you go through all the pain, you're gonna have Google Analytics just like you did before the upgrade. You know, it's it's kind of one of those no-win projects, yet you're gonna have to do it sooner or later. So yeah, I guess the big thing is um God, and it is insane, isn't it? The months are flying by here no matter what happens.

So I think it's gotta be up and running and have at least the same functionality by end of year, because you definitely don't want to be in the first half of next year. Um, but I can say, at least, especially if you're doing e-commerce stuff, you are probably better off waiting at least another three months just to see if like Shopify integrations finally get built out and some of these other tools because you'd hate to build a whole bunch of stuff and then four months later have somebody come out with an integration that clashes with that and you have to clean it or fix it or whatever. So um, yeah, it's nothing but horrible news, really, is my takeaway from this. My singular piece of advice is if you have Google Analytics bookmarked in Chrome, change that bookmark so that your default behavior now has to be to start with GA4. Make yourself get used to it.

Just you know, it's like you know, changing an ingredient in your your dishes, you know. Your doctor said you have to change this ingredient. So the the default reaction uh is not going to be change unless you force yourself to do it. So change your bookmarks, you know, delete your browser history with the old URL save where you know you've got old dashboards. That's that's the easiest and least inconvenient way to start changing your behavior.

All right. Any final thoughts? Exercise more, eat right. That's it. I think honestly, if you are if you are frustrated with the definitions in Google Analytics for know that you're not alone.

Um I am happy to be frustrated with you, and you can find me in our free Slack group free. Uh, and I will be frustrated alongside with you as you try to figure out why affiliates and affiliate are not showing up. Totally different. Oh my goodness. Um, so yeah, just know that we are here to help.

All right, folks, we will all see you all 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?

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