You Ask, I Answer: GA4 Impact on Attribution Analysis?

In today's episode, Andrew asks, what impact will Google Analytics 4 have on attribution analysis, specifically in relation to public relations role in attribution models. Well, there's two different questions here, sort of rolled into one. First, attribution analysis itself at Google Analytics is actually pretty robust once Google rolled out its attribution models, which are confusingly labeled under the advertising section in GA4 in the left-hand menu. Don't know why they did that. The built-in attribution models are actually pretty good.

One is the cross-channel data-driven model, which is Google's what they call the time to uh event uh data-driven model in their academic paper. And that looks at sort of the additive effects of different touch points within the customer journey. It's a pretty good model. It gives you a very good sense of here's what's working at each level of the customer journey. It's a good model for online for the clickstream.

Where the model starts to run into issues is dealing with offline or dealing with when the clickstream is broken. So an example of what the clickstream is broken is you're on your phone and you're surfing and you're reading and stuff like that, and you see something interesting. Maybe you see a cool Instagram post, like, oh, go to your laptop, and and you um resume there. You've broken the clickstream. And well, the consumer has broken the clickstream because this and the laptop, the sessions are seen as different.

Uh now, Google has done some work, as have many ad companies, to try and unify that. But the issue is from a marketing perspective, a lot of very good privacy tools prevent us from unifying those sessions and seeing as that's the same person. So Google Analytics 4 really doesn't do any better or worse than its predecessors or its competitors when it comes to when the clickstream gets broken. That especially is for offline. Say you're reading an article and you have a conversation with your significant other.

And they tell you to check out this cool thing and you go and Google it and stuff. Organic search gets credit for that interaction, but it really was word of mouth, right? Um, and you know, maybe your significant other saw a news article of some kind or a post from an influencer. Public relations should get credit for that, but because it's invisible, because it's not connected to the clickstream, um, it doesn't. So what's built into Google Analytics 4 is an improvement on the existing modeling for uh clickstream events.

It is not any better for broken clickstreams, offline stuff or brand. So you may say, well, that's problematic. How do we fix that? Well, you can't fix it in Google Analytics 4 itself. There's no facility built in for doing more complex attribution models that can take into account uh some offline effects.

But there are ways to do uh modeling of that, to look at uh all of your data and build more sophisticated statistical or machine learning models that can do attribution saying, hey, this looks like it has a correlation to the target outcome, and so um you know, run some causality tests to see if that is in fact causative or not. Again, that's not something that's built in. Uh it's not built into any uh web analytics platform. There are no platforms on the market today that can do this. Um Google's data is probably the closest thing to get to.

And one of the things you'll want to calibrate on from a measurement perspective is branded organic search. Branded organic search is when somebody searches for you or your company or products or services by name. You can see the data right within Google Search Console. That is one of the best measures of public relations effectiveness. Because if no one's searching for you by name, right, if nobody knows who you are or your products or your services, your public relations isn't working, right?

Your brand building isn't working. You've got no brand. If, on the other hand, people are looking for trust insights or Christopher Penn by name, and me, not the deceased actor, um, then I've got a brand, my brand is working. And if my public relations efforts are behind that, then I can attribute uh at least some of that to public relations. How do you do that?

Um again, same technology, same statistical models that they're basically multiple regression models. Um the specific algorithm that a lot of people had a very good success with success with is called XG Boost. Um, you do need to have some machine learning experience to it to make it work. Um, but it is one of the many approaches people are taking to a more sophisticated way of doing that kind of attribution analysis. And it's not foolproof, it's not flawless, it's not perfect, but it is directionally accurate and will tell you that yes, in general, your public relations efforts are or are not having the impact that you want.

So, Google Analytics 4 in general will give you better starting data to work with, especially if you're combining it with Google Search Console data, and after that, you have to build your own attribution model. So, really good question, very complicated question. There's a lot of math, a lot of math in here. But if you get it right, you absolutely can value the impact of public relations. The reason why most companies don't, it's expensive to do this, right?

It is expensive to build these models, it is um time consuming, you have to ingest a lot of data, you have to do a lot of data science, and most companies are not willing to invest the money in salaries or contractors or whatever to do that because they would rather just kind of hope that public relations works and you know be the first to uh cut their budgets when when things turn south instead of figuring out what actually works from a data driven perspective. So, good question. Thanks for asking. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.