You Ask, I Answer: Biggest Mistakes in Google Analytics 4?

In today's episode, Kaylee asks, what are the biggest mistakes you see people making with Google Analytics for? Gosh, there's so many. Um, some of the easy ones, uh, not doing proper governance on your tags. Um, because the default channel groupings, for example, that are built into GA4, you can't change them. Google has very specific requirements about how your stuff should be tagged.

If you don't follow that, chunks of the application stop working. Um, another one would be not understanding the difference between events and conversions. Um events are any activity you designate that you want to keep track of. Conversions are things that presumably have some business impact. Uh, they're not the same thing.

It's not a mistake people make because of of their own volition, but of because of the way Google designed the application. There's like four different places to do configuration and setup. Um, and you need to spend some time in each of them, which is kind of messy, kind of not optimal, um, but it is the way it is. But I think the biggest mistake of alling and trying to make Google Analytics for something it's not. Right?

It is not an all-in-one analytics tool anymore. The way universal analytics used to be, universal analytics used to be a Swiss Army knife of analytics. You do your setup in it, you would deploy it, you would do your analysis in it, you would do your reporting in it. One-stop shopping. Not great at any of those things, but not bad, right?

But it got the job done. Again, Swiss Army Knife gets the job done. Um, it's not as good as a best-in-class tool for any of those things, but you also don't need to carry around an entire toolbox. Google Analytics 4, its overall architecture is a big departure from that. Now, uh configuration, the bulk of configuration is expected to be done in something like Google Tag Manager.

You can do Google Analytics 4 without Tag Manager, but it's not optimal. It's difficult to get as much flexibility as you want. It is not compliant with a lot of things like consent managers. So Google has made it very clear configuration, the bulk of configuration for your GA4 is meant to be done in Google Tag Manager, and then connecting those pieces to Google Analytics. Google Analytics, Google has designed to be a business intelligence tool, right?

To be an actual analysis tool. What happened is the question you're just constantly trying to answer. And it's meant for you to go in there and do research, dig around, look at all the different pieces, and figure out questions you want to ask it and the answers you need to get, right? So that's that is its primary intended role. And when you look at the design, you look at the software, you look at the reports that are built in, you look at tools like Explore Hub, it is abundantly clear Google intends for GA4 to be its own BI and analysis tool, kind of like you know, a looker or tableau or something, really meant to be exploring your data and understanding it better.

It is not a reporting tool. It is a mediocre reporting tool. Google intends all of our reporting to be done, or the bulk of our reporting to non-analysts to be done with Google Data Studio to distill down just what they need and hand it to them with training wheels on it, essentially, so that they can do a little bit of slicing and dicing, but they can't screw up GA4. They can't screw up the rest of your analytics tech stack. They're just looking at their dashboard and making decisions off of that.

And the biggest mistake people make when it comes to Google Analytics 4 is wanting it to go back to and expecting it to be that one-stop shopping. It is not one-stop shopping. It's now a shopping mall, right? It's not a single store. And we can certainly debate the merits of one system over the other, one uh set of thought processes over the other.

There are a lot of people who are like, yeah, the Swiss Army knife approach isn't really good at anything, but it's not bad at everything. Um, and it's a lot easier for people to sort of mentally understand. Whereas GA4 is a intended to be a best of breed point solution, right? Tag manager is intended to be a best of breed point solution, data studio, and so on and so forth. And that gives also it gives Google the ability to revamp parts of the analytics process without so many dependencies within one tool.

By having those three core tasks split into three different uh tools, you can do a lot more maintenance, you can scale better, you can scale faster from a development perspective. So uh for Google, it certainly is an upside to be it to have those things be discrete entities. But those would be my suggestions for the biggest mistakes people make with Google Analytics 4. It really is all about using it the way that Google has designed it to use. And if you don't like that, if you if it's not working for you, it's a good time to shop around for a different analytics tool.

It's a good time to look at some of the alternatives that are out there, particularly open source alternatives. I would say that if the reasons you're looking at leaving behind Google Analytics are reasons to adopt an open source tool, you have to make a hard split anyway. On the damn recording, this is July the 4th. So in less than a year, 361 days, our data in the old Universal Analytics is just gonna come to a stop. No more data will be collected after that point.

And that data is never carried forward into Google Analytics 4. So now is the time to make a decision. Are you gonna stick with GA4? If so, get it up and running as quickly as possible. Um, because otherwise you won't have year-over-year data in you know 361 days when when you have to make the switch.

Uh or if you're not gonna stick with it, now is the time to install your new solution. Again, so that you have almost a year's worth of time to fact check your your new proposed solution, to experiment, to test with it, and figure out does it do what you want it to do? Um my recommendation if you're going to to part vendors would be to look at the Matomo uh system, which is uh uh an open source analytics tool that is similar to a little more similar to the way Universal Analytics functions. Certainly much more similar to that than than Google Analytics 4. It's not as robust, but it is open source, which means you run it on your own servers, and then no one can take it away from you.

Because it's running on your server, it's running on your hardware. Um, it's yours. Yeah, obviously you probably want to keep it up to date, uh, keep it patched against security leaks, but at that point, that's your baby, and and you can do with it whatever you like, and you're no longer beholden to a third party that can capriciously just turn off your analytics on you. Uh you know, even with a fair amount of notice that still is turning off your your analytics and turning off your data at some point in the near future. When you run your own system, you don't have that problem because as long as you keep paying your bills for your servers, uh, it's it's not an issue.

So that's something to think about as you're looking at very hard at your analytics strategy. Now's the time to make those decisions. Anyway, uh, those are my thoughts on on the stakes. Good question. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.