Tracking your way to success with Google Analytics 4 with Ray Pastoors (EXPERT)

Reading Time: 27 minutes

Taking the DIY approach to GA4

We have another expert from the big Recipe course taking over the podcast to share his vast knowledge about Google Analytics 4, Ray Pastoors.
Stay Tooned to find out from Ray how this powerful, free tool can be used in your business, and how it’s changed recently.

Tune in to learn:

Why you should use Google Analytics 4
What’s new in the GA4 space
How to use annotations
The three key sections of GA4 and how they work
How to fix double tagging
How to prevent channel data mismatch
Ray’s top tool recommendations
Why tracking your FAQ’s is important for AIO and SEO
How ecommerce businesses and Shopify users can get the most out of GA4
How service-based businesses should use GA4

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About Ray Pastoors

Ray Pastoors is a digital marketing expert with over 20 years of experience across 300 small businesses and leading corporate brands across healthcare, financial services and energy.
Ray has a knack for turning Google jargon and boring topics into entertaining and valuable insights.
Ray is an expert in Google Analytics 4 for Digital Marketing Collective and the Recipe for SEO Success course. He’s also been recognised for supporting causes like 1% for the Planet and the Its Time Foundation – giving solar to remote Pacific Island schools.

Transcript

Kate Toon: Hello and welcome to another episode. My name is Kate Toon and I’m the head chef at the Recipe for SEO Success, an online teaching hub related to all things, search engine optimization and digital marketing. And today we have another expert from the big recipe. Taken over the podcast to share his vast knowledge about Google Analytics 4, Ray Pastoors.

So stay Tooned to find out how Ray has used this powerful free tool in businesses and how much it’s changed recently.

Ray Pastoors: Hi there. It’s Ray Pastoors here, and today I’m chatting to you about tracking your way to success with Google Analytics 4. Yes, Google Analytics is a fun tool to use, but best of all, it is free. So it makes for a worthwhile time when it comes to your business. Now, it also reduces the gut feel which is really important because we don’t really want to make our decisions based on that initially.

We also want to see what’s actually going on with our website and within our business as well. So in terms of what I’ll cover today in this chat, we’ll look at why Google Analytics, what’s new in the Google Analytics 4 space, some of the key reports and how to use them and talk about some of the common problems that happen out there within this space.

So let’s get cracking. For starters, who am I? Well, I’m Ray Pastoors and I bring over 20 years of digital experience. I’ve worked with leading brands in financial services, healthcare, energy, social enterprise, as well as government and e-commerce. A whole range plus over 300 small businesses. I’m an endorsed Google Analytics expert for the lovely Kate Toon and the digital marketing membership and the Recipe for SEO Success.

So when it comes to understanding your website analytics, I’m well known for reducing the amount of jargon and bringing a no fluff approach so that you can actually measure the things that matter towards your business and your goals online. Okay, so why Google Analytics? Well, there are a few reasons really, to tap into this space.

Number one, it’s free to use, so it doesn’t cost you anything except for your time, which we’ll get into. Why it’s important to know what’s matters in that interface versus what’s not, so you don’t waste that precious time in your business. Google Analytics provides us with more information about our people.

So these are people that are visiting our website. The closest we get to is called users. so essentially, you know, someone’s visiting a website on a mobile phone versus a desktop. Google tries to piece that together. But sometimes due to the modern day of privacy browsing when it comes to Apple devices and also other browsing capabilities, we don’t always get to know that it’s the same user.

We also often measure things known as a cookie, which is a piece of code that is attached to us when we visit a website. So we know if we’ve been to a user before, people information such as location, where they’re coming from, you know, the state, but also the city is very useful country if we’re a worldwide business.

when it comes to age and gender, these things were in the plenty. In the past we’ve been universal analytics, but these days with GA four ’cause of privacy laws, we only really get a small sample size of the data. So we only get around 10% or less depending on how much traffic we receive. So really, it’s not as specific as it used to be, but still can be used as a guide of course.

Now we also get to know if they’ve been a visitor before or if they’re a new user to the site. based on those, I guess caveats that I talked about before, we can also understand page usage. So we’re creating all this content, whether it’s a blog post or pages in itself, but which ones are actually driving the most attention.

Typically, your homepage will be the one that gets the most traction. If you’re an e-commerce store, shopping behaviour is very useful. In particular, you know, how many times does someone actually view the product and then actually purchase it or go to the checkout.

Now with Google Analytics, it helps us to save, as well as make better decisions with our marketing efforts so we can spend on the right channels that are giving us more bang for our buck. Google Analytics also provides answers to our questions and is really useful for linking up to other Google products. So it can be used for retargeting, particularly in Google Ads. The more knowledge that Google Ads has about your user, the more likely they can find users that are exactly like them.

So what’s new in Google Analytics 4? There’s been a few different things in the pipeline. The most recent ones essentially, have been around importing cost data, particularly from other channels. So, for example, Reddit, which is a popular channel in the global side of things, for brands particularly, as more and more people use that and AI tools, artificial intelligence also use that as a citation for their sources.

So Reddit’s usage has definitely gone up in their investing in a whole search experience. It’s quite interesting how Google and Reddit have almost partnered up in that, bringing that cost data in, you can also do with Meta. And some users have reported that call to action where it says to actually link up your Google account to Meta so that you can get more data through.

Some of the other things that have come into Google Analytics 4 is annotations. They used to be in universal analytics, so you can add up to a thousand notes to line charts. So when you’re in your reports in that reporting section. You can add little lines. So like if you get a sales uplift all of a sudden and want to explain it to users, you can.

Or if there’s anomalies with your data for some reason, maybe there was an outage that day on your website or something else curly happened, you can add a note to explain that. Or any campaign activity that you’ve got out in market, you can of course copy within the customer reports and explore reports section across properties.

So if you’re creating those custom, more advanced kind of reports, you can do that. You’ll often find the customer reports are that little pencil icon just on the top right-hand side of your Google Analytics. It allows you to drag and drop different cards to kind of create that custom reporting that you might like, and explore is often used for more advanced users, but I like to think of it as a drag and drop tool for your reports.

We also have more cookie consensual. So for our friends in the European Union, that are up for GDPR, it just helps them. Or for those in California where there is cookie consent required, that essentially it tells you what’s happening with your data. There’s a lot more AI generated insights that are happening, so you’ll often see popups within your Google Analytics suggesting different trends, to about your data. So, for example, you know, traffic increases might have gone up and down again, use these as a guide. They’re not perfect, particularly ’cause Google Analytics 4 only has enough data based on what you set it up as.

Essentially if you set it up early in the piece, you’d have a lot more data in there. If you didn’t, then of course it doesn’t have all that information. And again, these machine tools are not perfect. So the whole idea in the future is that you can type into that search query box at the top. You’ll see it’s a long box, type in a question and you’ll get an answer, and it will learn over time how you do things.

So for example, if I want to know past 90 days users that came from social media, I can pop that question in and it will generate a response. Now if I get really descriptive, as like with anything in search, not quite there yet, doesn’t really know the answer, so something to be mindful of.

There are a lot more updated ad tools, so within the Google Analytics menu, you’ll see obviously the report section explore, but there’s this advertising section and that’s where all the Google ad stuff has been moved into and excitingly, there is a new budget planner tool coming soon, which usually is only for enterprise users to help you forecast your budget in the Google Ads sphere. So, that’s a really good one to kind of look out for as well.

Now let’s get into the key reports and how to use them. There really are three key sections within Google Analytics 4, so the first one is known as the people section, so people information really.

So within this side of things we have pretty much the acquisition menu. So for those that have joined Google Analytics earlier on, you would have something called the lifecycle menu. So it’d be on the acquisition, and you’ll find user acquisition, traffic acquisition. For those that join GA4 later, you’ll have a menu type known as business objectives.

Okay. So generate leads will be the menu where you can find that out. You can actually get the lifecycle menu if you want to make it easier on yourself or change it up and change the names. How you do that is when you’re in the report section down the bottom. Hot tip, there’s this library little section as well hidden, you have to have edit access to be able to see it. But once you click on that, you’ll be able to go to the library and you’ll see that there’s these little card menus that are created and there’s three dots. You simply click on that, edit the menu, or publish ones that haven’t been published before.

So you can actually change the names of things as well, which a lot of people don’t actually realize. So within our people section, there’s also known as the user section. So these are our user attributes. So we talked about before, you know, knowing which location they’re in, what state, what country they’re from and their city as well.

We can also find the age, gender, again, limited. But what I like to do is the tech section, particularly if I’m trying to create a great user experience or I’m updating my website. The tech section’s really useful ’cause it tells me what are the most common devices and also screen sizes that are coming through.

So I’ll use that information and give that to my developer. Or if I want to make sure that I’m testing what the developer’s created is working, I will then, right click, for example, in Google Chrome, use the inspect mode, and then on the top right hand side, there’s this little device icon. I select that and then choose the device screen size that I want.

Some of them are preset, but if not, and I’ve got my data in front of me in terms of the screen size, I can add that in and then have the most common ones that are relevant to my actual website. The next report section is page usage. So the engagement section is going to be really useful here. in that lifecycle manual menu, it’s under engagement, so events, pages and screens, learning page. So events is everything that is being tracked, what actions people are actually taking. So important, particularly we’ll get into how to map those as well. ’cause that’s the juicy bit of Google Analytics 4. We have pages and screens. So that shows us what pages people are actually visiting.

The reason why it’s called screens is ’cause GA4 also supports apps as well. And the difference between that one and landing page is that landing pages is the first page that they visited during their visit, also known as the session. Whereas pages is obviously they went to that page at any point in time in the journey.

Now for our e-commerce peeps, we’ve got shopping behaviour. So that’s really useful if you’ve set up your e-commerce tracking. So if you have, for example, Shopify, you’ve got the great Google and YouTube app, which does that for you. Once you’ve connected that, those reports start to climb into your Google Analyticsv4.

For those that are using WordPress, you’ll need to use another plugin. WordPress has a Google Analytics for plugin which you can use. I personally use GTM4WP, which is GTM for WordPress. It’s a bit more technical, but it allows us to have a lot more information about our e-commerce journey.

So if you need help with that, you can engage with a tag specialist like myself or a developer to help you map that out. So they’re the key reports and essentially how to go in there. And with the e-commerce one, I think the most important one is obviously your revenue, how much dollars you are bringing into the business, but also to have a look at your purchase and checkout journey because you really want to know, are people getting stuck in that journey?

Are people leaving your site? and if they’re in droves, particularly if you’re making changes to your website, you really want to know that in order to convert more people and get more money in the door. Now what are some of the common problems that we hear about Google Analytics 4?

The first one is double tagging. So double tagging happens when there are more than one page view tag often happens, particularly, for example, WordPress. You often get a developer who puts the code into the theme itself. Then when you put it in the theme, you might also have a plugin, or what happens is you have multiple plugins doing the same thing.

You don’t realize, so you can end up with these double tags, which can be annoying. Now there is a quick fix to this scenario that avoids the page you tag firing twice. You’ll find this in the admin section of Google Analytics 4. So if you go to the bottom left hand side corner there’s a little gear icon with admin, head to data streams, head to configure tag settings, select Google tag, then admin, manage Google tag and under additional settings, I know if it’s well hidden, there’s a little toggle, which funnily enough says recommended, yet it’s so hard to find where you can ignore the duplicate instances of that page configuration tag. So you just toggle that on, as an extra feature. And for those that set up their Google Analytics earlier on might not be across this one because it wasn’t so obvious back in the day, it was not even available. So that’s something to be mindful of.

Data discrepancy. Now, no two data ports are the same. If you think about it, meta has its own way of doing things. LinkedIn, of course Google Ads even has its own way of doing things.

Google Search Console, and often people get confused about the discrepancies that happen there. So it’s important when we see a data discrepancy that we investigate the issue by working backwards. Okay, so noting that the data will never perfectly marry up with each other is important. But if it’s completely outta whack and it’s not painting the same story, then we need to investigate that and see why that is.

Could it be the double tagging issue that we mentioned earlier? Could it be that, you know, event is not being tracked properly? And so a really good and free way to be able to check this is to visualize and see how things are actually tracking within your Google Analytics itself. So you can use the Google Tag Assistant, Google Tag Assistant is a free tool.

It does come as a Chrome extension or simply, you can just type it into Google tag assistant.google.com, and find it there. So this is a great way you just pop in your website or any website really, and then it will open a new tab of your website. You scroll down, do the actions that you want to see what are being tracked, and then in the other window it’s going to show you what’s being tracked, okay?

If you have a cookie consent bar because you’re from overseas, make sure you allow that one so that the data collects. You’ll see any errors that kind of pop up.

Another common one is the data delay. So the data in Google Analytics 4 takes a bit more time to process. So particularly for e-commerce data, data can be delayed by 24 hours, but sometimes can also be delayed up to 72 hours. So when it comes to looking at your reports, be mindful of this delay and select a time period, for example, at least 24 hours prior, so that you aren’t getting caught out with that processing issue.

Now the other one that we see is data sampling. So like I said, with age and gender information, that’s sampled often due to privacy reasons and you’ll notice this because there’s this little orangey kind of triangle warning thing that appears. Typically, it’s a warning symbol and if you hover over it, it tells you what’s actually going on. So it tells you if the report is being sampled or not and more about the data source as well.

Data sampling can also occur based on restrictions on your account. Particularly you’ve got lots of traffic, you may be hitting your limits as well, within Google Analytics 4 if you’re tracking way too many events, this only really happens on sites with lots of traffic. That can also cause the data sampling issue.

There’s also a setting within the explore section, which limits it to only two months at a time. So if you’re an advanced user you can go into your admin section and look at the data retention settings to make sure that you have got the maximum amount of 14 months.

Now another key issue is the channel data mismatch. Now, this can happen for a variety of reasons, but with our, I guess our channel groups have been Google Analytics 4. They only know so much. So if you’re using, you know, organic social media, paid social media, email newsletters, even if you are creating redirects, so what we call like a vanity URL, so for example, Katetoon.com/bonus ’cause it’s a campaign around bonuses, then that is known as a vanity. Okay? So you can redirect that address, that shortened address to the actual page itself that you want, and add in a bit of tracking information into that. Now, what happens is if we use a tool such as like, Meta Business Suite, or Ads Manager and use their parameter tool, you can pop in information about A URL, but it often goes a bit haywire.

Also with some channels, Google Analytics can’t really tell where people are coming from. So to be able to navigate these problems, what we can do is we can use a tool called the Google URL Builder. It’s also known as the urchin tracking module, UTM, like a C urchin. It sticks pieces of information to a URL, so an address to your website so that that information in the B browser gets sent automatically to Google Analytics, and then that helps it bucket that information correctly into Google Analytics.

Now there’s an extra step here that you can apply and it’s called setting up your custom channel groups so you can actually, for the first time, tailor and edit your custom channel group rules so that your traffic gets pretty much in the correct channel bucket as much as possible.

Now, a good example of recently is with ChatGPT, Perplexity and all those tools that are being used by users when someone lands on your website from one of those tools, ’cause they’ve clicked a link or a citation as they call it. Now typically that traffic can actually go into a few different places.

Sometimes I see it in the referral bucket, but sometimes it’s also in the search bucket. So in order to create a rule to make sure those kind of things actually apply to the right channel, what you can do is create a channel group where you edit it, and order it so that if, for example, someone’s coming from ChatGPT. Or they’re coming from Gemini, which is Google’s AI tool. You can actually create a rule so that it’s in a different channel group. So maybe you want it to be a referral. ’cause really it’s a referral rather than organic search that’s happening there. Or you can even create a new channel. Okay? So you could create an AI tool channel, whatever you think is going to be useful for you, but it’s a really great use case of those custom channel groups.

The Google URL builder is obviously very easy to use. You just enter your website name in, including what we call the H-T-T-P-S semi with the forward slashes, whatever you want to call it. Include that and you’ve got that section where you can add the website URL. The next part you’ll see is the campaign ID. This is only used for Google Ads, so you can ignore this. And if you’ve got Google Ads set up and you haven’t turned it off, you’ll notice that the UTM tracked URL is automatically applied with these rules. Campaign source is, where is the campaign coming from? For example, is it a newsletter? Is it Facebook?

Is it LinkedIn? Et cetera. So you can pop that in campaign source, campaign medium would be the channel. So these have to link up to your channel groups. So don’t get too creative of this ’cause it doesn’t know which channel to bucket into. So these rules line up with actually those channel buckets in Google Analytics 4, which is where some people make the mistake of creating their own ones and not creating a custom channel group.

So for example, we have paid social is the campaign medium within there. Another one is, for example, CPC, which is cost per click for Google Ads. Email is another one, for email marketing campaign names. So this helps us to differentiate different campaigns from each other. Can also make it greater for you to track campaigns over time.

So if you’re running that campaign every year, you can filter out your trafficking Google Analytics to find that campaign in particularly, and find everything that’s related to it. Campaign term, again, used for Google Ads, so you can ignore that campaign content. This is where it gets interesting.

This is where you can differentiate URL based on where it is. So for example, if you’ve got an email, you might have the link at the top, you might even have it in the banner, might have it later in the body, in the text, might have it at the bottom. When you place that link each time in a different placement, you can create a different UTM tracked URL for each one.

So it can actually work out which ones people are tracking rather than just generically where that link is. Because even though email marketing tools kind of show us where people click, it’s not always accurate, particularly with these privacy restrictions. So it just adds that extra layer, and tells you also the full journey of the user.

And if they’re clicking multiple times. Another good one is if you’re doing ads, particularly like meta ads, you can pop in a different URL for each slide in your carousel to work out which one they’re actually clicking on. You can also do it for different types of posts, the formats, so you can have it in the captions, see if it gets clicked there.

If it gets clicked earlier on in the caption later on or as a linked post. So again, you’re differentiating the different ads and the variations so that you can tell how well things are actually tracking.

Now, the key thing about Google Analytics 4 that is super important and that a lot of people miss out on is mapping out your engagement.

Okay? So think of your engagement as a rigid funnel. So flip the pyramid on its side. We start off with basic interactions. Okay, so people coming to our website, loading a page, very basic interaction, but what’s actually going on in between is super important and I like to rephrase it as Hidden gems. Okay, so in this middle kind of stage, people are doing a lot of activity there or they’re not.

And so tracking those things are super important because remember, not everyone, as we go down, that pyramid or funnel is actually going to purchase or submit a form or do that final action that we want them to take for our website. Okay? So having that middle component of tracking is very vital. Now, to give you an example.

What we can do here is look at some hidden gems that we did for Kate Toon’s project. So when you have an opt-in for a subscription for a newsletter, or for your freebie on your website, you should be tracking that obviously. So when someone submits it, it gets tracked in your Google Analytics. So again, you need to custom tag these.

They don’t just come out of the box. You need to engage with myself or a tag developer specialist to be able to bring this information in, and how we often do it is we use what we call Cascade Styling Sheets, A C-S-S-S code. We use that code to actually track what’s happening so that comes from your website.

We pick that up, send it into Google Tag Manager, usually as a free tool. And then that information is, I guess transported into Google Analytics. But the beauty of Google Tag Manager is it can also transport to other platforms such as meta for your ads. And to your pixel. So for subscribes we can measure, you know, if someone is interacting with that ’cause that shows intent as well. If someone’s signing up for our newsletter or for our freebie offer on our website, it shows the user has got some more intent. So if we’re not tracking that within our analytics, we’re missing out on that information. So whilst we see it in our email marketing programs, we’re not actually connecting the dots everywhere else.

Another one is form starts and fields. So often we will track, form, submit, so the form is being submitted. We can track that quite easily by creating a thank you page. Again, you have to create that tracking to be able to do that.

But one that people often miss is actually a form start. So depending on how your forms are set up online, sometimes you can do this, sometimes you can’t. Because, for example, we had a client that uses Keap, K-E-A-P, as their customer relationship management software. And so Keap doesn’t allow us to track when a form start is happening. So like, for example, if someone clicks on a field, we can’t specifically work out which field that is. We can only measure the thank you page, so the form submit interaction. So sometimes with systems not able to measure, but if, for example, you are often using like a plugin for your form, like such as WordPress, you’ll often be able to track those fields so you can actually measure which field someone is filling in.

It doesn’t send the information to Google Analytics ’cause customer privacy is important. So we don’t do that. If someone does that, slap them on the wrist, definitely not want to do that. but essentially it just shows us which field they’re at so we can track that information. My favourite one is FAQs. Okay.

So if you’ve got frequently asked questions on your website, using a collapsible container or accordion format, you can actually click on those and then put in tracking so you can work out which ones are being used over time. Why that’s important is because you can work out which ones are being used, which ones are not.

So you can move them around based on what they’re being used as. And if they’re not being used at all, replace them with something that is valuable. And the other benefit of FAQs is that AI tools at the moment love these things. So with a bit of schema, bit of extra tag information from your developer, or depending on what content management system and site builder use might be able to do it in there. I know with Elemental they have a toggle button. But FAQs are really important for the AI tools, for ranking and stuff like that. So a vital one, not just for your analytics tracking, your user experience, but also your search engine optimization.

So there’s some real key wins there. The other thing about the FAQ open tracking is if something is being opened quite a lot in the user journey, you might actually consider bringing that content further up on the page or creating other content to answer that query, and you can even interlink the content.

So if you created a blog post that answers that in greater detail, include it as an FAQ, then interlink that by adding hyperlink. So link to that blog post so that when someone clicks the FAQ and they want to know more, they click on that, open a new tab, and then they can go into greater depth for that.

So there’s some real wins across the board with the FAQs, and again, make sure they’re in a collapsible format. If you just put them all less text, you won’t be able to track them, for one, on the page with Google Tank Manager in Google Analytics. But the other thing is it’s so annoying to have so much text overload that your users get frustrated and out they go essentially.

If you’re in the e-commerce space, product filters is quite valuable. So if you’ve got filters for your products, you can create tracking for that. So, for example, what clothing size they use, what type of products they’re interested in. and even if you want to get really specific with your developers, we can even look at the price entries that they put in, depending how your website is set up.

Another good use case is within Shopify you have often this thing called buy with Shop Pay, and then you also have an add to cart button. And what people don’t realize is the default Shopify at the moment, Google and YouTube app doesn’t actually measure when someone clicks the buy with shop pay button as add to cart.

So if you want to include that as add to cart data, which I think it really should be, again, you need custom tagging to be able to do that. For that setup. It can also helps you segment users. So if you are thinking about all these things, so like what size people want in terms of clothing, what categories, and also whether your users have higher intent or not, or if they’re using shop pay or after pay even you can segment your users even more for your marketing efforts, which is really, pure gold.

When we get into key events, which is, essentially conversions, but Google decided to be complicated and add another definition in. So conversions is the name within the Google Ads reporting side of the Google Analytics form. But everywhere else you’ll see key events. And so what you can do is once you track an event, you can toggle it as what we call these key events, AKA conversion.

So a good example of this is add to cart. Shopping cart page, checkout page, or even form completions or submit. So a key event is someone adding to cart because that is really important and you want to encourage that more. So you can build an audience based on that for your marketing, shopping cart, they’re viewing the cart, if that’s something that they can do within your website.

Are they reaching that checkout or purchase phase? and are they actually checking out at the end of the day? If you are a more B2B side of business or tracking, you know, service queries, your form completions and submits will be your key events for that one. So key events are found in standard reports, customer reports and explore reports.

But like I said, conversions, that terminology will be found in the Google Advertising Report section. They mean the exact same thing. It’s just the way Google has set it up.

Now in terms of events, I just want to touch on that. There are four different types of events, funnily enough, in Google Analytics 4, they go from low effort from you all the way to high effort. So the low effort, thinking about the ones that are automated for you. So if there are first time visitor, whether they’re session has started by default, it’s 30 minutes unless you’ve changed it and user engagement on the page.

But enhanced stuff, page view, for example, can’t be turned off. But you have the option to toggle on or off these other ones called enhanced events, so essentially this is something where it’s exciting that Google Analytics is trying to make things easy for people by adding this stuff in that you can toggle on or off rather than needing a custom developer.

So there’s this thing called scrolls where it measures when you visit 90% down the page. So use the scrolling down the page about 90% of the length. It fires that event off, so you know whether people are actually going down the page or not. If you want to know other areas, like 50%, 25% level, you have to custom tag those things at the moment.

The other thing about enhanced events is that it measures clicks on websites to other external sites. So if your website is linking to an external site, whether it’s the landing page, ’cause you’ve got some partnership with another website, or it’s just external links on your blog and you want to measure where people are going to, this is the space to do that within that event.

Key one, and it’s a particular hint from Google about what we think about digital user experience, is that the YouTube video starts progress and complete metrics are being put into Google Analytics. So if you use YouTube for the most part, it will automatically be tanked when you embed the video. Or if you’re using a WordPress content site builder or anything like that, often those tools will be able to track the YouTube interactions, and you can then see that data by creating what we call an explore or customer reports to do that.

Same with those external links that I mentioned earlier, whereas scrolls can actually be found in your reports. File downloads is another one. People didn’t realize that, you know, if you had a PDF on your website it’s hosted on there and people visited that URL it actually wasn’t tracked in universal Analytics, but now it can automatically, and again, to see that data, you want to create an explore report, then we have form interactions really form submits.

This one is a bit curly for quite a lot of sites. It doesn’t pick up the form correctly, so we usually say, scrap that one. Toggle it off and just focus on creating your custom one. What, either through that, you know, thank you Page trickaroo, kind of trick, where essentially you create a thank you page and then in your form builder where it has the option to redirect user once they’ve completed the form, you send them to that page and that page URL is used to create that event tracking.

Now hot tip as well, don’t forget to mark that page as not indexed ’cause we don’t want to find it in our Google search results. We don’t want the search bots to see it as well. So make sure that’s the thing. If you’ve got a search bar on your site and you want to make sure that people can’t really find that, you can try and avoid that by creating a random, generic URL format as the URL name as well, so people don’t ponder over that easily.

If you can’t exclude those kind of things in your main search bar, which is quite often the case, we then have recommended, so these are events that Google recommends, such as add to cart, begin Checkout, purchase. So some of the plugins will be able to do this for you, but otherwise, these are events that Google recommends and there’s a whole range of them on the Google Help Center.

And they’re just advisable events. So it just gives you tips on how to create them and what you should include in terms of information. And they call that parameter. So information equals parameter, is this extra piece of information that you’re grabbing, putting into your Google Analytics data as part of that.

So these are events that you have to custom create or use a plugin to achieve but they’re recommended by Google, depending on what your industry is, but also what your goals are as a business owner or website owner. And then we have the everything else bucket, which is known as custom. So that’s only to be used if those other three that I mentioned don’t cover what you need.

Okay. So these are somewhat techy. They require a developer or a tag specialist like myself to be able to do that for you so that you can measure those things. So like those examples before. Scrolls at different depths. So 25%, 50% or measuring FAQs opens. If you’re using another video program, for example, Kate was using Vimeo, that doesn’t come in the box, out of the box. So you have to custom tag to be able to achieve that but it is achievable. You can bring that data into Google Analytics, but it’s custom development to be able to measure that for you. If you want to measure those, subscribe opt-ins again to track those button clicks, we’re going to have to use that custom method to be able to do that.

How we can test events. We talked about it earlier, using the Google Tag Assistant. There’s also the Google Analytics to bug you. So how to test events. You can check out Raypastoors.au/test and there’s a great resource that explains this in more detail, and on back to the Google URL builder, there is also Ray Pastoors.au/track and that explains in greater detail how to use that Google URL builder to your advantage.

So you can see the trend here is that there is actually quite a lot of free stuff available. Google’s not so great at explaining it and how to find the value. They are getting a bit better here and there, but they have a lot more to do. But to be honest, it keeps me in a job so I can explain it a bit better and make it a little bit easier for people to understand with my resources as well, with an Aussie kind of twist, but also jargon free, which is really important.

Particularly, you know, for a lot of small businesses. We have a lot on our plate as is, a lot of heads in the kitchen. So it’s really important that, you know, we make things easier for people so that they can focus on the energy that they need to. And I think the key thing about all of this is understanding what it is that you want to achieve as a business.

Now, if you’re in e-commerce, you’re obviously wanting revenue in the door. You know, you want average order value, average purchase revenue, as Google Analytics likes to call it. So that’s key. If you’re a website that has blog- blogging, you know, lifestyle blogger, or it’s all about your content, you want to make sure that people are engaging, you know, the average session duration is good.

There’s good amount of scrolls going on, there’s engagement tracking for those key content things. If you’re a service-based business, leads are important to you, usually, whether that’s a core tracking or it is you know, those forms tracking. So getting those leads in the door, making sure that you track those things.

So they’re usually the key things that you want to know. But most of all, you need to be clear in terms of what it is that you want to measure. So when you go to your Google Analytics report, understanding which ones actually matter, there’s a lot of garbage in there. But essentially what it is that you want to measure that ties to your business or website goal.

And that is key. Otherwise, you will get lost in the interface or within the world of analytics. And the other key thing as well is looking at your data is only one piece of the puzzle. What you then need to do is look at other areas as well and connect the dots. So for example. Putting it all together, I see users are engaging with my website on a particular page.

Are they also engaging with the ads elsewhere? Does meta details show the same? And then once they engage with it, what is their user journey? Does it ladder up or do I need to do a few experiments to actually test whether my assumptions about the users are correct or not? So data is only as good as it gets in terms of the story.

You’ve actually gotta put the puzzle, the pieces together to form what we call an actual insight. So often people make the mistake that an insight is just a data or metric result, but really it’s not. Insight comes from having that nice holistic view. Putting all the pieces together, bringing it to life and out what our assumptions are to then work out what’s actually going on.

And that’s the juicy bit. That is what we call hidden gems within our data sets that can really drive the needle, in terms of results, ’cause a lot of people don’t do that. A lot of people don’t have the time for it, or they just can’t be bothered or they don’t realize that benefit as well. So that is a wrap.

If you wanna check out more resources from me, visit Ray Pastoors, Ray, R-A-Y-P-A-S-T double O S.au. You can check it out or find me on LinkedIn, where I follow a whole range of topics. But essentially, no, I don’t. I really only provide stuff around Google Analytics, organic search, and also things about sustainability ’cause I have a passion for the environment. As part of our commitment for 1% for the planet, we support solar for schools, and carbon neutral as well. But yeah, great chatting with you, Kate, as always. Thanks so much for the time and hopefully, people can continue to analyse their website and enjoy.

Kate Toon: So that’s the end of this week’s show. If you have questions about Google Analytics 4, you can head to the I love SEO group on Facebook, where you’ll find me, Ray, and lots of other clever people. I also wanted to tell you about my upcoming AI SEO workshop, where I’m going to be teaching you everything you need to know about AI, SEO tools, generative engine optimization, and so much more.

Check out the website for more details, but until next time, happy SEOeing.