7 tips to ensure your GA4 setup works for your business
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a powerful tool that helps businesses understand customer behaviour and make data-driven decisions, and effective 1 July, has replaced Universal Analytics (UA).
Many of our customers have been able to proactively migrate and re-map key configurations to avoid any downtime for their marketing analytics. But if you haven’t already done this and have been auto-migrated, don’t worry! To ensure your business gets the most out of GA4, we’ve outlined a helpful checklist to ensure your GA4 setup is on point and ready for success.
1. Make sure that enhanced measurement is enabled:
Enhanced measurement is a handy feature in GA4 that automatically collects important data without manual tagging. This ensures you’re capturing valuable information like form views and page views, clicks, video engagement, and file downloads, giving you a better understanding of how users interact with your website. If you manually add the GA4 configuration tag on your website, you would also need to make sure that each event is ‘enabled for automatic event detection’ for your GA4 tag, which is what makes the enhanced measurement feature so convenient. Additionally, it is your responsibility to ensure that no personally identifiable information (PII) is collected.
2. Confirm custom events and conversions:
Custom events and conversions allow you to track specific actions that matter to your business. The great thing about GA4 custom events is that they allow you to define and track specific actions that are relevant to your business. GA4 offers a very extensive set of recommended events, which might save you the time and effort of having to create additional custom events. Custom events need to follow the instructed naming conventions and guidelines and can be set up through the Google Tag, Google Tag Manager, or Firebase.
3. Understand cross-platform customer journeys with Google Signals:
Google Signals is a helpful data collection feature that shows you how customers move across different platforms and devices. By activating Google Signals, you can gain insights into cross-device behaviour, helping you understand how users engage with your brand and unlocking powerful remarketing capabilities for Google users who have turned on Ads Personalisation. There are some important considerations to note however about the limitations of Ads personalisation based on how the Google Signals feature settings are configured.
4. Ensure attribution models reflect cross-channel campaigns:
Attribution models help you understand the impact of your marketing efforts across different channels. GA4 offers advanced options for attribution modelling, allowing you to accurately assess the effectiveness of your cross-channel campaigns. Google Analytics 4 properties can generate attribution reports for paid and organic rules-based models, paid channels, and data-driven attribution models. Data-driven attribution uses your business’ GA4 data and applies Machine Learning (ML) to distribute credit for the conversion based on data for each conversion event.
5. Verify e-commerce data accuracy:
If you run an online store, it’s important to ensure the accuracy of your product and sales data in GA4. You can do this by comparing it with data from other systems you use, like your e-commerce platform or inventory management software. The GA4 e-commerce purchases report offers a great summary based on the list of recommended events, and it can also be customised to align with your specific brand items and categories as required.
6. Integrate your marketing tools with GA4:
To get the most out of GA4, it’s beneficial to integrate your other marketing tools, such as advertising platforms or email marketing services, with GA4. This helps with better data sharing and comprehensive analysis. Google’s support centre offers articles for each integration in its product suite here. Remember that since 1 July 2023, properties integrated with Google UA stopped processing data so they will not show up in GA4 reporting until the integrations are updated.
7. Ensure accessible dashboards and reporting for all teams:
Make sure your dashboards report on the key metrics that matter to your business, and ensure that all relevant teams have access to the information they need. This promotes transparency and empowers teams to make informed decisions based on GA4 insights. Regularly review and update your dashboards to meet the evolving needs of your business. Connect with a trusted Google Partner like XPON or your in-house GMP experts to reserve time for these reviews and updates.
Next steps
From enabling enhanced measurement and custom events to visualising the customer journey and integrating marketing tools, each step is crucial for optimising your data collection and analysis. Now that UA has been deprecated, investing time in setting up or double-checking that GA4 is configured correctly will pay off by providing valuable insights for your business strategies.
Are you 100% confident in GA4? XPON is ready to ensure your business is fully prepared to leverage the power of Google Analytics 4. If you would like to source best practice advice from Google’s Partner of the Year, contact our team to get started with a GA4 audit.