So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on how to start making the most of your Google Analytics 4 property. We walk through resetting your goals, advanced path analysis, and use exploration. Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- Funnel and path analysis for anything!
- Turning events into conversions
- In-depth user exploration
Upcoming Episodes:
- Out of the box attribution models – 3/25/2021
- How do you benchmark a website’s performance? – TBD
- Auditing your Tag Manager – TBD
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/insights/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:42
Happy Thursday and welcome to sell what the marketing analytics and insights live show. I’m joined by Chris and john, as always. And this week, we’re gonna go do a little bit of a deep dive into Google Analytics for four. So Google Analytics four is the newer version of Google Analytics that Google has been rolling out. Our recommendation is always to be running for in parallel with Google Analytics, three or classic, however you refer to it, and not to just completely jump ship onto Google, it’ll explore. So Chris, you’re going to get into a bit of a walkthrough of some easy wins that you can get with Google Analytics for. And john and i, as always, we’ll constantly interrupt you and ask you lots of questions.
Christopher Penn 1:30
Cool. Let’s talk about first, why you would want to even be looking at this thing. Well, obviously, Google is rolling it out in Google being Google, you will be given a certain amount of time, we don’t know how long to adopt it. So it’s one of those things that we want to make sure that we have up and running so that when Google does unveil, they’ll say, Hey, now you must use this, you’re ready to do it. As a bit of background, Google Analytics for is very much a completely different application. Every version prior to this is built on the same fundamental platform that Google bought from a company called urgent technologies, way back in 2005, so 16 years ago. So everything you know and love about Google Analytics, tracking codes, the interface, the back end systems, all was fundamentally extended versions of that 2005 system. A couple of years ago, Google said, Hey, this kinda ain’t working anymore. And the reason that they did that was because of these lovely devices, right? These things are a totally different way of interacting with companies with the internet. And so Google said, we, we know that people are using these for everything, like literally everything, you can swipe right on getting a car, getting a date, getting a wine dropped off at your house, whatever, it all happens to this thing. But that’s not what the way analytics was, was working. So they said, Okay, we’ve got the separate tool that does in app analytics called Firebase. And they, I forget who they acquired that from, but it’s a much more sophisticated system that tracks every kind of interaction, like you touch up this, touch that now on the screen, and you know, and record all these interactions. And a couple years ago, Google said, hey, let’s just merge the two together. Because one of the challenges that a lot of companies have is, you have people who use this. And then you have people who are on their desktops. And we don’t know who’s who. Right. So we have people who are using this. Is it the same person like Katie is Katie, on your phone is Katie, on on on your laptop? Who is it? And so Google said, let’s try and fix that. And so they created the thing originally, it’s called Google Analytics app plus web. And then bout was about five months ago. They said, Yep, we’re going to merge all together and call it Google Analytics for and so that’s where we are today, how we got here.
Katie Robbert 3:57
And so before you go too far, Chris, I feel like you also dropped a little bit of trivia in there, around what UTM stands for and why it’s called what it is
Christopher Penn 4:07
exactly. Urgent tracking module. That’s from from the old old 2005 thing. So actually, Katie, I’m going to ask you this as a question. Yeah. to getting a an organization, a cultural group of people to change, particularly a big change, where you’re saying, hey, you’re going to totally you do things differently. Now? What are some of the things that you think about to make the change easier?
Katie Robbert 4:37
communication is a big thing. So people need to understand why, why Why are you asking them to change what it is that they’re used to doing to doing something else? What is the benefit of doing something different and how does it affect them personally, because one of the things that I see in terms of, you know, larger change management initiatives is Yeah, the company can sort of roll out and mandate. Okay, we’re going to do this this way now. But there’s a lack of focus on how this affects john, how this affects Chris, how this affects Katie. And in order for people to get on board with a big change, they need to understand how their job, personally, is going to be impacted by this change. And so that’s one of the places that I would definitely focus, you know, switching software providers or switching platforms or upgrading to different systems. It’s not an easy change. But it’s easier in the sense of, there’s a little bit more predictability, you can document it. And the software doesn’t have feelings and emotions to say, I don’t want to do that, or I’m nervous. If we do it that way, then my job is in jeopardy. So that’s really where I like to focus is helping the teams understand what that means for them each individually and making sure there’s a clear documentation for how you get from A to B. And also making sure you set up those those milestones in small wins so that people can continue to see progress along the way. And it’s not this big black box five year initiative.
Christopher Penn 6:08
Yeah, one of the things that I like to look for is easy wins some kind of easy win to give people it’s like, hey, if you just try this thing out, and can see an immediate benefit of some kind, any kind, I feel like that makes it a little bit easier for people to swallow the change management pill as opposed to saying, Hey, you got to do this thing, because it’s required, but it’s not gonna be fun. And you’re not gonna see any benefit where there’s the benefits can be so obtuse that you’ll five years later, like, Oh, yeah, I guess that was better. But it really sucked for the last five years, you know. So let’s talk about Google Analytics for and its role, because this is one of the things that you will make your journey to ga for easier or harder. prior to using Google Analytics. Prior to this version, Google Analytics was sort of an all in one, right? you set up your tracking, you got your tracking code, you put your goals in, and then you had your interface and you were you building all your dashboards and you would build reports and have it send PDFs. So it was kind of an all in one tool. And Google has fundamentally changed how this how this part of the Google Marketing Platform works. Now Google Analytics is now you can even see it in the interface here, where it was a few canned reports. But there’s really this thing called the analysis, they want Google Analytics to be the BI tool, the business intelligence tool of your marketing department. Which raises the question, Well, what about all those other things we used to do in it. So one of the things that is is big change now is that a lot of your configuration is going to be done in Google Tag Manager. So if you want your journey to Google Analytics for to be easier, rather than harder, get away from every type of goal that use even in ga three, except events, events are what you want to do. Because the new model in ga four is that everything’s an event of session, a user of customer, visit a product, it’s all events. Now salacia had a very quick example here, have a just a simple Thank you event. And so instead of having a goal, where you’re saying, okay, I want the page to be, you know, a specific page to be fired on, I just create events. Now, just a very simple event. And what’s really cool about this is that you can use the same events in Tag Manager for Google Analytics, three, Google Analytics for the same triggers. So you can reuse your existing ga three goals that you set up, if they are events and Tag Manager. So that’s easy win number one, move to an event model. And then it becomes much less painful to set up new goals in in Google Analytics for
Katie Robbert 8:41
so Chris, I have a question about events. And so in going through a Google Analytics audit with a lot of our clients, I know that a lot of the goals are, you know, someone landed on a page or viewed a page or viewed a video, you know, and so can we be a little bit more clear about what qualifies as an event? And what are some of the goals that won’t easily transfer over to Google Analytics for?
Christopher Penn 9:10
Everything’s an event live, literally, everything has that. So if you have a goal that was hate,
Katie Robbert 9:15
as long as it’s actionable,
Christopher Penn 9:17
yeah, as long as the user does something, you know, here’s a real simple example. This is a page view based event if somebody lands on a page that contains you know, thank you in the name, but doesn’t contain you know, the, the, the thank you for contacting us, because you don’t want that in here and doesn’t contain you know, thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. We want to fire this goal, this specific types of tags that go with that. So this is a page view event, but there’s so many different kinds of events, we set up a start a new trigger here for fun. I want to be a triggering event. You can choose Do you want it to be a click on a link on accident tags here. Let’s go back triggers knew. So do I want it to be a page, I want to be part of the page it’s loaded, do I want to know that a Windows loader want to track someone’s clicking on a part of the page, even if it’s not a clickable link, just knowing that someone’s clicking, that can be a goal, to want something to be seen, if you have a publishing website, and your job is to show ads, you might have as a goal, hey, my ads got seen, I displayed the ad form submissions, you can have as a goal, if your job is content engagement and user engagement, hey, I need to get people to get 99% of the way through the page. If you’ve got a video on your site, you know, a YouTube video trigger is a super powerful event. Because you want to know how much did somebody watch a video, like you’ve got a landing page with a sales video on it. You know, people watch 5% of the videos, maybe that that video is not doing its job. And you can do even really complicated, interesting things happening with like scripts and custom events, you can actually build your own custom events, totally from, you know, bare metal if you want to do. So there’s no shortage of different kinds of things that you can now turn into goals. And that’s one of the more powerful examples of what you can do to make Google Analytics for work for us. Now, instead of, you know, destination, pages per session, things like that. because everything’s an event now, any event can become a conversion. So speaking of which, one of the really nice things if you remember, in Google Analytics, three, we would enjoy things like this, right, where you’d have your goal set up, and you have 20, total 20 goals, lots, and lots and lots of people, you know, would use them all up and then have to start new, new views to add more goals. It was really silly. With the event model, and Alan Google Analytics for, you get 30 goals loss. But here’s what’s really cool. They’re 30 Gold slots, but because of the way events are layered with, you know, names and parameters, you could set up one match event like thank you page, and then have dozens of sub parameters under that you can slice and dice later on. But you don’t have to burn, you know, 20 Gold slots just to track like one campaign, you could actually have a meta goal with all these little tiny variables inside of it. Almost like a basket of activities that a user complete. And then you can open up that basket and dig around, say, Okay, in this meta event, like a purchase, like a newsletter subscription, like a contact form, what are all the parameters, the different things was it from this page or that page? Was it after a show to come through a certain type of tracking like, so one, easy win? Number two is, if you think about how you change, think about how you think about goals in Google Analytics, from being individual one time things to being a container in which you put different kinds of user actions. Not only do you get 50% more gold slots, in Google Analytics, for, you actually could make hundreds of different goals inside of each one as hundreds of different events. In any Google Analytics for count, you are now capped at 500 different events. Right? So you could have 500 different sub types of conversions, which should be plenty for most companies, in most cases. And if you need more than that, you might want to do some governance to figure out like, do we actually need all those? Or can they be made into sort of a hierarchy where you can track the big headlines?
John Wall 13:34
So how does that work for the golden? I mean, if you have a goal, and then you have 20 parameters under it, does it just if any one of them has tripped, the goal is considered tripped. But then you can still drill down and see the parameters? Or how does that work?
Christopher Penn 13:46
Yeah, you can, you can either create a modified event, or have those things in it. So for example, you have event name, you can add, you start adding all these different parameters based on what type of data you’re sending. And remember, because using Google Tag Manager to send the events, you can create custom fields, there are tons of custom fields, as long as it comes in with some kind of name that’s recognizable, you would then be able to plug that in here. So yeah, you can make very granular events that roll up into you know, bigger goals. Discard changes, okay. Next thing that I think is valuable in and useful and Google Analytics for that is easier than it wasn’t three is path analysis. So one of the challenges with Google Analytics three is that its path analysis was a little hard to use. And it didn’t really get you the ability to dig deep into what’s going on. So let’s go ahead and go to the analysis hub. Let’s go into a new path analysis. I’m going to go ahead and wait for this to load There we go, I’m going to change from event name to page, title and screen name. Now remember, because you’re using multiple data streams with Google Analytics, four, you could actually see hopping back and forth between the website and an app, which in itself would be cool. But just in this alone here is, for example, our Google Analytics for readiness audit. I click through that, and I can see, you know, how many people click through to the to the thank you page on that. And I can see where they went after that. And good, see where they went after that, and so on, and so forth. So I can actually do an almost infinite amount of path analysis, through my whip through our website and see what weird people go, what were the things that they checked out next. And you can even use this data to start kind of building models to be able to say like, Okay, if people go to this page, and they go to this page, what happens next? Where do they go next? If people if you want to look at like the services page, or even just the homepage, where do people go after the homepage? You know, what are the important things like, Hey, 29, people went to the contact page, you know, starting at the homepage, what happened after that the all hit, thank you. No, they didn’t, they actually went back to the homepage, so the find something that they were looking for. So you can see, you can spend a lot of time in the analysis hub, just looking at how users transit, through your website, transit through all your content, in what I think is a lot easier. If you want to get fancy, you can start to add in filters, right, you can start saying I only want to see certain kinds of event counts, for example, do I want to see see like match type, I want to see something with greater than one event. That’s I could filter out stuff where an event like a conversion maybe didn’t happen, right and start slicing and dicing duality of boiling things down. If there’s specific kinds I could filter on, on certain social channels, what is just my Facebook traffic do on my site. So all of this is inside the path analysis tool, which is part of the analysis hub? I said, I think it’s a super easy win for people who look to slice and dice and say, what things are really happening on our site? How do we use this information to make better decisions? I can say if my Facebook traffic’s coming in from a certain way. And they’re just not reaching. They’re not going where Why don’t you do it to go? Maybe I need to change what I’m sharing on Facebook, maybe I need to run some ads on Facebook.
Katie Robbert 17:25
So Chris, this is, you know, I’ll be honest, like, I’ve seen Google and explore a lot. But I’m already a little bit overwhelmed with the amount that you’ve shown us in the very short amount of time. So I wanted to sort of pause for a second, we did have a question. Let’s see if I can pull this up. So the question was, do you recommend setting up a new separate container or account in GTM? for your new ga for property, or just adding ga for tags to your existing container? And so I think, can we break that down a little bit in terms of what even is the Google Tag Manager container? And sort of what this all means? Because I think there’s a lot to unpack, especially if you’re not as familiar with Tag Manager?
Christopher Penn 18:10
That’s a good question. And the answer is going to depend on how many conversion events you have. So inside Google Tag Manager, the containers the bucket, right, it’s the physical piece of code that goes on your website, I guess it’s not really physical, because virtual but it’s, it’s the logical entity that goes on your website. And you put stuff in that bucket and tags and triggers, essentially, you know, what are you telling Tag Manager to listen for? And then what are you telling Tag Manager to go and do? That’s a trigger and attack. Because all of your goals and configuration for sending these events happens in Tag Manager, if you have, you know, a modest number of existing goals and things right now. I would say keep it all in one, Google Tag Manager container, right. On the other hand, if you’re an organization where you have 15, Google Analytics accounts that are all properly set up, and the other is 22 views, and this and that, and everybody needs their own thing, then yeah, logically, you might want to separate out and have a ga for container just for g4, because you’re going to have a lot of event tags in there, you’re going to have a lot of triggers in there. And so I would say, if you’re using more than one property in ga three right now, or if you’re using more than five views in ga three right now, you probably would want to think about, you know, setting up that separate ga for container just at least in in the initial stage because you want to do some testing. Katie said at the top of the show, do not just go turn off ga three, you’ll be really unhappy if you do that. But you would want to build maybe a test environment even in a separate container, just see how things are working without blowing up your main account. One of the most awesome tools is this Chrome, extend Try remember the name of it GTM copy paste is the name of the extension you’ll find in the Chrome Store. And one of the things that you can do with GTM, copy paste, which I think is absolutely brilliant, is you can take existing tags and triggers and copy them to a clipboard, and then copy and paste them to another Google Tag Manager account. So if there’s a list of things that you know that you’re eventually want to port over, it’s like maybe a master environment, you could do it that way, you can also export the entire container important pieces of it, but that’s a little more technical. And you better be good at JSON. This is like just copy and paste from one account to another. So that would be my advice. If you’ve already got a complex gap setup, you’re probably going to a want a testing environment for ga four. And you may want to have a totally separate ga for container.
Katie Robbert 20:49
Got it? And so this, this report looks a lot. So the path analysis report looks a lot like the behavior flow in Google Google Analytics three. So it looks like it’s functioning roughly the same way. One of the challenges with that behavior flow is that it doesn’t translate well into something like Data Studio, which is a question that we’re often asked is how do I get that information, emailed to me or in a more automated way or regularly, and you know, this might be your win? Number three, or it might just be a curveball question that I’ve asked you, you still
Christopher Penn 21:25
can’t do that you still can’t put in Data Studio. That’s one of those things that that is, it’s just a limitation of the interface, right? There’s just no good way to put even something that seems pretty straightforward like that. It just for whatever reason, data SEO does not support those types of diagrams. And I kind of understand that in the sense that the path analysis really is an exploratory tool, right? It is not, when you’re handing someone reporting in Data Studio, you’re not necessarily asking them to, to explore on their own, you’re asking them to review the results and then take an action. And so it’s a kind of a different use case, in days to where you might want to build it as a couple of tables. I know, for clients, we’ve had to build this, you know, a replica of it with a series of tables tied together. But really, if someone wants to do that little exploration they should be doing in the BI tool itself. Now that said, you can do a little bit of you can download the the PDF of the this flow itself. You can also add people to your visualizations here that so they can go check it out. It’s still not, you know, go go pop this in today’s Studio and have fun with it is just there just is no functionality for that.
Unknown Speaker 22:49
Got it,
Katie Robbert 22:50
which is a frustrating thing for people because that’s probably one of the top questions we get.
Christopher Penn 22:56
Yep, men. And Google has said, No, you There are plenty of templates in the template gallery too, for stuff that you can explore different types of use cases and simulations and things. So if you want to go poking around, there is a lot to see in here. It’s worth spending some time just enjoying enjoying those templates. But win number three has nothing to do with any of that win. Number three is this. Have you ever had the experience? I know I have. We are Google Analytics is sounds working, right? And then you go into ga and you know, a week or two weeks later, like I look, all my traffic’s zeros. That’s weird, right? I don’t love that I don’t love when that happens. I also would like to know, on a more regular basis, like, Hey, is something happening that is worth paying attention to like, Did my site suddenly get a whole bunch of new traffic or did you know my my books just start selling a whole bunch of new copies. And there hasn’t really been a good system for that in place. In ga three, there’s been plenty of add ons and ways to write code to do that with the API, but nothing for the average end user. Well, in ga four, you now have these automated insights, which you can find on the home screen, and go to these automated insights. And one of these is the Create button. And the Create button is where you can build your own automations. And this one, I think is so much fun. Let’s create a brand new one here. I want to create something as evaluated daily. I could even do hourly, if you want to do all users and I want to look at things like let’s do sessions. And I want to look at a percentage decrease more than 90%. Right? compared to yesterday. What we want to call this name, we’re gonna call it Hey, who broke da? It’s gonna notify me and it’s very simple customer insights going to run every single day and will raise his hand an alert like hey, it looks like 90% of your traffic’s gone, right. That means I should probably go check to make sure We didn’t push a new version of the website or something, and totally blow up Google Analytics, right? So from a data quality perspective, that’s it. That’s a huge win for just for somebody to be listening, go, Oh, look, I got an email saying the website’s not sending any data that that sucks. And as you can see, because these are all customizable, you could do something like, if you have revenue, for example, it’s like on my, on my personal website, I want to know, if I’ve had a, you know, maybe a greater than 25% increase in revenue since yesterday. Did somebody start sharing my book?
Unknown Speaker 25:37
Who bought this?
Christopher Penn 25:41
So notifying me of any of my KPIs? You know, is there an anomaly Did something happen that I need to know about? This, just very simple, though, it’ll send you an email. And also, if you have the Google Analytics app on your phone, it’ll ping your app to the notification saying, like, Hey, your automated insight fired, and it’s super handy to go, Ah, something’s up, I’d like to know that something’s up. So one of the keys to do is to make sure that you have all your goals and events set up properly, and ga for and you have a few of these automated insights, just general best practices, make sure your site’s not down, and then have an anomaly alert on your KPIs to let you know, hey, something’s up, go. Go look at the website.
Katie Robbert 26:24
A couple questions for you, Chris. In terms of this KPI alert, do you think that it makes sense for when companies and marketing teams are planning larger campaigns, you know, especially around the holidays, it might make sense to set up that hourly alert, you know, if they’re, if they’re spending a lot of money and are hoping for an influx of traffic to their website, that might be, you know, a really easy way to make sure things are still working and working as expected. So is it something where you can turn on and off and create these alerts, like, pretty easily? Is there a limit to the number of alerts?
Christopher Penn 27:04
I believe you’re limited to 100 of them? Which again, you know, is if you’ve got 100 notifications on your phone? Yeah, happy? But no, I think that makes total sense to say, yeah, there’s, if you know, for example, you’re about to spend a million bucks on an ad campaign. Probably not a bad idea to have some monitoring, you know, at the our level ago, yeah, you’re, you’re spending money not getting anything for it.
Katie Robbert 27:29
Makes sense? The The next question is probably more of an opinion question. Because I don’t think we have a data to support any sort of like actual statement about this. But what is the likelihood that someone has a Google Analytics account on their phone, and they’re checking it regularly versus a marketer who’s just going in to Google Analytics maybe once or twice a month?
Christopher Penn 27:54
It depends. I mean, it depends on how important it is to you. And, you know, one of the things we always say with KPIs is a KPI is a number for which you get a bonus or not. Right? And if you are, if you really care about that number, and it’s something can be measured in Google Analytics, I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to know about that. Now, that said, I’m probably in the minority of marketers who have this on my phone, and have notifications turned on. But I also am a nerd. So I’m totally okay with that.
John Wall 28:26
Well, the big tip, too, is it’s, you know, what can you do with that? I mean, I think that’s the thing. You know, if you get that 80% traffic down you that’s because you need to run to a server and see what’s going on. And same deal if you’re in communications, if you get a social media fire alarm, you know, then yeah, you know, it’s time to start rustling up the troops and see who said something stupid. But if it’s, you know, if it’s just like, raw traffic is up or down, that kind of stuff. Maybe you’re only checking once a month.
Christopher Penn 28:53
Yep. And that’s a really good point, john, because remember that the Google Analytics measurement protocol allows you to send any data to Google Analytics and have it be tracked. So you could absolutely take something from like your social media monitoring system, tie it to the GA API, and then set up an automated insight and say, like, hey, it looks like your, let’s say, your executive said something stupid on Twitter again, you know, the little bell goes off, like, ah, heck,
Katie Robbert 29:18
you guys glad that I’m not that executive?
Christopher Penn 29:21
On a daily basis? Brian has a really good question from YouTube asking if there is anything that’s critical nga three, the J four doesn’t. And the answer to that is sort of, there are some things that have been left by the wayside in ga for Channel groupings. For example, God, channel groups have been replaced just by medium. Google said, Yep, you just got to use medium from now because fundamentally, that’s what you’ve been doing anyway. And, and so that’s got those individual aggregates like users and sessions things those are all gone because everything’s an event now. So that’s kind of one of the things where if you have reporting that exists today, on features that have been deprecated, you know, one of the things you’re going to have to manage is the process for getting that data and bringing it back in. So just to give you a short list of things, if views are gone, most filters are gone. Channel groupings, the old event tracking with category action, label value is gone. I think this other things that are gone, and everything now exists in nga for. And if you are a tech savvy shop, there, you may have the Big Query database set up on the back end, that allows you to look at your raw Google Analytics data, which by the way, is not an easy one. But it’s a huge win. If you if you have the technical capability, you can dig into the raw hit level data for Google Analytics, which is just a data nerds absolute dream. A lot of the reports that you’ve built for ga three, obviously will need updating and me not only connecting to a new data source, like in a Data Studio, but the fundamental metrics themselves have changed. So you’ll have to mess that up until about a month ago, you couldn’t get source medium in Data Studio for ga four, which is kind of a big problem. But Google has since fixed that, which is good. But I would say we have
John Wall 31:26
to set get rid of all that weirdness then where you would run a report where one was session based and another was event based, and like the report would just zero out because it was different data sets.
Christopher Penn 31:37
Exactly right. So those those scopes of user session hit and product are gone, right? Everything is an event now. And so you now have unified data, which is a big deal, right? It allows you to actually look at your data, you know, in the same scope, and that that part’s really nice. The point that’s not really nice is that it is also just really painful to look at the raw data if you’re accustomed to doing it. So just to give you a quick sense of what that looks like. Let’s go ahead and shrink this down. So this is Google’s BigQuery, you can see, now everything is literally just rows in a table, you can see what people have been doing the source the medium, and scroll over here. And you can see this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of data fields that you can, you know, depending on your ga setup, and how many custom parameters you’ve set up, maybe in here, but it is all in one big flat table. So to your point, john, the idea of user level metrics and versus paisible metrics are gone. Yeah. So again, I would classify this as a big win, but not an easy win.
Katie Robbert 32:51
It’s, you know, it’s one of those things where there’s a lot of information to take in, and it can be super overwhelming. I mean, Google Analytics three is overwhelming, if you’re not familiar with the system. And so now, Google Analytics four is so different, that I can see where this is going to be, you know, a bit of a struggle to get people from one system to the other, or even just getting ga for setup. You know, so little plug, you know, one of the things that we do at Trust Insights is that we will help you on that journey. So we will do a full audit of Google Analytics, three Tag Manager and get Google Analytics for setup and running in parallel to your three systems. So we can just run in the background and collect data. The you know, as we mentioned, the benefit of doing that is that, you know, you can start to see, is the data matching up? Am I collecting the data correctly? Or do I have disparities between the two systems, and this is a great time to work that out before Google sunsets, Google Analytics three. So if you need help with that, definitely, you know, reach out to us, ping us find us in slack. There’s no shortage of ways to reach any one of us if you have questions, or want help with that.
Christopher Penn 34:08
One of the other things I think is important is to keep in mind that architecture change, right? Tag Manager is where you do data collection. Google Analytics is where you do your actual analysis. In Data Studio. That’s where you do your reporting. So to the extent that you could start a change management process in your company to get people used to the idea, like yeah, you’re going to be using Google Data Studio to get your reports, usually dashboards, use these things, then the transition to ga four will be a little bit easier, because you won’t have users of the previous Google Analytics 370 jumping into for, like, everything’s gone, because that was everyone’s first reaction when they went in. Whereas if they’re in Data Studio, you can change the back end data source. And, you know, with some adaptation to the report for the connectors, it’ll still be the report they’re used to seeing. And so and Google has made it pretty clear that Where we as marketing analysts, as marketing, technologists should be putting reports for the end user to say like, hey, let’s, let’s just go ahead and make sure that you know, the users have a friendly, easy environment to work in, that doesn’t have too many buttons that they can’t break, and that they get the information that they need to make good decisions.
John Wall 35:23
Yeah, how’s it for the user management? Will all ga three accounts just automatically have access to ga four? Is this your chance to they already didn’t house? they already do is it’s you’ve got to go clean it up?
Christopher Penn 35:33
Yes, you probably should say Brian has another question in here, recommended all teens depart search for properties to start gathering data for the rest of his address. I need them to set big arrays. Well, if you want the Big Query data, Yes, you do. Because as with all things, Google nothing is ever retroactive. So it is something that you must just set up if you think you want to use that data later on. Bear in mind, once you start using BigQuery, there is a cost to it, right? BigQuery is pay as you go part of Google Cloud. And, you know, the costs are not overwhelming. But they you know, as the database gets bigger, you get you get to pay more. Now, for a company like Trust Insights, where we get, you know, 10 or 15,000 visitors a month, that’s, you know, it’s gonna cost us like a buck 80. But if you are Amazon, right, you’re gonna be talking about hundreds of millions of visitors a day. And every action and event they take, that’s going to add up. Same with events and and things, the more events you set up, the faster your database grows. So if you don’t want to incur that cost, you may not want to set up a query. But if you want access to the data, because you know, for sure you’re going to be doing data analysis, then yeah, it was set up earlier sooner rather than later.
Katie Robbert 36:48
One of the things that we haven’t talked about a whole lot, and I don’t know how relevant it is, is what does that mean for users of Google Analytics? 360. So Google Analytics, three, slash universal. There’s the free version that the majority of people are on, but then there’s the paid version of the very expensive version of Google Analytics 360. What is that? Where does ga four fit in with that? And, you know, what is the difference between free and the 360?
Christopher Penn 37:16
You know, I don’t actually know we’d have to go ask our friends over at Google. What’s new in the Google Marketing Platform for for 360? Because one of the nice things about the previous version of 360 was it was on sample data mean, you got access to all the raw data. And now if you set a big way, you still have access to it now in the free version, so I don’t know you’d have to check the product listings.
Katie Robbert 37:40
All right, we are on it, we will get back to people with some kind of an answer.
Christopher Penn 37:46
Okay, so folks don’t have any more questions we’ll be doing, you’ll be seeing a lot more of ga for in the next, you know, 12 to 18 months as companies pivot, and you’re going to see more good use cases of it. Right now, you know, it was released in October, people are still getting their feet under them on this thing and trying to learn how to use it. And be careful the mistake of trying to make j four into something it’s not right. It is an analysis tool. It’s not a reporting tool, make sure that you’re reporting it to a Data Studio, and you and your users will be much happier. Any final parting words?
Unknown Speaker 38:22
Get ga for setup, and if you need help, contact us.
Unknown Speaker 38:27
get rolling.
Christopher Penn 38:30
Thanks for watching, everyone. 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 Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast and a weekly email newsletter at Trust insights.ai slash newsletter. got questions about what you saw on today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.
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