So What? Google Analytics 4 Migration

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.

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In this week’s episode of So What? we do a live migration of Marketing Over Coffee’s Universal Analytics account to Google Analytics 4, including goal setup, Tag Manager, integration with other parts of the Google Marketing Platform, and much, much more. Catch the replay here:

 

In this episode you’ll learn: 

• The major differences between Google Analytics 3 & 4
• How to set yourself up for migration
• Pitfalls to be aware of

Upcoming Episodes:

• TBD!

 

Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/

AI-Generated Transcript:

Christopher Penn 0:23

Happy Thursday everyone this is so what’s the marketing analytics insights live show this week our fearless CEO Katie is taking some much needed time off to go.

I think it was stalking, like small rabbits or something in the in the back with I don’t

John Wall 0:38

know, deep woods somewhere.

Yeah, that was very deep woods.

Christopher Penn 0:41

So while she is off enjoying her time this week, we’re going to have some fun with Google Analytics 4.

Specifically, we’re going to migrate one of our websites, the marketing over coffee website, from GA three GA for leaving GA three in place, and stuff.

So before we begin, we have to have a quick birthday shout out marketing over coffee, the podcast that John and I do turned 15 This week

John Wall 1:09

did were way too old.

That’s just all there is to it.

We’ve just don’t we are dinosaurs in this world.

So.

Christopher Penn 1:16

So with a Google Analytics, 4, migration is like eight or nine major parts, you have to go through this some users goals, conversions, legal stuff, platform infrastructure, business infrastructure, your GA three instance for Tag Manager since GA, for instance, Google Data Studio, and then alternative analytic systems and stuff.

So let’s get started.

I’m gonna go ahead and just pull up the marketing over coffee website here in a second screen while we chat this through.

So one of the first things that we have to do with any kind of website is figure out what the goals are.

So John, what are the major goals for marketing over coffee from a primary and secondary perspective?

John Wall 2:02

Yeah, I mean, the ultimate goal, of course, is our sponsors getting leads, right.

I mean, that’s actually what pays the bills.

But as far as the web traffic, we’ve, you know, just generic traffic and getting to the pages.

And then we do have newsletter signups.

Which, when you mentioned last week, we’re going to do this I mentioned a probably broken because we changed vendors a couple of times on that.

So it’ll be interesting to see how bad that office.

But yeah, that’s really, you know, traffic newsletter sign up.

And then of course, traffic for sponsor hits.

Christopher Penn 2:29

Gotcha.

So would you classify as a goal something like, people going to click on you know, get get marketing or coffee on Apple podcasts or Google podcasts? would those be goals too?

John Wall 2:41

Yeah.

And we had back solved a little while ago and $8 a lead was the price that we had come up with, we kind of knew that, you know, based on what we’ve made in previous years that if we get qualified traffic, those people are usually worth about eight bucks to us.

Christopher Penn 2:55

Okay, got it.

So from a goal perspective, then we want we obviously, do you care about traffic, we do care about the newsletters.

Let’s take a quick look at the news.

Ooh.

So this is iframed.

In.

John Wall 3:07

Yeah, that’s to be that’s a stop yet, because we just transitioned off digital about three months ago.

And so that’s up there until I get ghost up and running.

So yeah, right now I’m just collecting them on a Google spreadsheet for now.

Christopher Penn 3:22

Gotcha.

Okay.

Well, this is something that can’t easily be tracked, because framed in so they can’t match that the site does have Gravity Forms.

You guys put up a gravity form on site, and then you can track that natively?

John Wall 3:35

Yeah, that would be in fact, yeah, that would probably be better, because I could get notifications that actually make sure it’s working, as opposed to me not looking at the spreadsheet that’s being sold.

Christopher Penn 3:44

So once again, it’s the cobblers kids have have no she absolutely.

Yes.

I mean, it works.

Give me a thumbs up.

John Wall 3:51

I am collecting email addresses.

It works.

Christopher Penn 3:53

Fair enough.

Okay, other parts of the Google Marketing Platform.

The site does use Tag Manager.

Right? It does.

Yeah, yeah, that’s okay.

What about search console?

John Wall 4:06

Huh? Yeah, it’s on.

I haven’t looked that long.

But you know, last time I looked, it was clean.

But it’s been a good five or six months since I looked last.

Christopher Penn 4:14

Got it.

Okay, let’s see, do I have access to that search console account? If I don’t, I can’t do.

John Wall 4:24

We may have to.

I have done href site health.

That one was last done like about two months ago.

And we got the health way up in the 90s.

So that was solid.

But

Christopher Penn 4:33

God, it looks like I do have search console access to the to the site.

So we’re, we should be all set with that there too.

One of the big things with GA for migrations is you need to have admin on any of the systems that you want to tie into it.

So other parts of Google Marketing Platform like Tag Manager, Search Console, Google ads and stuff.

If you want them integrated with GA for you, you’ve got to have access to those systems.

So I feel like Other than the newsletters, you have been kind of in a walk, it was one of the contact form.

Is that of any value? I mean, I know a lot of its people just pitching.

John Wall 5:08

Yeah, yeah, we get pitches.

So it’s Yeah, I don’t put any extra value on that.

So no need.

Christopher Penn 5:15

Okay, so not necessarily, I guess we’ll just leave it as it’s not bad to have that as a goal to see if people are still interacting, but certainly not something we’re gonna stick $1 value amount on, unless it’s to fund the comedy episode of terrible pitches.

Okay.

So first things first.

And these are considerations for your company.

Do you as the marketer have the ability to to sign legally binding documents with Google? around data protection? If you don’t, you need to make sure you get legal luiten sooner rather than later.

Second, what governs your marketing data collection? So marketing over coffee is technically a US Corporation, right? Yes.

Okay, but it’s not like a, like a French Corporation.

John Wall 6:10

Yeah, no, we’re not like anything sketchy based out of some part of the world, we all write the classic Delaware LLC.

Christopher Penn 6:17

Okay.

So that would mean that while there aren’t any deed agreements that directly cover marketing over coffee, as a as an operating business entity, there are some data privacy ones that do apply.

So California’s laws would apply, obviously, because we have listeners in California GDPR would apply for any listeners who are physically located within the European Economic Area.

And then P IPL for any listeners who are based in China.

But from a legal perspective, you’ll be the person who agree to things.

Let’s see other stuff platform stuff.

The site does use SSL.

So that’s all set.

Any other domains that we would classify into the marketing over coffee family?

John Wall 6:59

Not anymore.

No, there was an email domain for the email provider.

But that’s it.

So we’re back down to the single site.

Christopher Penn 7:05

Okay, cool.

Are there any systems and referrals that we know we should ignore? So again, the for some companies, if you have Zendesk, you probably have a lot of traffic coming to and from Zendesk, and it’s not, for marketing purposes, not terribly helpful for obviously, for customer service measurement.

That’s something you’d want to do separately.

John Wall 7:25

Yeah, no, I don’t even bother with my own IP, dynamic IP here.

So and it’s not like I’m pounding the site more than five times a week.

So Okay.

Christopher Penn 7:35

In Google Analytics itself, what reports do you focus on? So if we go into the marketing over coffee domain, you see the lovely GA four warning there? Where do you spend your time in the app as the primary user?

John Wall 7:49

Yeah, I you know, the behavior tab is big, because I like to see which content is actually pulling and doing things.

I do look at the conversions just for some raw numbers.

But really, that’s about it.

You know, we’re not so huge that the real time gets a lot of action.

And yeah, you know, really, I just spent more time over an H refs trying to clean up errors and broken links.

That was kind of like the project for the last year, so I don’t spend a ton of time over here.

Christopher Penn 8:14

Okay, got so in terms of things that you might be sorely missing, probably not a ton that you like, oh, my gosh, you know, this this obscure feature from GA three, it’s going away is my beloved insights.

Okay?

John Wall 8:27

Yeah, no, no, we’re definitely get your raw traffic.

And that’s, that’s 90% of it.

Christopher Penn 8:31

Got it.

Alright, so let’s do this.

We need to get started.

The first thing we have to do is we have to create the new GA for property.

I’m assuming the accounts that have access to this as everybody who’s in here still need to have access to scout like this one, I don’t think needs to be in this miscellaneous.

Okay.

I think that looks good for the site.

There’s the Trust Insights stuff.

John Wall 8:53

That’s, yeah, ti token.

Okay, so yeah, no, everybody else we know.

So that’s okay.

Christopher Penn 8:58

So let’s go ahead and create a new property.

This will be called MSE, GA, for fun.

We’re gonna go with New York time, US dollars, the currency.

We don’t want the advanced option.

We don’t need that.

We are a small business.

And we’re doing this mainly to measure lead generation.

Optimize by sight, measure customer engagement.

That sounds good.

Okay, now, the next part is to set up our data stream.

Do we still have mobile apps?

John Wall 9:35

Yeah, that’s another good that actually just happened three days ago, I was hitting the mobile app.

And I got the classic iOS, hey, the developer, this app is fallen woefully behind and needs to figure out their problems.

So actually, let me check on a newer platform because that was an older device.

Yeah, no, it still says it needs to be updated.

And it won’t even let me Oh, Open it.

So it has to be like four or five versions who don’t have a mobile app? Yeah, no, because it used to be like you could down, you know, you could open it up.

And they would just say like, well, it may or may not work.

Good luck.

But this is the follow on like, No, we’re not even gonna let you start

Christopher Penn 10:15

it.

Okay, so we’re gonna do just WebDAV.

If we’d had the mobile app working, we could have talked about that, again, setup, but not so much.

Right? We do have SSL in place and marketing over coffee calm, we’re gonna call this MSE web MSE web stream.

Enhanced measurement is turned on, just make sure everything is here is is all set, recreate that stream.

Okay, that’s interesting.

Good job, Google.

Just turn off all the ad blocking widgets here.

Normally, I’d be doing this on a different site.

But okay, there’s our measurement ID.

So let’s copy that we’re gonna come back to Google Analytics, 4 in just a bit, but we need to move over to tag manager because now we have to start creating all the GA for stuff.

So first things first, let’s check our built in tags, make sure they’re okay.

Yep, they’re all on which I personally like doesn’t slow things down.

There’s the MSE J, which I’m going to rename to GA three.

And let’s create ourselves a new constant.

And we’ll see GA for constant.

Because of the way Google Analytics 4 set up, there’s no longer a a built in setting here.

There’s one here, this applies only to GA three.

So for GA four, you just got to use a constant you put in, you put that in, hit save.

Okay.

Next things.

Next we need to create the base tag.

So GA for works by having a base tag, and then having event tags that tell GA for to do stuff above and beyond the base.

So let’s create our first so for bass tag.

And this is our GF for configuration base tag.

And our measurement ID this is where our constant EP comes into play.

I always do that because one day you will fat finger that and then you’ll have to wonder why.

Let’s see, do we need any thing else there’s no additional consent required.

And this is going to trigger everywhere okay so now the the base tag as in which will count your basic page use and stuff like that.

We now need to look at our trigger collection and and our goals and figure out what stuff do we need to set up so we’ve got our Android and iTunes, link clicks to take you to those relevant apps.

We’ve got it so we’ll track any click that goes off website got download the mp3 Let’s get a placeholder in here for NEWSLETTER Subscribe.

And this can be a form submission.

And let’s go to the site here.

Christopher Penn 13:26

Okay, so it’s newsletter.

Some forms on the page URL contains, like, that’s what works work until we switch it over to Gravity Forms.

But we got that in place.

Let’s see.

One, two, got these three things we’ve got contact form needs to go in.

Let’s get the contact form the thank you page URL

Christopher Penn 14:12

okay, we actually don’t have a thank you page, we just do a in page change.

So let’s do Thank you.

Contact.

Thank you.

Now we’re going to do our form submission on some forms where the page URL contains contact.

Alright, so now we’ve got our major goal completions or conversions.

Tags set up.

Now we have to create the corresponding triggers.

So we’re going to kind of mess with any of the GA three stuff was gonna leave that A B for right now.

I’m going to rename this GA three

Christopher Penn 15:02

He, one of the things that people do the most wrong is they don’t delineate between GA three and J four.

And then your, your tag manager is just a huge big mess.

Cody asks Is The Best Practice Center page u and g for configuration tag, tag words, yes.

I’ve not seen a use case for not having the base configuration tag, also fire page you, you can obviously set it up as a separate independent event, particularly if there’s places you don’t want page use to fire you don’t want the geotags to fire at all.

Like for example, if you were doing marketing and you had a login page for existing customers, and then just the customers portal, it would make sense to just not fire pages for your marketing data stream.

Okay, so now we need to create those goals.

Those this conversion service call this GA for contact conversion.

It’s going to be our event configuration tag is the base tag and we’ll call this contact and this will trigger with our contact form thank you let’s do the newsletter next

Christopher Penn 16:27

event base tag and this is newsletter conversion save next we’re going to do let’s see the iTunes iTunes quick version I guess I’ve been called iTunes what two years now? Okay.

Call this apple conversion and outbound iTunes an android version.

Version

Christopher Penn 17:28

Okay, and outbound Android.

Okay.

And we also want to track outbound clicks, we may not necessarily want to be a conversion, but we do want to track outbound clicks for.

Christopher Penn 17:57

Because we have a lot of links in the show notes and stuff to different vendors and partners and stuff.

But I’d like to know who they are.

In fact, now I think about that.

Let’s add to that event, let’s add a value and then add the Click URL.

And that way we know we’ll be able to tell from the event data what how about the clicks again, clicked on.

Unknown Speaker 18:23

That’s huge, right? I

Christopher Penn 18:24

mean, there’s no way to do that in GA three is there? Oh yeah, there’s, you can do that GMP.

Hey, you set that up as an event just to grab it.

Yeah, it’s an event based stuff.

The event model is not super different, except that the naming is a lot more flexible now.

But functionally, not super, super different.

Alright, the other thing that we need to do is inside Tag Manager is now it is now a best practice to enable the consent overview that allows you to review consent for all your tags and stuff which is is really really important.

So we’ve gone through now is set up our conversions for GA four we’re gonna come back to tag manager in a bit we’re now we need to actually start configuring the sucker.

So we don’t currently use any connected site tags.

If we did like Google optimized or something we want to put that in here.

Let’s see for me measure protocol if we were going to do stuff with the measurement protocol, like push data into it, we would want to look at that.

You okay, if I hate say yes, Google.

Sure.

Alright, are signing legally binding agreements on the air? It’s great.

Let’s see universal we do want to click Universal analytics events.

This one’s a really big deal.

So there’s some vendors like with Calendly for example Calendly will send a like a an appointment booked gap events.

They don’t send a GA for event right now.

So if you turn this on, you can collect those, those J three events and have them passed into GA for it which is really handy.

Unknown Speaker 19:54

Will that stay even past sunset or? Probably because

Christopher Penn 19:59

they Like I said, there’s a ton of services out there.

Now, I’d hope those services or at least the more modern ones, would,

John Wall 20:06

they would come around.

Yeah, that’s good point.

Christopher Penn 20:09

Exactly.

Let’s go ahead and turn on marketing over coffee as for cross domain.

We don’t have any internal traffic.

Don’t have any unwanted referrals yet, don’t think session timeout, we 30 minutes is the generally six best practice, we’re going to leave that alone.

So this data stream, this web stream is now all set.

Let’s look into our property settings.

So industry, what do we do for the industry? Business? Industrial?

John Wall 20:40

Yeah, yeah, cuz I don’t think they have a marketing tech or anything now.

Christopher Penn 20:44

Okay.

Save on that.

See, access should be.

Yep.

Looks good.

Okay, let’s do our data settings data collection, we need to turn on Google signals, signing more legally binding things.

Let it rip.

Let it rip.

Yep.

All right.

So we’ve got that the user data collection is involved acknowledge.

So there’s a whole long paper about House, the, the client ID and Google Analytics can then be paired to other stuff that’s worth reading, it’s in the support documents is really awkward.

Google has so much useful documentation about GA for but it’s in the developers portal.

Where, where your average market is not going to see it like here’s a long list of metrics in GA three.

And here’s the equivalent to GA four that’s not published anywhere, easy to find.

We have in fact, I think I put it in the slack group.

I say a week or two ago, if you’ve not joined the slack, go to trust insights.ai/analytics.

For marketers, we’re sharing stuff there.

Alright, so we’ve got collection on retention, right, crank this as far as it’ll go, which is the 14 months for that data.

There.

It’s just keeping those hit logs.

Ga four will keep aggregated data past that.

But it will not keep individual event data.

So if there’s stuff you’ll ever want to look back on.

This will give you 14 months.

And then if you want more than that, you have got to set up the BigQuery integration.

You got a big query? Yeah.

Yep.

So we don’t have any filtering to do right now.

Let’s check our reporting identity, we want to make sure it’s by user and device attribution settings.

The default should be cross channel data driven, and then the windows wide open their property change history is it’s just us tooling around.

Do we have a Google Ads account?

John Wall 22:51

We do.

I don’t know if it’s linked, though.

Because like, I have my own personal Google Ads account.

I think that’s one that I’m actually using.

Christopher Penn 22:58

Okay, that’s fine.

We don’t use ad manager, Big Query.

Let’s put a big query project in place.

Let’s use

Unknown Speaker 23:10

there’s one there.

Oh, yeah.

Christopher Penn 23:11

Look at that.

It’s random.

Question is, do I have his billing setup on it? Billing may not be.

Okay, total estimated daily events.

So a 1 million daily limit, including average, so I think we’re gonna be okay.

We’re daily.

Okay.

That looks good.

It looks like I don’t have billing turned on that project.

So there’s a marketing over coffee project in GCP.

But it’s not, it’s not set to Bill.

Right.

What that means is you get two sets of tables in BigQuery, you get the previous day’s captured data, and you get a live table as well.

So if you’re doing stuff with real time analytics in BigQuery, you want both turned on.

And stubble the cost, which, you know, for settling Marketo a coffee, the cost of this is going to be somewhere between $1 and $2 a month is like it’s not a huge deal.

Now if you’re like CNN, it could get really expensive, right? Okay, so we’ve got BigQuery all linked up.

If you don’t have administrative access to your company’s Google Cloud Platform account, you’re going to need to do get it if you want to be able to to do this integration.

And again, this is to get you event data passed the 14 month rolling window.

Let’s see search console.

Let’s link up our search console here.

Marketing over coffee.

Next, select the web stream this one and submits in our search console data will be linked into Google Analytics 4 as well.

Okay, So that’s all of the configuration for GA four so we’ve now got it in place it should be receiving data because we’ve published the tags and tag match so let’s go into reports real quick and just see if there’s any real time activity and while we’re at it let’s go into preview mode in Tag Manager

Christopher Penn 25:36

Okay, so the page is loading

Unknown Speaker 26:07

I would have to kick the cash there

Christopher Penn 26:11

might not even be that it might also be that I need to allow that Let’s retry There we go.

Tag assistance now connected.

Alright, so what’s fired G three tag as far as GA for bass tag is fired StackAdapt of clarity.

Now let’s go we’ll reopen the debug window

Christopher Penn 26:45

Yeah.

Let’s go ahead and click on newsletter

Christopher Penn 26:57

and accept our cookies so curiosity let’s do a test

Christopher Penn 27:11

okay, yeah, so did not, did not register at all.

Okay,

John Wall 27:15

right.

Yeah.

So that switches to gravity.

That’s not gonna fire.

Exactly.

Christopher Penn 27:19

Okay, so we know J four is there and look, we’ve got some traffic, which is good.

Okay, next thing we need to do is we need to actually put those events and conversions that we that we did in Tag Manager into the interface so we’re going to go to Configure have events go away.

Okay, and we’re going to declare just for thoroughness, we’re going to clear those events Apple conversion event name event name equals that right that’s how to do one for Android

Christopher Penn 28:08

Watson the newsletter

Christopher Penn 28:17

contact

Christopher Penn 28:25

and what did I call it other one was the outbound G for outbound clicks, I call upon click event

Christopher Penn 28:41

Okay, I’ll be parameters of the source.

That’s correct.

Alright, so now we’ve got our conversion events declared.

We now need to go in and designate though, so I’m going to go ahead and do the same.

Anything that has converged in the name we’re going to recycle here.

We’re not going to do the Alpine click one is in a conversion event.

Christopher Penn 29:24

Save, go away.

Okay, so now our conversions are set up.

Do we have any audiences that we defined in the old site? Any specific audiences or segments? No, I don’t believe so.

All right.

It might be interesting to set up a couple of audiences.

Let’s do one let’s create a custom audience.

We’re gonna set to maximum limit.

And let’s call this apple audience.

For fun If we have an event

Christopher Penn 30:07

where’s my customer that’s

Christopher Penn 30:14

holding not that I hate Wednesday, they’re here that we could set up a event events.

So like, if you click on the Apple iTunes button, you can enroll you in an apple audience versus an Android audience and designate different users that way.

Can’t do it now.

It’s not there yet.

Okay.

We don’t have any custom dimensions and metrics on the old site.

I don’t think.

I don’t think so.

It’s just the new site.

And then let’s go ahead and I don’t have the chrome debug extension on

John Wall 30:50

here.

I was just say, so that you have to have an extension on to make that stuff trigger.

Christopher Penn 30:54

Yeah, you have to debug, but then you can see what’s happening.

But given that we are seeing stuff in the real time environment here.

Yeah, we know it’s at least working.

Yeah, we just got some stuff working.

The Seth Godin podcast is always doing well.

Okay, so I think there’s anything else like check the checklist here all that Alright, so we don’t have any filters? No, sir.

So tracking

Christopher Penn 31:31

alright.

So next thing to do is in the website itself, we want to install a backup system.

Because one of the things that is kind of an issue Oh, Cody is question prevent to have parameters surprises you for larger timeframe less they must you have to create custom dimensions you should see the event parameter data accompanying the event itself.

Right.

So because it’s it’s tied to the event record within within the backend data structure.

Now that said, you have essentially have, you know, a sort of session level, event scoping, and then user level event scoping.

If you want to, I think have more flexibility, it wouldn’t hurt to make it a custom dimension.

Okay, the next thing I do is in the website itself, installing a backup system, because one of the things that has happened, obviously, you know, a lot of folks like well, this is a challenge is to have a parallel analytic system of some kind.

So if you’re using WordPress, and your WordPress hosting company is is is a pretty solid company.

Like we use WP Engine, which can tolerate all sorts of abuse, the one of the things that you may want to do is install another analytics package.

So I’m going to install the open source matomo analytics.

This is not only is it free is an open source, but it runs on your server so it’s not hosted elsewhere.

Which means that all the data stays on your server and from a privacy perspective the data never leaves your control Alright, let’s enable tracking Alright, the price page we have other right now okay, so we should have we go into the reporting engine now.

This takes us to the matomo for marketing over coffee let’s go into Settings System general settings you don’t need us to star comm save them there.

We don’t use most of the stuff that we don’t use their Tag Manager.

The nice thing is you don’t have to use their tag manager because it’s physically installed on the server itself.

Let’s go back to our there we go go to the WP settings here add tracking code default tracking we do want to track we do want to track four fours and save

Christopher Penn 34:52

no other folks need access.

Okay privacy stuff exclusions If we want to exclude like administrators like us, we could exclude them.

If we want to geolocation more accurate, we could install MaxMind, which we probably should do at some point.

But now that means we have a second web analytics systems running in parallel with Google Analytics.

So if for example, in a year and a half, the EU says, We disallow and Google Analytics completely, which is a nonzero possibility, because of GDPR compliance, then you definitely want to have a system that is not Google also tracking your site as well.

They can put things together.

And as people’s ad blockers get better, you also want to have something that can can pick up the data.

Okay, um, let’s see, go down the rest of the checklist here.

I think the only thing I guess we could do it would be this a dashboard for it and stuff.

You wanted to put together a dashboard.

Let’s take a look at creating one here.

And we’re going to connect to Google Analytics.

We’re going to connect to our GF moc g4 account, which Where did that go? Let’s see it in here.

Christopher Penn 36:28

It’s there.

I just can’t see it.

It’s out there.

This Okay, add that in.

Alright, let’s some basic stuff.

Let’s put up turn on the grid, set the grid to 12 and snap to the grid just because I’m obsessive like that.

Like my things to be nice.

So you said traffic, John, right.

John Wall 36:54

Yeah, drive traffic is definitely the leader.

Christopher Penn 36:56

Okay.

What kind of traffic? Do you care about? Sessions? Did you care about human beings users?

John Wall 37:06

Um, you know, we’ve always cared about sessions, not users, but I’m trying to think users would actually be more useful.

Christopher Penn 37:17

Well, yes.

And no, I mean, we make our revenue models based on sponsorship, so wouldn’t hurt to have more at times of activity, people using their eyeballs on the site.

Regardless if it’s the same person or not, because of the way people you know, the buying cycle goes, I think sessions is a fine metric.

John Wall 37:40

Yeah, yeah, I’m definitely that is.

That is what we share with advertisers.

That’s for sure.

Christopher Penn 37:43

Exactly.

The other thing is that from a an analytics perspective, knowing where a session came from, is, is useful.

Because, you know, again, we get somebody to come back over and over and over again, I would like to know, the all the different channels that that users coming from,

Unknown Speaker 38:01

yeah, where are they coming from? Definitely.

Alright.

Christopher Penn 38:05

So let’s go into what we got here for our counts.

So users says, amusingly enough, been renamed.

Well, you can there’s active users in this total users.

For the purposes of these recordings, we’re going to go with active users.

And the API documentation does detail the difference between the these because there’s a lot of things that now have these like, really, really nitpicky granular things.

And let’s do let’s do this as a time series chart.

We’ve got our date.

And I don’t need event name breakdown.

I just need the date and the active users.

So that’ll be your active user accounts.

What’s up, there’s obviously nothing to show yet because just literally just turn GFR on.

The other thing I tend to like to do for simplicity sake is to take a clone of our charts noise make little scorecards makes it easier for people to read what’s going on.

Okay, and then what other measures of conversion we carry are to be honest dashboard.

John Wall 39:19

You know, channels that you’d mentioned, my channels are we they have been corrected.

I mean, UTM management’s an issue, but it’s still good to know where stuff is coming from.

Christopher Penn 39:29

Okay, so let’s do that as a table and bar.

And so it’s interesting.

source medium used to be the sort of the standard for coding, and now it’s two separate fields, Google’s has separated them out.

And again, this is one of those things where there’s like three different sources here.

So you can see session source source and user source in the documentation, which is again in The developer section.

Session source is the source of from that particular session that you’re looking at.

The ones labeled plane source is the conversion source.

So if a conversion event happened, the sources is the the, you know, that was in play at the time of conversion.

And then user source is the first touch user source.

So it’s kind of funny that you almost have like a miniature attribution model, just the way the date is broken up.

But for this, for our purposes, we’re going to go a second source.

And then let’s get rid of dates because we don’t necessarily need that’s governed by the overall here, and then let’s then add in our medium as well.

Then our channel grouping can be thrown in.

Okay, so once again, once we get data in there, then we’ll have a nice little table telling me where your traffic is coming from.

Anything else?

John Wall 41:04

I didn’t know those are, you know, that’s like getting the lion’s share of the stuff.

That’s pretty much how many people are there? And then, you know, we did this last month that didn’t do anything.

Those are the kind of the big question.

Anything else you suggest other stuff that you’ve seen that should be in there? Well,

Christopher Penn 41:18

normally, if the conversion events were moneymakers, you would definitely have them front and center.

But obviously, we you know, we make our money differently.

So these are, you know, the, the active users really is, you know, essentially what you show to the advertiser and say like, yeah, we got got scads of people.

Right, yeah.

That? Does Libsyn have a connector for Google Data Studio?

John Wall 41:43

No, not that I’m aware of.

I mean, let me take a look and see if there’s anything new there.

But yeah, they really don’t have any outgoing stats, as far as I know.

Christopher Penn 41:51

Okay, for those listening.

Libsyn is the podcast hosting company that hosts the mp3 is

John Wall 41:58

just good, because as I’m in there, I can open up a ticket to say, When are you going to fix the app?

Christopher Penn 42:06

Oh, you know, that’s something that we forgot to put in, we forgot to put in a tag for people clicking on just the mp3 links.

That was in the old, let’s put that back two, or three, like, again, that’s because we put the actual show URLs right on the website.

Christopher Penn 42:33

I’m gonna mark that as conversion because we’re getting people to listen to the show.

And push that and then go into GA for and go back into our configuration menu.

hate these little sliding side names.

Christopher Penn 43:03

And declare that as conversion as well.

Now, the other thing, we said that we value listeners add a value of $8.

What could do any of these conversions? be things that you would attach that dollar amount to?

John Wall 43:27

I mean, we it was always just one because that’s the average amount.

You know, the reality is they’re obviously the people that listen to every single show every week are worth more than the ones that only pop in once in a while.

Right.

But that was it.

I mean, I guess we could argue that the newsletter subscribers are worth more, I’ve never done any, I guess at what the way to do that would be we would take the newsletter subscribers, just figure out how we want to portion that total income.

So if I said Well, I think newsletter subscribers are worth twice as much we could make them 16 and then the general listeners would fall to like six bucks or something like that.

Christopher Penn 44:02

Right? Okay.

Well, let’s let’s set a newsletter subscription value then.

So in here, unlike GA three, conversion data is set up in Tag Manager now.

So event parameters, we’re going to add in our currency, which is USD and we’re going to add our value which is going to be $16.

So now every time this tag fires, it’s going to fire that that value data with it.

Unknown Speaker 44:35

Yeah, that’s good to track.

Christopher Penn 44:38

And then that will show up as essentially as revenue in GA for all right.

So as of right now marketing over coffee is is now set up, GA for is running.

We’ve got our tags and our triggers and stuff all up to date.

Typically at SU you As we would, if this was a commercial client, we’d then go to different stakeholders, present the dashboards, review it the last time through with different users, make sure that the user stories that we’ve acquired from folks match up with what we’ve actually built, that the goals are all in there, and that the data is flowing properly.

But that’s the the, I would call this the actually the easy part of GFR migration, the, because the hard part for us doesn’t really exist, because it’s literally just the two of us.

But that is like, who needs access? What kind of access do they need? What are their user stories, you know, the all the different business cases the the reporting structure internally in the organization, the governance around UTM, tracking codes, all those things would be stuff that typically takes the longest for clients to get the pushing the buttons part is less is less time consuming, as long as you know what buttons to push in which order.

But it really is, is working out the configuration of who should get what.

And any other integrations like this is a very vanilla setup.

There’s no integrate needed integrations with Hubspot, or Shopify or any other crazy stuff.

And it’s just stock GA for

John Wall 46:22

Yeah, yeah, getting that straight is a huge deal.

And then how about as far as the UTM, because because we’ve already been dealing with that with a bunch of clients.

As far as you know, the old schema does not work.

So you do need to retool that whole process, right.

Christopher Penn 46:34

So the, it’s not that it doesn’t work.

The source medium codes are the two most critical ones.

And there’s only three UTM codes as shown in the interface, which is kind of obnoxious, and which is available API.

If you look in Data Studio.

If you look at the you know, sort of what’s available, you have source, you have medium, you have campaign, but other stuff like keyword and stuff, which used to be in the older js is no longer here.

So your three, the three UTM codes that are available in the API for tracking your source medium campaign.

So your naming convention has to conform to those.

And then for yield, we talked about the sort of session default channel grouping in Let’s resize this to do even so you have a session default channel grouping.

In order for traffic to be to be correctly classified, you have to use Google’s approved list of mediums, which is really what governs that.

So you can’t just kind of wing it.

So like, for example, I’ve seen people do stuff like, you know, banner ad as the source and Facebook as the medium.

And Google will not put that in a in a channel grouping, because it should be, you know, Facebook, and then either social or paid social, as you mean, you can maybe name the campaign, Facebook banner, but there’s a lot more rigor around what you do with source medium codes now.

John Wall 48:12

And so what happens if those are wrong? It’s still in the dataset, but just doesn’t show up in the interface at all? Or is it actually get ignored?

Christopher Penn 48:17

It shows up, but it won’t show up in the right channel grouping.

Like if you using channel groupings in the built in activation report, and you don’t have the good governance, the that report will be wrong.

Unknown Speaker 48:29

Yeah, it doesn’t have the data.

Christopher Penn 48:32

So what’s, what’s next steps for you, John, now that your website is is all properly things clean and

John Wall 48:41

shiny? Well, obviously, the email thing is the next big step that we need to do, I gotta get a switch over to Gravity Forms, and actually send some email too, because that’s been dragging as we’ve gone through this vendor process.

But yeah, that’s top of the list to get cleaned up.

Christopher Penn 48:56

All right, if you’ve got any questions about the stuff that we did, in this, this very rapid walkthrough, because we didn’t actually sit down and explain in detail a lot of the different settings, I suppose at some point, we probably should.

But if you’ve got questions, and he didn’t ask them in time, go to trust insights.ai/analytics For markers, and if you just want somebody to do it for ya, then contact page on the site.

Any final parting thoughts?

John Wall 49:25

No, just you know, you’ve got the clock is ticking.

You have about 14 months.

So and a big thing too, is, you know, this announcements now so that you can have it on at least get it turned on.

So you’re gathering data, so that come June 2023 You have a year’s worth of history, because otherwise you’re not going to have history, right? Because the history that you can’t do any cross compare back to J three.

Christopher Penn 49:45

Nope, you cannot.

I would bet that some enterprising person will probably figure out a way to make a connector to do data import.

But don’t bank on it.

John Wall 49:56

Ya know, that’s only gonna last for like three years.

That’s a that’s a My night that has a fuse that product so.

Christopher Penn 50:02

Exactly, exactly.

So, alright, well in that case, let’s head on out of here and we’ll talk to you all next week.

Take care.

Thanks for watching today.

Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it.

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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.