AND THE NEW Digital Performance Director, Jake Chapman, offers his five quick tips for brands to get up to speed with the all new Google Analytics 4…
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is here and Universal Analytics is officially a thing of the past. Hopefully you managed to switch over before the deadline in July, otherwise
you’ll no longer know where you get traffic from, or what users do on your website!
These insights are key to any brand, marketer or website host, so it's essential that everyone using Google Analytics gets this set up properly to fully be able to track your future performance.
Whether you've had GA4 set up for a year or you're just getting around to it now, it's vital that you double check your settings to make sure you’re getting all the key information you need about your website traffic.
Here are five starter settings to check in your GA4 set up:
1. List unwanted referrals
Stop seeing PayPal, Shop Pay and other payment providers in your e-commerce acquisition reports by simply listing them as unwanted referrals.
Add third party payment domains such as:
paypal.com
shopify.com
shop.com
shop.app
klarna.com
You should also add your own domain here to stop internal referrals showing up.
2. Extend data retention period
The default data retention period is set to two months but the more data, the better.
Assuming there are no privacy hurdles, move your data retention period to 14 months.
3. Mark events as conversions
The most important events must be marked as conversions for them to show as conversions in your reports.
If you want lead capture as well as purchases to show in your reports, for example, you'll need to mark them both as conversions.
4. Check enhanced conversions
Enhanced conversions are events automatically picked up by Google, so you may not need to manually add them.
But the settings should still be checked to make sure the events most important to you are being tracked.
5. Register Custom Parameters
Does your custom event have one or more custom parameters?
If it does then you need to register each parameter as a custom dimension or metric, otherwise they won’t show up in your reports.
