10 Actionable GA4 Tips To Get Powerful Insights

Google Analytics is dead, long live Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

Here're 10 actionable tips to get powerful insights from GA4.

1. Turn on Enhanced Measurement to automatically track page scroll, site search, video engagement etc. Also, turn on and Automatic Event Detection to automatically track file downloads, first_open, first_visit etc.

2. Exclude internal traffic via Data Filter e.g. add your office wifi IP to remove internal traffic and get more accurate insights.

3. Configure other domains for Cross-Domain Tracking e.g. if you have country-specific websites e.g. .co.uk and .com.au, add these domains to the list to measure cross-domain traffic more effectively.

4. Allow User-Provided Data Capabilities. Enabling this feature will allow GA4 to use the data shared by users with you to more accurately track conversions across its products. e.g. customer purchases on your website and share his email address in the process, Google will use this data to then attribute conversions to this customer where there are data gaps due to third-party cookies missing.

5. Create Custom Channel Group to get more insightful data e.g. if you use Office 365 products internally and are getting referral traffic from it, create a separate channel for it to identify and distinguish this traffic.

6. Review your Unassigned traffic over time. If your UTM tags in URLs or Google Tag Manager (GTM) tags have not been set up accurately, then GA4 won't be able to recognise the source of traffic and clump it all under Unassigned channel. Use this GA4 UTM builder or UTM source list by Steve Lamar.
GA4 UTM builder: https://lnkd.in/gJtbgEdj
GA4 source list: https://lnkd.in/g5YqsMJz

8. Update Conversion Window for click-through conversions for acquisition (default: 30 days) and all other conversion events (default: 90 days) based on your business needs.

9 . Update Event Data Retention to 14 months (default: 2 months) and reset user data on new activity. While the standard reports will store data forever, the Explore reports will only use the data within the retention period.

10. Create Predictive Audiences i.e. audiences that are likely to take an action in the future based on their past behavior e.g. purchasers and first time purchasers, churning users and churning purchasers, and top spenders.

11. Create Funnel and Path Exploration reports via Explore - unlike GA, GA4 doesn't have these reports. Refer to these guides by Analytics Mania: https://lnkd.in/gxxBwkgE
https://lnkd.in/ggWhgEeW

Bonus: Push your GA4 data to BigQuery at the earliest if you want to use it to do big data analysis. It will only store the data from the day you push, and is not retroactive.