How to configure Google Analytics 4 for your business
Google Analytics 4 offers fewer pre-built reports than its predecessor, Universal Analytics. GA4’s event-based data model allows for greater customisation to meet your business needs and goals. With fewer pre-packaged reports, customisation is almost always a necessity if you want to get the most out of the tool.
In addition to the customisation of measurable events, GA4’s many different settings allow the tool to be customised according to the company’s wishes, and for example, user data protection can be improved with a few configurations.
Take a look at these few tips on how to configure the tool!
- Design the measurement to meet your objectives
- Define desired events as conversions
- Register event parameters as custom dimensions
- Define the data retention period and reporting identity
- Filter out internal traffic from the data
- Customise predefined reports to suit your own needs
- Link your GA4 account with other accounts
Design the measurement to meet your objectives
Good planning ensures that monitoring is able to identify all the information needed to collect quality data. GA4 automatically tracks some site events, such as file downloads or YouTube video views, but important site functionalities and conversions often require a separate tracking setup.
Simply implementing events in Google Tag Manager is enough to tell you how many forms are submitted or how much a site functionality is used, for example, but one of the most essential features of GA4 is the parameters that can be attached to events. Parameters are intended to provide additional information about the event being measured and to enrich the data collected. Instead of finding out how many forms have been submitted on the site, this additional information can also be used to find out, for example, what form names have been submitted or what users have selected in a particular form field. This tells us much more about the actual use of the form than just the number of times the form has been submitted.
If a site has a lot of customised functionalities, we ensure through good design that nothing essential is left out of the analytics. Data starts accumulating from the moment the measurement is created, so it’s important to have a comprehensive plan in place.
On the other hand, good design also ensures that the data we collect is in a readable format and easy to interpret. Later, when we want to develop the measurement as the site’s functionality or conversion paths evolve, we have a ready-made template that makes it easy to add new metrics to the implementation.
Define desired events as conversions
Not all events set for website measurement are likely to be equal in terms of business or website objectives. Conversions are the actions we want a visitor to take on a website, the so-called final points that allow us to judge whether a website visit has been successful. They need to be clearly measurable so that they can be monitored. Depending on the site, conversions can be soft, such as consuming specific content, or hard, such as leaving contact details or other similar goals that require visitors to take more active steps. Again, the focus is on the company’s own objectives and the role of the website in achieving them.
In GA4, each conversion is a tracking event set for measurement. However, it is usually preferred to separate them from actions taken by visitors that are intended to provide additional information about their use of the site, but are less important.
For this purpose, the GA4 interface makes it easy to mark any desired event as a key event. Previously these were known as conversion events, but Google recently changed them to key events. If a conversion event has also been added to Google Ads as a conversion, it can still be found in the GA4 reports on the advertising side as a conversion. So conversions have not disappeared, but can appear under different names depending on the report.
Image from Google’s demo account
Register event parameters as custom dimensions
To get the most out of the GA4 measurement, add your own parameters to the events to provide more information about the events. However, these are not automatically available in the finished reports, but have to be registered separately in the GA4 admin view.
Registration is easy, but please note that the event parameter must be entered in GA4 exactly as it is set in the event to be measured in order for the tool to be able to associate it correctly.
Once registered, the parameters will be available in both the basic reports and in the self-generated reports in the Explore section of the tool. Registering the parameters also makes them available in Looker Studio if you want to use it as a tool for data visualisation.
Image from Google’s demo account
Define the data retention period and reporting identity
GA4 enables better configuration to affect user privacy and ensure that data is not stored in the tool for unnecessarily long periods of time.
In the data retention section of the Admin view, data retention can be configured at event and user level. The default retention period is two months, but can be extended to 14 months in the free GA4 version. This primarily affects the length of time for which the data is available in the reports created in the Research section. So if the retention period is set to two months, the data will only be shown in the Explore reports for the last two months.
The basic reports do not lose data after the specified period, as they do not use unique visitor data. The data in the standard reports can therefore always be accessed, whatever the retention period you choose.
The reporting identity, on the other hand, helps to determine how the data is collected. Its purpose is to help identify the same user across different devices. By default, GA4 uses a blended identity. In this case, GA4 uses a unique user ID for logged-in users and device information to collect data. These are combined with Google’s own machine learning model to model data from users who have not accepted cookies.
The use of a federated reporting identity requires that a user ID is collected and that there are a sufficient number of logged-in users on the site to guarantee the anonymity of the user in the reports. If there is too little traffic or if the GA4 interprets the user’s privacy as compromised, the data in the reports will be limited (data threshold).
In order to guarantee user privacy and ensure sufficient data in reports, we recommend changing the reporting identity to device-based. In this case, only device information and no other identifiers are collected from the user. The amount of traffic received is also sufficient and there is no limit to the amount of data available from the reports.
Image from Google’s demo account
Filter out internal traffic from the data
In many companies, the website is also heavily used on a daily basis by the company’s own employees. If a lot of traffic comes from the IP addresses of the company’s own offices, this can show up surprisingly in the data collected and thus distort the reports on website usage. Internal traffic can be filtered out in the GA4 settings, and as many IP addresses as necessary can be assigned.
IPs can easily be marked as internal traffic in the settings of your own data stream. After that, the filter still needs to be enabled and activated in order to start filtering out internal traffic from the reports.
Customise predefined reports to suit your own needs
Although GA4 has few pre-built reports compared to Universal Analytics, it is possible to customise them to suit your needs. The reports come with certain metrics by default, but you can easily add and remove them as you wish.
Once changes have been made, the report can be saved either on top of an existing report or as a completely new report. This way, the changes you make are preserved for the future and you get more out of your reports.
Image from Google’s demo account
Link your GA4 account with other accounts
GA4 provides ready-made linking options to a wide range of tools. Typically, you want to link Google Analytics with Google Ads or Google Search Console, so that the data from these can also be viewed in the GA4 interface.
Google Search Console linking allows you to view organic search terms and organic traffic landing pages through standard reports.
With the Google Ads link, advertising data can be viewed in greater depth in the Advertising section of GA4 and the traffic generated by campaigns can be analysed in more detail. The link also allows you to export audiences and conversions directly to Google Ads.
Image from Google’s demo account
In conclusion
GA4 requires more learning than Universal Analytics to get comfortable with it. The tool’s many customisation options make it a viable tool for many companies.
However, for many, GA4’s user interface and the completely new data model compared to the previous one may raise the barrier to everyday use. By building your own visual reporting platform in Google Looker Studio, using GA4 data on a daily basis becomes more effortless.
Need help with GA4 deployment and customization, or interested in a reporting model built in Looker Studio? Contact us and we’ll be happy to help!