11 Steps To Establishing A Profitable GA4 Property

11 Steps To Establishing A Profitable GA4 Property? Whether you like it or not, Universal Analytics will be phased out in 2023. However, configuring GA4 does not have to be difficult. Google Analytics 4 (GA4), as many of us are already aware, is not an analytics update. It is a completely new Analytics product.

Although Universal Analytics (UA) will not be phased out until July 2023, advertisers should get ahead of the curve and implement GA4 as soon as possible. The sooner you bite the bullet and migrate to GA4, the better prepared you’ll be for the future and the sooner you’ll be able to act on relevant customer insights.

Following the advice of Russel Ketchum, Google’s Director of Analytics, and Steve Ganem, Group Product Manager at Google Analytics, correctly implementing GA4 can be broken down into a few steps. Here are 11 things to keep in mind when setting up a new GA4 property.

Account Structure

Businesses should begin by structuring their GA4 properties and accounts to meet their operational requirements.

“Getting familiar with the key concepts of account, property and data streams will help inform the structure that’s right for the business. It is essential that customers take their time with this piece to make sure their whole organization gets the most out of the product”, Ganem claims.

Setup Assistant

Following that, businesses should use the Setup Assistant to save time when setting up a GA4 property to measure a site or app that already uses Universal Analytics.

“Marketers looking for a guided setup experience in Google Analytics 4 should use the setup assistant. This includes tools to automate some required steps and help you track progress. For example, these tools let you select the goals you want to import to GA4, copy the Google Ads links currently used, and add the users who have access to your current property.” – Ganem

Analytics Tag

To begin collecting data, businesses and advertisers should add the Google tag to their websites. Businesses should look into using the Google tag to start viewing data in their GA4 properties. It’s worth noting that if a company was using the global site tag, it’s now using the Google tag, and nothing else needs to be done.

Ganem said: “Structured data collection is the foundation of a measurement strategy which enables businesses to understand the effectiveness of their campaigns and marketing efforts. With Google tag, we’ve made it even easier to implement this critical piece of the puzzle.” 

Link to Google Ads

Importing Google Ads links from their existing Universal Analytics property into the new GA4 property is essential if you want to start seeing Google Ads data in your GA4 reports. After that, businesses should take action in their Google Ads account to begin using GA4 data in their campaigns.

Ganem said: “Insights are only as good as the actions a business or advertiser can take from them. That’s why Google Analytics 4 allows insights to be quickly applied to campaigns with the Google Ads integration.”

Custom Events

By mapping Universal Analytics custom events to GA4, businesses can complete their measurement.

“Google Analytics 4 was built on an entirely new and more robust event-based data model. In Universal Analytics, Page Views and Sessions were so important because that’s really all there was. In Google Analytics 4 these are just two of the dozens of events that can be automatically collected – and that doesn’t even consider the near countless number of events that customers can instrument for themselves. Meaning that how a user interacts with a site can be measured natively – measuring things like purchases, scrolls, button clicks, external links, form submissions, video plays, etc. Additionally, these are not measured as an afterthought of a page view or as an inference made about what “must be happening” in a long session. This event model, coupled with more intelligent handling of users throughout the product, “is some of the key ways we’re equipping our customers to succeed in the world ahead”, said Ketchum.

Goals & Conversions

Businesses should Import Universal Analytics goals into GA4 to gain a better understanding of how their websites and apps are performing.

Ketchum said: “Most websites and apps are designed with the objective of getting users to perform some important action. For some, that can be creating a new account, for others, it might be making a purchase or just submitting an interest form. Whatever action you want customers to take on your website or app should be represented as a conversion event in GA4. Doing so unlocks key marketing features, such as the ability to understand which campaigns are delivering the best results for your business.”

Bidding

Validate and bid on GA4 conversions in Google Ads to improve bid optimization.

“The conversion events a business collects from their website or app can actually improve the performance of their ad campaigns. By linking to Google Ads and importing your conversions, it can provide important feedback to their campaigns, which automatically improves their performance when automated bidding is enabled”, said Ganem

Audiences

To get the most out of GA4, advertisers and marketers must create relevant audiences in Google Analytics 4 and activate them where they will be most useful. Discover the predictive audiences available in GA4.

Ketchum said: “GA4’s Audience Builder is the most powerful audience system we have ever built in Google Analytics, because it lets businesses express almost any criteria they can think of in a simple and intuitive user interface. The audiences they define are pre-populated based on the last 30 days of data, and evaluated on an ongoing basis, and they can be used for a variety of purposes including generating reporting insights, online advertising, and sending more meaningful push notifications.”

Ecommerce

Businesses that sell products online should configure e-commerce in GA4 properties to use names and parameters that will provide the most useful e-commerce reporting.

Ganem said: “By simply following our recommended eCommerce data collection best practices, businesses will get rich out-of-the-box insights on shopping cart activity, and can benefit from powerful ML-based features such as Purchase Probability and Predicted Revenue.”

Users

Finally, manually or automatically copy Universal Analytics property users to GA4 property.

“For many businesses, it’s important to tightly control access to sensitive financial information. That’s why we added settings in GA4 to allow customers to control access to cost and revenue data on a user-by-user basis.” – Ganem

Reports & analysis

Now that GA4 is up and running, it’s time to get acquainted with the navigation, and standard reporting options, and learn how to customize reporting in entirely new ways based on what’s important to the business.

EverRanks has compiled the 11 Steps to Establishing a Profitable GA4 Property. We hope that these steps and tips will make the process easier and help businesses understand the most important aspects of getting started with GA4.