Best Practices for Transitioning to Google Analytics 4
5:30PM Mar 14, +0000
Speakers:
Nathan Ingram
David Zimmerman
Keywords:
ga
google analytics
universal analytics
google
analytics
website
tracking
add
site
tag manager
data
question
clients
opt
plugin
code
reports
install
cookie
create
packet number one more confidence that GA four is actually a good thing. And also GA four is not as scary as it seems. But two, I want to give you some tips on making that transition more smooth. I definitely want to make sure we have time at the end to answer some questions you might have whether about the transition process or even GA four. I invite you to go back to the webinar and I themes if you want the boot camp we did on GA for last year. There's gonna be a lot to catch up there too. And at the end, I'm going to talk to you about a study group I'm sponsoring with going through GA four together if you want to participate in that. So let's get started. Because here we are. We're in this dilemma right now. And the first of the dilemma is we we like Google Analytics the old way. Well, that is very common. You know it I do too. The problem is it's going away as of July will stop tracking. As of December, we will no longer have access to any of the data in Ubay. So you can say oh you want to you like do you a better than GA four but we got to do something about it. So sorry. But we gotta move on. This next thing that we have is a dilemma and I hear this all the time is the but Google Analytics is illegal thing. You know, I'm no lawyer to the disappointment of my mother. But I just when people start saying that threat, I want you to ask yourself what financial interest did they have in promoting this idea? Sometimes I've seen a lot of fear mongering around Google Analytics and just ask yourself, do they have it? Something financial of interest of theirs to promote the idea that analytics is illegal? If you live in the European Union and market to an audience in the European Union, you might need to consider some options but the US State Department is actively working on this. Google has massive financial interest to make sure that it is not illegal in Europe. And so just be careful about throwing out the baby with the bathwater because someone warned you of something like this. And the other dilemma we all kind of face is just the idea that GA four is very confusing. It is it is very confusing and my bullet points not showing up there but GA four is confusing. It is frustrating. However, GA four is a superior product for lots of reasons. Here's kind of a table I kind of created that compares the different different versions of analytics. Universal Analytics is old analytics, but most of you're probably using now, GA for Google Analytics. Four is what we will have to use starting in July. There are significant differences. But I think as you understand these differences, you can start to see why this is a better product. Universal Analytics is built around pageviews. That's if you're using Google Analytics for a long time. That's what you're used to go into Google Analytics for however, is built around events. So what ends up happening is Google Analytics for gives us a lot better data on our website. For instance, we used to do fancy tracking of hey, did anybody scroll down the page? And we'd set up different events with JavaScript to do all kinds of fancy stuff to see. Oh, does anybody scroll down the page on my website? Well, that it's actually tracked by default Google Analytics for it because it's tracking the event of the scroll. It's tracking when you click on something let's say you click on a button, you click on a link. It's already keeping track of that. You don't have to set up separate Google Analytics JavaScript codes and hacking websites to do all this stuff. It's doing it automatically out of the box. That is somewhat why the numbers don't line up. We're tracking two different things a page view or an event. Now it page view isn't event. So we can line up these numbers correctly. But we just got to understand that they're tracking two different things. We all know or if you have a larger running website that Universal Analytics begins to start sampling data. It can be annoying with a larger website. Google Analytics will do that too. But Google Analytics is also using machine learning. Now machine learning is I kinda was a little uncomfortable with this idea that the data I'm getting in universal Google Analytics for is machine learned. It's not necessarily exactly what you're seeing. It's giving some machine learning and then maybe adding some information in there. But what's really good about this as privacy becomes more important, the machine learning algorithm is able to conject you know, it wasn't able to track that because of a privacy thing, but it can conject into our data to give us more insight. That would normally make me very uncomfortable. But Google is doing it very conservatively. In promises with smaller websites where the numbers are more could potentially be bigger impact if the added more or less or less. It's not going to affect it. Very much. They're being very conservative with it. Now, I really hope you're not reporting on bounce rates, because that's pretty stupid metric. But if you really have to report on bounce rate, the bounce rate in Google Analytics for is actually relatively accurate. Bounce Rate and universal was pretty stupid. Basically, if you visited a page and you did nothing but back out Google Analytics, Universal Analytics, we call that a bounce. But what we don't know is Did someone call a phone number on that page if they visited a page called a phone number and left Universal Analytics. We'll call it an unsuccessful visit a bounce. However, if they clicked the call on YouTube or on Google Analytics for with that would be a very successful visit. And because it's tracking clicks, it would know someone had to click to call on that page and it's no longer a bounce. So because of these engagement activities, we have a better source of data with GA for bounce rates, pretty stupid metric anyway. You know, Universal Analytics, everybody loves all these built in reports. Ga four is bare minimum by design, because they're trying to do is I don't know if you've ever had this problem, but you introduce Google Analytics to a client and they just just get absorbed in this data, most of which doesn't really even matter to them, but they get obsessed with it because it's their GA four kind of gets away from that problem by not overwhelming people. With too much data. A lot of the data in Universal Analytics, I'd argue doesn't apply to every client. And so when certain clients let's say a lead generation client is trying to look at the number of pages viewed. It's really not a very valuable metric for them, unless they're like selling ads. If you're the New York Times, and you're selling ads, you need to know how many pages are viewed in a session. If your lead gen service pages viewed in the session, actually might be a bad thing. Maybe people aren't finding what they need to and they're frustrated. But the point is, I'm trying to say is that Google Analytics for doesn't provide these confusing reports. But they allow you to create all kinds of reports. With the Explore feature, you can do all kinds of different things. So if you need it, you can create it, but they don't volunteer it off the bat. Custom Reports and Dashboards are being replaced by Looker studio. I know Looker Studio can be a challenge to some. But it's really a great product and you can integrate all kinds of great data together. So it's worth your time to invest. I'd suggest that that's the future. So take some time and learn that you can't do annotations. I love annotations in my Google Analytics can't do that GA for yet. But perhaps later.
You have to do fancy event tracking and Universal Analytics with JavaScript all happens by default. In GA four goals are tracked a little different that might explain some deaf differences in data with a goal that you set up into Universal Analytics. It's only counted for each session of a user. So if someone on one visit to your website, submits a goal twice, it's counted once a universal in GA for every time the goal is completed, is counted. So even if in the same session. But the biggest reason the biggest difference in reporting numbers is how Google attributes your conversions. Universal Analytics by default is last non direct. Click that is really not very great way to measure the success of a marketing campaign. You know, someone may find you for more organic search, sign up for your email list, after your email list, follow you on Facebook, and then finally make a purchase. So where do we attribute the sale in Universal Analytics that would be attributed to Facebook to social because that's the last non direct click. Data driven. Attribution allows Google to say you know what, the first source and the third source both helped contribute and give a little bit of attribution value to those other sources. So if you're doing different marketing channels that have had poor performance, you might start to see some things performing better. In fact, you might even see decimals reported in terms of conversions. That's the data driven. Anyway, this is a comparison of what we're doing. This is a comparison of what GF four has to offer. I think it's better solution. I think you'll eventually get over the learning curve and be really grateful. But primarily what I want to talk about today is something my dad, I mean, I mean, Google said that if you don't do it, I'll do it for you. That's kind of where we are right now. You and your clients. They're getting these notifications and Google Analytics. Hey, you better do it or we're gonna do it for you. And I want to leave with an idea that you don't let want Google to do it for you. So I would like you to learn how to do it yourself. So we're going to talk about that today. So there are several reasons why you should transition manually to GA for and not let Google's automated system do it. The first reason is that oh man, this is not showing up. Get older Google Analytics for auto migrations simply didn't work. I don't know if you started a long time ago with GA for when I did this about a year ago. I tried to import use their little wizard to import my goals into conversions. Didn't even work. In the past. Google has really screwed up these auto migration systems. And so I've lost confidence in the auto migration systems to actually auto migrate. So that's why I think it's better for you to do it manually. There we go. If you do it manually, you get to control what you change. Rather than what let Google gas No, this is probably more important if you have a very complicated install of Google Analytics. The automated system might not read between lines very well. They might imply or think you're trying to do something else and you're not. So if you have a complicated install of Google Analytics, it's probably just worth you doing it yourself. Just do it. manually. Every go the best reason why you should probably do this migration from Universal to GA for manually. It's just frankly, let's be honest, your Google Analytics installs a little crazy. It's a little messed up. There might be filters in there that you don't even use anymore. There might be goals or conversions that aren't even accurate or tracking anymore. Like this is your opportunity to clean it up. Especially like your users. You know, this is maybe the first time you've worked with this. You the clients that worked with put forth other people beside you. They might still have access to their Google Analytics account like they have no business being in there. Now's your chance to lock them out. Lock out old employees who have no business accessing this information. Do an inventory to make sure that everyone who needs it gets it and the owners own it. Like there's all kinds of reasons to take this opportunity to clean up things. If you do it automatically. All those people will still have access to it, which is kind of defeats the purpose. But of all the reasons to do it manually. The biggest one is because Google says you should. You should do this manually. Here is Google's documentation. This is in one of the links in the last slides of how to do the automated process okay, I find this hilarious when I saw this I just laughed out loud. Okay, so they like broke their branding guidelines not only to give you a call out but like even use a red letters and then a huge underline, like, we strongly recommend you manually migrate your Universal Analytics to GA for There you go. And a story. Like they don't even have confidence they're gonna be able to do it right. So just take the time and migrate your accounts manually. And think me later when Google doesn't mess it up. All right, let's see where else Where are we going? Here we are. So how do we do a manual install? First thing we have to do is app opt out of automatic migration. So I'm going to I have an account that I've kind of built a long time ago and frankly, don't care much about so you know, my kink warms Charlotte website is not very important to me. In fact, it's not very important to many other people, as you can see by the traffic. But this does not have a GA for account. So what we're going to do is we're going to show you how to opt out of this and we're going to go in here we're going to go wherever then Universal Analytics, right. And since we're looking at the property for Universal Analytics, we know that because it's got a UA dash blah, blah, blah dash one right? We go here to GA for Setup Assistant. We scroll down. It says automatically set up a basic Google Analytics for property. No, thank you. Success. We have opted out of Google's migration done. Now. It's kind of a pain in the butt to go through all of our clients all of our properties and opt out of this. But I think it's it's worth the effort. The second thing we need to do after we opt out is we need to create a new property so we can follow their wizard but like I said, I have gotten lost confidence in Google's ability to do the wizard. So all I'm going to do is go back here. And I'm going to create a property. You'll know if you're a good user of analytics, we used to think in terms of views. The GA four property does not have views anymore. It has more property. So we're going to create a new property this is the new GA four or Tinker worms. All right, we just got a name at something, I'm going to change it to my local time. This actually mattered more in Universal Analytics, the GA four because in Universal Analytics it wouldn't hit midnight the session would start over so if you'd have the wrong timezone. You'd have a little bit of a screwy situation. But that doesn't happen if the GA for but we're gonna go ahead and change our timezone at least so it's reporting time accurately. Great. Next, we can answer these questions. Or we can skip out. Google, you got enough information on me. Okay, so now we're getting to this little thing that we were we were seeing a few weeks ago in everyone every time we logged in, I don't know about you. We can migrate from Universal Analytics. This again, is what we have opted out of. So this is the frustrating thing. Google's advice is to not let this happen. But then Google keeps offering this to us. So we're just gonna say no, or we're gonna say because you're stupid for a reason. And we're going to save okay, but we're not
done creating a GA for property. We need to start collecting data. So we need to create a platform now for most of us. It's going to be a web platform. If you have an Android app or an iOS app, well guess what one of the advantages of GA four is that we can have cross application tracking and we can track between apps and websites and we can even compare users. It's pretty amazing. They've actually integrated Firebase within GA for But alas, Charlotte canker. worms.com does not have a web app. So we're going to do that. All I have to do here is type in my website. URL. Now, trick pro tip here, pull the canonical name of the URL. When I say canonical, I mean, you know, after all the redirects, where does this end? Some of you have triple W some of you don't some of you have HTTPS. Some of you don't yet. You need your analytics to be set up to match whatever the final version now because if we're in Chrome, I have a little block. So I know this is HTTPS, but I'm going to prevent problems. Copy. Paste. Okay. So what I've learned is even though Chrome is not displaying the triple w is still built in. So that's important. I need to keep the canonical version. It's already got HTTPS. I don't know why porn at my screen. You can't see that. But now I know I have the canonical version of my homepage. And I'm entering it there. Have to give my website a name. Now, I do recommend enabling advanced member measurement. Again, this is one of the cool features of GA four because it's going to track not only pageviews but scrolls. It's not going to only correct scrolls, but it's going to track outbound clicks, and a whole bunch of other stuff automatically for you video engagements tracked blah, blah, blah, really cool stuff that universal. We used to have to do all kinds of fancy code stuff to do. Ga for does it for us. Create stream. Guess what? No, I have to install it. Now, this is a Blogspot blog. I don't use it very often. We're a WordPress community. So I'm not going to install this on here. But I do want just you know how to set up the profile because I'm going to recommend you take the time before you add anything to your site to go ahead and create your GA for properties. Save yourself some trouble create your property even if you're not installed it yet. But we've created this here. The best way is on WordPress to install this on your site. And I'll say this with the caveat that I'm not a fan of adding yet another plugin to do get another thing but Google here is recommending and I will to their site kit plugin. The site kit plugin is available for free it is a Google product and it allows you to add all kinds of things in a really easy way. When you go to the WordPress I have the link to the actual plugin in the slides. But make sure you download the Google Site kit plugin to do this. Follow this wizard it does work and add your Google Analytics. You can see it's even walking you through your tag ID remember universal studies to start with UA now it doesn't anymore. We have directions on here. Y'all know how to put a plug in in. You can read directions. You don't need me to waste your time doing that. So we won't but I will say now that we have done this we've added this tracking to the site. In our example, we haven't so I'm going to switch back to my slides. So we started we opted out her property of the automatic migration. We created a GTA for property. Then if you're using WordPress I recommend using the site get plugin to add your code to every page of the website. But step four, this is me pleading with you please please set up conversion tracking. Now we could do a whole nother webinar on how to set up Google tracking for conversions in GA four it's really pretty easy. One of the advantages of GA four is that we don't have to add codes to pages anymore. They built it so we can do it within GA fours interface. We don't have to had event tracking JavaScript. We don't have to do all kinds of bugging things are breaking themes. Google Analytics for it makes this really easy. For instance, let's say we want to click sorry. Consider the submission button on a form of conversion. in Universal Analytics, we'd have to set up JavaScript code to say hey, we're going to every time this button is clicked which send a special event in the universal and I want you to consider that an event and then I want Google Analytics to listen for that event and it happens on once you consider it a goal. Okay, but sometimes that event tracking was a pain. Sometimes your your form plugin didn't even support it. Then you'd have to do Tag Manager and then you have to do JavaScript Ah, what a mess GA for if you recall, listens for events. It is event based system so in other words, every time anything on the website is clicked Google Analytics for knows it. So if we want to start tracking a form submission, we just have to tell Google Analytics. Whenever this button is clicked, we want you not just to consider it another click. We want you to consider that click a conversion. It's already listening to it. We just have to tell Google Analytics which clicks to listen to and consider a conversion. That's really what it comes down to. But what I'm saying now is while you're doing this manual installation process, please take the time to add conversion tracking. This is the real value of Google Analytics. Hey, you know it's really interesting to know how much traffic you got. It might even be fun to see where that traffic came from. But what good is that traffic if it doesn't help the website produce something of value. You're building these wonderful websites for your clients or you're paying a developer to build a website for your business. You need to know that websites generating some sort of income for you. And when you track conversion tracking, whether that's e commerce or lead generation or phone calls, if you know more phone calls are generated from your website, then not you know your website's making you money. If you're building a website for someone and you can say 100 people contacted you last month of that. How many customers did you get? Now the website you built for them is not just a cost of doing business. It is now suddenly an income revenue generating device. And if you can take the time to add conversion tracking, you will prove really quickly how valuable your website is. Now, I will caveat this to say if you are running Google ads, there are additional steps that you need to take. I'm not going to get into them today because we only have so much time but there is more you need to do pay attention to that now pitfalls that we need to worry about when making this migration. Some of you have installed Google Analytics years ago or you installed it using some old plugin that you've not updated in 20 years. Or maybe you know you your theme has automatically added your Google Analytics code to your site for you. Hey, that's great. But you really need to make sure for this to work that your website is running analytics. Excuse me, your website is running the G tag.js. Google Analytics function, not analytics.js. So there's a difference. Let me share my screen again and we will show you this. So this wonderful, earth shattering Charlotte cankerworm website. If we view the source and we look for the Universal Analytics code
we see that it is running analytics.js Now if you've ever played with Blogger you know there's a place where you can add this identification number in the interface and it will help you by automatically adding Google Analytics to your website. Thank you blogger. You're a Google product. We're not surprised however, because this is running the old analytics script analytics.js We can't use the auto migrate functions even if we wanted to. To convert into GA for GA for requires the G tag.js analytics package. So it's worth checking on your code of your website of existing sites to make sure you are not using analytics that J S and using G tag dot j s. Now if you are going to take my suggestion and install a completely new analytics code on your site, you're gonna be fine. Even if you had this old one because this old one is gonna stop working in a couple months and you just take it off. But if you try to do the automation because you think whatever it's just easier, and you're using the analytics.js You're gonna have some serious problems, you're gonna have to add the G tag.js code anyway. So just go ahead and install the G tag dot j s on your site. And then you don't have to worry about analytics.js
Hey, David real quick. Could you zoom in on that? Code? It's really small for some folks. Okay,
I will do my best Oh, zoom, zoom, zoom. Zoom. That a little better. Perfect. Thank you. Okay, there we go. analytics.js is what blogger is running. Make sure that you are not running analytics dot j s. This UA code won't tell you because that G tag can run with the UA code. Just make sure you're not running analytics dot j s. Thank you Nathan. One other little pro tip that's a lot of fun to play with is the real time verification report in Google Analytics for once you install your analytics code, especially your GA for code, go to the real time report. It's easy to find and watch to confirm that people are viewing your site. You know sometimes I'll even go call a couple friends and say hey, will you go visit the site for me real quick? Just to confirm that I can track it it is working. What we want to see is we want to see that it's not just tracking on the homepage. Common mistake is that people edit only to the homepage, the Google Analytics code on the homepage. You want to make sure it's on every single page of your site. But anyway, use the real time verification. You can even watch yourself, view yourself through the site. That's a really nice troubleshooting report to confirm that it's actually working. Another pitfall is privacy or cookie opt ins. Different services that allow you to provide a cookie banner and say hey, I'm going to consent to being trapped if you are working or living or even if your visitors live or work in some particular locations. Virginia, Colorado, Europe, California, Brazil, all kinds of places. You have to give them a privacy opt out option. I'm not going to talk about all the laws here. But you know there are different solutions you can use to provide that cookie opt in warning, they work. So understand that you potentially could be completely cutting off any ability for your website to measure traffic. By doing this, I highly recommend whatever cookie solution prophecy opt in you use. Make sure it only shows to the people who are required to see it. Every solution I've seen that as credible has the ability to only show the cookie disclaimer to geographies to have to see it. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. Technically I live in South Carolina but anyway in neither North or South Carolina, am I required to see a cookie opt in. So when I visit my website, I don't see it. That means I can see the traffic from anybody in North and South Carolina. Now if you're in Virginia and view my site, you should get the opt in. And that's because the law requires it. And then I have to get your permission to track you. Now there are other rules about this. It's not just that you live in Virginia, for instance, California. The rule is that I have to have so much traffic and so much income from my website from California to be required to show it to California. So even in that case, I don't have any clients in California. I really don't make any money from California. I come in under the threshold for California. So consult your attorney but I don't know if I really have to comply with CPE CCPA point is only show the cookie banner when you have to show the cookie banner or you will have zero traffic even though you converted yourself into GA for and frankly this is not a GA for thing you can pay all kinds of other third party tracking services and they all have to comply with that. So just know that your cookie opt in privacy policy will affect your traffic. I will say that the transition to GFR is a good opportunity to make this because the traffic's going to be different anyway. So as long as the traffic's any different you might as well add this at that point, because the numbers aren't gonna line up but at least now, we are taking the hit in traffic at the same time and it's not like, hey, last month we converted J four and now everything's totally different and then three months later, we added a cookie policy now Steven down even further, take the hit at once only up from there. I will say another pitfall is just make sure that your WordPress theme. You don't have an additional plugin or anything else is adding a your Google Analytics code also to your site. I find it really funny. In fact, sometimes it's not funny when I've seen plugins try to add Google Analytics code to my site. You want to take this opportunity to make sure you know what analytics codes are tracked on your site. Maybe your old developer used an old Google Analytics installed that you don't even have access to anymore. It's still on your site. They're still getting your data, frankly, it's now their business. Double check, view your source code look for use a dash look for analytics dot j s g tag dot j s just to account for all the code that might be on your website. I will say there's a nice little browser plugin called Ghostery that I use. I use it primarily to make sure I don't inflate my clients numbers when I visit their site. But it does instantly tell me how many installs of Google Analytics are on the site. So I can instantly say, Oh, wow, there are three different installs of analytics on this site. I better account for them so that I can make sure there's only one running. Also make sure that you're don't have the same analytics could track executing twice. On your website. Sometimes you see that suddenly all your traffic numbers are divisible by two because they're double tracking. Funny, but not funny at the same time. And finally, you know, Tag Manager I highly recommend you install Tag Manager and use that on your website and use that to install your Google Analytics code on your site. I will suggest Sorry. There we got new Share. There we go. Where to duck out all right. Well, we're gonna go back to that. Um, Google Tag Manager is a great little tool you can think of Tag Manager like a bucket that allows you to add and remove codes to the website, because the Tag Manager code is on your website. So if you want to start doing Facebook ads, put your Facebook code within your Tag Manager and now you don't have to monkey with your theme even better. When your marketing people don't have to monkey with your theme. You can add Tag Manager through site kit plugin. That's the high act way I'd recommend you add Tag Manager to your site kit. However, be really careful there when you add Tag Manager. You want to add Google Analytics within your Tag Manager install but that you got to remember to go back into your site kid install until site kit. Don't serve Google Analytics through site kit because you're already serving it through Tag Manager for some reason, I'm not able to show you my Chrome, but maybe we'll figure that out in a q&a time. Point is I recommend using Tag Manager if you do use it with site kit, pay attention to make sure you don't run into any problems. Here are some of the little things we talked about today. I did a little YouTube video a couple of weeks ago how to opt out of Google's automatic GA for migration if you missed this here today. I also am linking to a couple of things on from Google on making the switch. The last bulleted item here is the disclaimer of why you should do it manually, but some other valuable information. I will say hey, you know I am been running for the last two or three quarters a Google Analytics certification study group. I would invite you all to participate in that. Google Analytics. Google offers a certification for analytics just like it offers a certification for Google ads. It's great certification. It's actually fairly hard to pass. So people who haven't really deserved it. It's a great way to learn what GFR can do is a great way to demystify it. We're starting a new session of the study group on April 17.
would love for you to join us. So just click the link sign up. And I think the study group lasts five weeks, and we'll go through the certification together even if you don't earn the certification. I think you'll learn a lot more about Google Analytics. And anyway that is all we've got to cover today.
Really great stuff today, David. And just to clarify that study group is free, right?
Yes, it is. Right,
right when you take a drink. Yeah, yes. All right, folks. We have a lot of questions stacked up 26 of them. Actually. Yes, Stacy. It's really free. So take advantage of David's generosity there. It is a quite a good group. So if you have a question you haven't asked yet, pop open that q&a and ask that question. Also. Open it up anyway and scroll through the questions that have been asked. And if you have that same question hit the thumbs up icon because in just a moment, we'll be taking votes, taking questions in the order of votes that they have received. One thing I would like to clarify, David, you talked about the the Google Site kit plugin and also the using the Google Tag Manager So which is the better option to actually install the code?
Yes. So I finally able to show you so when you install a site kit within your settings, you can connect services right by default. When you get started, you'll usually connect the service of Google Analytics and that'll install your Google Analytics code there. Right? I recommend if you're not too scared of this, go ahead and add the service of Tag Manager. Okay, that will put the Tag Manager code on your website. You can then add your Google Analytics code in your Tag Manager install. But go back into your analytics and Do not insert your Google Analytics code through site kid at that point, because you've already added it in Tag Manager, turn it off here. Okay. In this case, I have the Universal Analytics snippet on here, because I did not add it in Tag Manager. But because I added the Google Analytics for in Tag Manager. It is not inserted through site kit. Just a little picadillo. But I do recommend going in and creating a Tag Manager and then adding
it through second. Yeah, very good. And we found just any anytime we've relied on a plugin to add the analytics code, there's always the chance that somehow that plugin loses connection with Google and it needs you to go in and authorize it again. And we've had sites you know, it was a few weeks before we realized that and I mean, there's no analytics because there was no tracking code. Yeah, okay. several, several, many questions. 28 questions. All right. So let me just address a couple things. There is a replay will have that let me drop those links in the chat. I realized that the links in the chat are not copyable we've been around the world with zoom on this. It's just not possible. You can click the link and copy the URL from the browser. That's our workaround. There's not another way to do that. You know, and we've been on with Zoom support. I understand. It's a thing. We haven't been able to find the solution. So with that, let us get into the q&a. First one from Melanie. David, would you say that Google Analytics for is making Tag Manager redundant?
No. There are two different things. All right, is talk of merging the tags but they are two different things. Yeah.
Okay, Beth says I have a new website where Google Analytics is not yet set. Up. Would it be beneficial to set that up in GA for from scratch before I do the migrations of other sites?
I don't know if it's beneficial. You cannot add you a anymore to new sites. They've locked you out of that. So I highly recommend adding any Google Analytics as quickly as possible to a website. You might not think you need it now. But you'll thank yourself later. I don't know if it'll help you but do it as soon as possible.
Yeah, and so bad. I think that's the question was really about just so she could get to understand Google Analytics for more but yeah, you don't have any other option now, Beth, because you can't add UI code. Right.
Okay, that
says another question. Reminder best as your as your monitor client that they need to get their marketing agency to take care of the analytics issue. And they said they're trying but nobody can remember the Google account and who owns the analytics is there something they can do? Oh, how many times we've had this problem. Start over the case of the last analytics, yeah. Wouldn't it be great if there was a spot you could go and say, Oh, it's this account that owns that UA code?
Yeah, they're not that I've ever known. I've even Yeah, it's sorry.
Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, Stacy said it belongs to the person who left six months ago. Good luck. That's probably true. Well, and
that's why I said take this opportunity to do an audit to see who is controlling it. I think as a marketing professional, my duty is to give ownership of the account to the client so that even they can lock me out of it. I know that some developers are really scared of approaching it that way because they know their clients monkey with things but I debt is their asset. They own it. I'm managing it for them. They should always have ownership. And they should know who has ownership. Yeah, they're going to screw it up. Sometimes you just got to start over. It's like
a domain name right? Why it should own the domain name. Yes,
absolutely.
Monica is question if we already have installed Google Analytics for is Google going to override our setup? How do we know we've done it correctly? I'd almost rather have Google do it.
Okay. So let us go to what Google says about this.
Okay, I still think you should opt out, even if you already created one. I am so frustrated and confused with Google. And they're what they're telling me. I went and created a Google Analytics for property for every one of my clients last March. So they've been running for over a year at this point. Sometimes I connected them. Sometimes I disconnected them. But no matter what, Google is still telling me they don't even know that they have a GA for property. And it I get really worried when it's right there and they don't even know. So you might be fine. You might be fine to just let it happen. But I tell you, I've seen Google really push this very, very hard, very, very fast. They've made a lot of mistakes. And because I as a marketer live and breathe by analytics to show the value of what I'm doing for my clients. I really can't afford for Google to screw up my data. And so in that way, I am just not going to let them accidentally break something. And so I don't have any confidence. Opt Out is the best professional recommendation I can give you. If you want to try to opt in and see what happens. It might work. It might be fine. I might be paranoid and then you can say I told you David, you're crazy. I don't have to, you know, whatever. But I really recommend you just go ahead and opt out. Yeah. All right. Next
question from Monica. Can we make the switch just from within the Google Site kit plugin does it it does it create the property install? The code automatically?
So if you if yes, I should say that. Yes. If you use site kit plugin, it will create a an install of GA for it might hiccup if the current analytics dot j s is on your site, because but the wizard in site kit will tell you that. But still double check your code like make sure your theme isn't adding it to make sure you if you're using monster insights or something like that, that it's not also adding make sure your developer didn't hard coded in there. You know, follow the wizard and set kit and add it that way. It will tell you what's going on. That's you can you can just simply added by doing the second plug in Yeah, yeah. Good.
See asks if you have a basic brochure site where the only real event is filling out a contact form, for example, will GA for a port there's not enough data for a report forever. So apparently that's what's happening to sue she's not getting enough data.
So GA will always report. Always it's hard to say. If you're getting no data, you got no visitors in Google Analytics. It's not like Search Console where at a certain threshold they're gonna not show you certain pieces of information. Google Analytics of that site has zero visits in analytics. The first thing I check is to make sure the analytics cuts really installed. Like let's new outcomes razor here and make sure that the simplest solution is there really is an install of Google Analytics on the site. That's where the Ghostery plugin can help or you can just open up the code of the page as rendered and look for you a dash analytics.js g tag.js. look and make sure the codes on the site if the code is on the site, you still getting zero. You're just getting no traffic to that website at all. And sorry, you know, that's just the truth. Yeah.
Great. Let's see. I'm gonna skip down to tears question because there's, I think there's a misconception here from one of your slides that we should probably clarify. On it's it's slide seven David where it talks about pitfalls. And the first bullet is analytics dot j s not G tag.gs. And I think what you meant by that is that having analytics J S is the pitfall versus you want g tag.gs. On your site, right? Yes. Analytics J. s not G tag. That's not the recommendation. That's the pitfall
Right? Right. Thank you. That is very confusing. So you do not want analytics.js You need to have g tag.js. Thank you. I double negative myself out.
Yeah. Here's a great question Dion. What if it's what if the site has already been transitioned automatically by Google? Can it be undone? What would you recommend if it's been automatically transitioned? Okay.
That, that if you didn't opt out in time, you can still disconnect your properties that would not allow the connection for Google to do this. Or you can just hope for the best. Yeah. Is there is
the link to that Google answers doc in the handouts.
It is in the third the last slide of last bullet. Got it.
Great. Okay. I'm going to drop that link in the chat folks for if you if you happen to miss that. Okay, next question is from Monica. What's the best way to figure out how to set up someone new, some new reports in Google Analytics for to see some of the items we're used to seeing in Universal Analytics. That seems to be the most confusing thing right now. Like right, those reports to sync up
so the data is not going to sync up because we're measuring apples and oranges. So this is a time when we educate our clients to understand that number one, apples and oranges number two, apples are better than oranges, right? We got better data, we got more clarity. And so it's actually an improvement. Sometimes clients don't want to hear that sometimes clients are like, Oh my gosh, where are my pageviews? Okay, sorry, someone's moved your cheese. You know, we can complain about this all we want. It's hard to answer that in a broad statement without knowing the specifics you're looking for. I would look into Looker studio as a way to be able to easily create automated reports. Looker Studio is a great little tool. If you're a designer, your reports will look prettier than mine. Mine are pretty boring. But Looker Studio is a great way to connect your data into Looker studio and display it in a way that makes sense to you. Based on the data that you'd like to show,
formerly called Google Data Studio, and I still refuse to call it looker. I'm going to call it Google Data Studio until forever. I hate that I hate that name.
Hey, you know whatever. I still call it AdWords so.
So it's interesting though. With this different management management or measurement criteria. It's like you know, if you're a geezer like me, and you've been around the web for a while, we used to call it how many hits did you get on your website? Right, right. And a hit like loading the page was a hit in every single image was a hit. So you could triple your hits by adding more images, right? But it's it's just a different measurement criteria. So we're kind of evolved into the next age of the web as it were. Right. Right. Chris says, Please sign my guestbook.
One of them I
did too. Thank you, Chris, for that. Okay, next question is from Katherine. If you use if you use Google Tag Manager, or do the base tag for GA four, does it still have that advanced measurement and built in event tracking? Could you read that again? Yep. Okay, so if you use Google Tag Manager, and you're doing the GA for tag, does it have an advanced measurement and built in events tracking? Is that part of GA four that you just talked about?
Ga four has events tracking whether you use Tag Manager or not? Right? Yeah, so it's not integer is an easy way to add and subtract codes to website without monkeying with website code. Tag Manager is a bucket to allow you so let's say I want to do LinkedIn ads. I put the LinkedIn code I run it and then I say okay, I don't want to do LinkedIn ads anymore. It's too expensive because they are I take the code off I don't have to mess with my theme. I just adding subtracting code. So it's just a way to add codes to website doesn't offer you advantages or not. When you're using J four. Very good.
Alright, folks, we're gonna take we're getting we're starting to run over time here. We're gonna take about three minutes. David, do you have like, maybe three or four more minutes here?
Yeah, I gotta prepare for another client call. So but yes. Okay, so
we'll do two more questions and folks, look at the list of questions the one you want to see answered after the one that's currently at the top of the list. Make sure you click a thumbs up because that's the next question. This is a good question here from Nath what happens to the old data after the GA for cutoff date?
Cheer for we'll stop recording data in July one. You will have access to that data to December. Some date after December, Google will not promise you access to that data anymore. So bye bye.
Yeah, it's gone. Theoretically, right now Google has also been known to push off these dates further in the future but there are many there are million dollar lawsuits on the line and that's that's what's prompting all this transition to us to GA for right. So having that potentially, you know, that set of data that has personally identifiable information is a legal liability for Google. So they may not extend this deadline.
Who knows? Right? Yeah. All right. Let's see.
All right, last question is okay, we just got we just got another vote. We'll do this one from Richard. Do you have a cookie opt in plugin recommendation.
My cookie opt in plugin. Plugin recommendation is IU bender. I like I've used them for years. They are run by a group out of Italy so they're intimately aware of GDPR but they do a great job out of the box without extra configuration. Only showing your code to the users who need to see it, which again is my primary concern. If you're not in Virginia, or California or Europe, I can track you and I need to track you. And so that's the primary concern it works really well. It's a little more complicated setup, but it actually will actually watch your website to Oh, you added a new tag you didn't disclose it and tell you things like that that are advantageous. It's called IU bender. That's what I'd recommend.
Yep. And that spelling and link is there in the webinar chat. David, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for your wisdom in the presentation, as well as great answers to many, many questions and they're still by the way 23 open questions so we could have another hour at least for this.
Me at the SEO game plan and I'll see what I can do.
Yeah, there you go. So at the SEO game plan, and that's in the slides as well. So folks, if you came in late or if you want to catch the replay, we'll have the video up in about an hour at the link that I'm going to drop in the chat one more time. The link to download the slides is there as well. And we'll have all that up the transcript, all the chat blah, there's a lot of good links in the chat. So all that will be there for you on the replay page. Nick is saying I wish this had occurred more often. David we'd love to have you back. We love your instructional style and how much you know about all these things. Really appreciate you today. You want to wrap this all up for us. Give us give us your final thoughts.
Yeah, thank you all for viewing. I hope you'll learn to love GA for it is a better product. Join us for the study group. If you are still struggling with it. Not only will you learn more about GFR but you'll I think you'll have a good time because we always have a good time there. So you see there.
Definitely so take David up on that free study group for curious ants. I just very good. Chris from my agency went through it and passed the test. Yeah. Chris did a great job with that. We do these sorts of free webinars all the time here on iThemes Training. You can visit us at training dot i ithemes.com. The link there is in the chat. We have for example a WordPress news roundup coming up one week from today that's open for everybody. Basically a 30 day summary of everything that's happened in the WordPress world, especially angled at people who build and manage WordPress sites for clients. So we do that every month and a plug in Roundup and lots of other things. So take advantage those free webinars. If you're a member. We're back tomorrow for the fly business transformation course I'll be talking about pricing your work, and of course office hours with me for members on Thursday. That's gonna wrap it up for us today. Thank you all for hanging out with us. David, thanks again for your your really great insight into this. Thank you all as well all the attendees for great questions. That's going to do it today. I'm back here tomorrow for members with the business transformation course here on I iThemes Training, where we go further together.