 Thank you everyone. And thank you for joining this session. My goal here today is to get you up to speed on Google Analytics 4, Cookies tracking as well as, you know, alleviate some of the fears and concerns that other people have or most people have when they hear Cookies tracking and Google Analytics 4. By show of hands, can I see how many of you are familiar with first-party, third-party cookies so that I can just zoom? Okay, about 60% room. Okay, so the agenda for today is I'm gonna quickly go over Cookies, GF4 history, why Google is doing what they're doing. They announced it quite abruptly that, you know, we are moving into Google Analytics 4. Actually, they announced like two months back. What are the new stuff in GF4 and how to get started starting today or tomorrow? If you want to download the slides, you can scan this QR code and you will get a copy of the slides. Quick, Mike already covered about me. I am part tech, part marketing, so I'll skip through that. But yes, I did start my e-commerce venture back in 1997 when the web was still early on and the way I used to drive traffic at that time would be like, you know, going into eBay, putting up bids and trying to bring people to the site. And Analytics was a big headache at that time. You know, there was, I believe the software was called Web Trends, which is early on I would have to download the web server logs, analyze it. There was nothing like this that exists back then, right? So if you are getting started, like the Shopify, Amazon, you are living in a glorious time. And then after I graduated, I went on to work at a Silicon Valley company that went public back in the 2000s. But coming back quickly is without data, we are blind. At least for us, what we do, right? We do Google search marketing. We help growing brands and entrepreneurs with their visibility and bringing new customers and new traffic. If we don't have an insight into what's working, what's not working, we are just basically flying blind. So data help us to understand, you know, what's really happened. Historical data tells us what future actions and decisions we should be taking and cookies, right? Cookies are everything. We use cookies to track from what items have been added to the shopping cart to what are your preferences, personalizing, things like that. So cookies are inherently good. If not the web as we know today would be broken, right? So that's very good about cookies. However, there are cookies that are first party and then there are third parties. First party are if you come to marketandgrow.com and if we set some cookies in your browser that says, hey, so and so came, this user is logged in, those would be considered as a first party. And third party would be things like if we use Facebook and we had, you know, Facebook integration and then Facebook would place a cookie also and they would track you. And where it actually became really bad is this third party cookies started tracking users or visitors across the web. So you came to marketandgrow.com, now Facebook figured out, pixels, you say, you came to our site and then you went to somewhere else and then the profile you're saying, you like digital marketing. You like sports, things like that. So what happened was some platforms overused it. And I think we have all heard the news where, you know, scandals happened. They over tracked over, you know, profiled us and they figured out what we were going to do before we even knew what we were going to do. So third party cookies are going away. Firefox and Safari has already blocked it. Apple's ATT rolled out last year with iOS 14.5 and we kind of, you know, we don't do Facebook marketing, but I'm hearing from my peers in the industry who run agents in Facebook marketing that they are suffering. And Google was supposed to actually phase out third party cookies this year and they changed their mind and they said they're going to phase it out next year and you will see why. First of all, Google wants to phase it out. They want to be pro-privacy, but at the same time, analytics Google ads, they all run on third party cookies because Google and already Google analytics has been deemed illegal in certain EU countries. So Google was caught between a rock and a hard place. Now they have been working with GA4 for some time. They released the beta in 2020, but they were really not really ready to put it into the real life, right? They were not, the GA4 was not ready for the production environment, as you may know, but they just had to do it. So here's the quick history of GA4. Google started off as Arching, which was a company Google bought in 2005, then became 2008. Classic analytics. Universal analytics was 2012, which is about a 10 years old. If you follow Alex, I think, you know, he just said, that's like a million years in this day and age. And off in 2022, we are moving to GA4. So the reason why we call it GA4, not GA2022 is this is the fourth iteration of Google's analytics. However, this is not an upgrade. You know, that's something I want everybody to know. If you're moving from universal analytics to GA4, it's not an upgrade only because everything has changed, right? And I'm going to cover it very quickly. Number one is you, the cutoff deadline, date is July 1st, 2023. On that day, Google will stop sending data to your current analytics, which is universal analytics, and they're going to go into GA4. So you have to move. And there is no promise how long Google will keep the data. So if you're using universal analytics, it's for you to actually start backing up your data, as well as start moving to GA4, because you want to have those historical data so that you can run comparisons and things like that. GA4 is event-driven. This is where the whole thing, you know, it's just like apples and oranges, just because GA4 architecture, the data model is very different from universal analytics. GA4 is privacy-centric. It will work with or without cookies. Google is using machine learning and statistical modeling to fill in the data gaps. For example, if you have ad blockers and all those things on and you don't consent to cookies, Google will still kind of figure out who you are based on other things or just predict that data. But if you want, as a website owner, if you want to have blended data, you need to turn on Google signals. Google GA4 relies on first-party cookies and I will skip over the privacy sandbox. It's just a way Google decides how they're going to track you. Other things you should know, Google GA4 allows BigQuery integrations. So what that does is if you want to retain data and you want to go crazy with data analysis, you can do that. Now, BigQuery integration was something that was reserved for enterprise customers who were paying over $150,000 a year. So they have brought it into GA4. Enhanced events out of the box and you will see very quickly is something that is really good in GA4. How you track users in GA4 is drastically different from GA3 and I've laid it out. You know, users versus total users, it's just the way they changed it. Oh, the other thing is e-commerce tracking needs to be implemented. So if you have an e-commerce site, that's something you need to work with the developer and start working with it. I'm not sure if e-commerce starts, has supported, is supporting. Or if there are any plugins that will support GA4 yet. Bounce rate has changed. That's what something a lot of people are crying about it. You know, I didn't like the bounce rate feature as it existed in the previous current version. So I'm not missing it. There is a new thing called engagement rate. And let's dive in because I'm going to go deep into all these things one by one. Engagement rate right now, it's the calculate what's called an engaged session, which is a session that has lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least two page views or screen views. Because good GA4 can track both app as well as app and website visits. Bounce rate in GA4 is the opposite of engagement rate. So if your engagement rate is 30%, that means your bounce rate is 70%. However, in universal analytics, it was, you know, if you had one session on your site, which was viewed only one page or did not trigger any events, it would be considered a bounce rate. So it's just drastically different how they calculate it now. This is how GA4 account structure will look like. You know, you have the main account and then you have different properties. Like I said, you can combine website, web app and mobile app. Just separate it out or you can do separate and just play around with it. Okay, so there are three ways you can get started. Today is there's no need to have any, you know, issues where, oh, should I start it? Should I not? If you're using WordPress, go ahead and add it directly through a plugin. There are plugins that support GA4. Ideally, I would prefer you use GTM, Google Tag Manager. I think there is a session right after this on Tag Manager or combine UA and GA4. You can do that. It's not really recommended, but it's a very quick and easy way for you to send data into GA4 and take a look at it. By the way, if you're getting started with GA4 by default, Google retains the data for two months. So you need to go back and change it to 14 months. That's the max you can save it for. But make sure you do that or else you just lose data. Here's, this is how you do the BigQuery integration. You can import data from your CRM and fit it into Google and Google is going to like help you with matching more customers and more visitors. Activate Google Signals if possible. If your privacy, the country you are in, privacy law allows you to do that. There is where the reporting identity comes in. If you are using the three options, if you are not turning on Google Signals, then you would have to use the device-based option. And, you know, this is a group feature in Google GA4. You have a bug view. So you can actually go in and snoop on someone, a visitor, of course, anonymous and you can see what they're doing, what events are firing and things like it makes life a lot easier. Data filters. Views are gone. So you can actually filter and you can split out traffic, internal traffic. You can do a lot of things with filters. Like I said, it's, everything is event. Everything is event. So a lot of the things that we have done in the past, page views, social, things like that, they've all moved away. But that allows you to also give you flexibility. You can pass in parameters into events and you can group them and you can do a lot of fancy stuff which was not otherwise possible in the past. This is the other thing that comes out of the box. Now you can track how far has someone gone into your website. Someone clicked outbound link. And if they have downloaded a file, things like that, that comes out of the box. Goals are gone. They're calling it conversions and setting it up very easy. If you have an event, you can just turn on toggle on the switch and it becomes a conversions. You can create custom events and then you can create custom conversions. Audiences, this is something that's helpful for you if you are creating, say, people who have bought my products and people who have bought or who have added products into the shopping cart but have not converted. You could actually create audiences. Reports and analysis hub in GF4 is very, very good. I like it compared to what it was in the past. There is a funnel analysis. It helps you to see, you know, where users have dropped off much better than what it was in the older version. In the older version, you were very strict. It was very strict, right? You had to think ahead of time what journey they will be in and if the user didn't follow the journey, then you would have lost them. So this is what happens and it's kind of flexible. And let's see, this is something called path analysis. And this is better than the current version, which is universal analytics because not only it gives you a clear picture but also what you can do, what's the reverse analysis where you could say if someone has purchased, how did they get to that stage? So if you're an e-commerce site or if you have a form submission, you can see how are the people ending up with that result and which path they came from. If you scan this QR code, you can actually download a checklist that will help you with planning and auditing and gives you, kind of helps you with measuring where you are. Take inventory of what assets and what events you are doing and then from there, you can actually map it back to your GA force so that way when you're not just like doing it on the fly and winging it. With that, if you have any questions, I know I zoomed through a lot of stuff here. Feel free to email me and that's it. Thank you.