 Hey, everybody. Cyrus here. Back with you with our next speaker. Now, I'm going to confess our next speaker is one of my favorite and most cool people that I've known in the marketing industry. She's an up-and-comer. I actually met her at MozCon a few years ago, so it's been a I've been terrifically excited to watch her success and to watch her grow and to watch her influence. Her name is Brie Anderson. She's an analytics nerd, a self-confessed analytics nerd who excels at explaining advanced concepts. Now, today she's going to talk about GA4 or Google Analytics 4, as most people know it. It came out last year, and while some of us are still using it, most of us aren't using it to its full potential, and Brie is here to set us right. The talk is titled, Reporting to Duty, Why You Need to Start Using GA4 Today. Please welcome my friend, Brie Anderson. It is so good to finally be back at MozCon, especially after the year we just had. I think we can all agree that last year was a little bit chaotic. My wife became my live-in cosmetologist, as well as my live-in office mate, and that went about as well as I'm sure you can imagine it did. And Google really looked at everything that was going on in the world, and they said, you know what this would be a great time for? Releasing a new analytics platform, and that's exactly what they did. In October of 2020, they rolled out Google Analytics 4. Now, Google Analytics 4 is where Google is really flexing their muscles on machine learning and artificial intelligence. They say that the smart insights are supposed to help businesses increase the return on investment, and it's something that they've built for the long term, honestly, the future of Google Analytics. And this would have been fine. I would have been so stoked, except for the fact that the day before it was rolled out, I practiced everything I needed to know in order to show people how to set up Google Analytics. And when I went in the next day, everything was changed, and Google was forcing everyone to set up Google Analytics 4 properties. But don't worry, I was able to find a way to set up universal analytics properties. It was just under that show advanced options section. Now, in here, you have the option to select a Google Analytics 4 and universal analytics property, or just a universal analytics property. And I know what you're thinking. As soon as I said that, you said, well, I know how to use universal analytics. So that's the one I'm going to use. Let me tell you, you're going to want a Google Analytics 4 property. There are a lot of things in Google Analytics 4 that you're not going to want to miss out on. One of the big things is the advanced tracking that you have access to. I know a lot of us have developers that get involved in the process to help us track specific events and things of that nature. But with Google Analytics 4, a lot of that is tracked for you already. And you can set up advanced tracking on your own, likely without a developer. Also, there are amazing visualizations all through Google Analytics 4. They're quite badass, and most all of them are customizable. Honestly, so cool. Lastly, when we really look into what Google Analytics 4 has to offer and the things that Google chose to put into Google Analytics 4, they might just be telling us some secrets as to what they find important. So if you want to get started with Google Analytics 4, now is the time to do it. Because if you get into Google Analytics 4 and you haven't set up the tracking or the property previously, you're going to have nothing in your dashboard. You have to go in and actively set it up for it to start collecting data. So it's really easy to do. You just go into the admin settings of your universal analytics property if you already have one. And under the property, you will have the option to go to Google Analytics 4 setup assistant. And there you can create your Google Analytics 4 property. Now, the properties in Google Analytics 4 are a bit different as all of your websites and apps are going to live into one property. They're all different data streams that stream into one property. Whereas in the past, we had to have multiple properties all for our different websites and apps. So once you create this new Google Analytics 4 property, if you are using the site tag that you had to put in the header of all of your pages, it will go ahead and start collecting data. If you are using Google Tag Manager, then you will be given a G tag. And you go into Tag Manager, you create a GA4 configuration tag, drop the G tag and publish it. It'll start tracking. The reason this is such a big deal and you need to do it right away is that there's absolutely no retrospective data being brought into Google Analytics 4. And I really suggest that you run Google Analytics 4 and Universal Analytics Code currently because honestly, while Google Analytics 4 is really cool, especially if you're used to Universal Analytics, it doesn't replace Universal Analytics just yet. So let's start with the tracking. We just got over how you can collect data, but what about events, right? We talked about that earlier. Well, in the good old days, you would have to create code for every event that you wanted to collect data on, or you would have to go into Tag Manager and select all of the events and triggers and tag and all that stuff that you wanted to track. Well, that's just not the case in Google Analytics 4. Google has started enhanced measurement where they just go ahead and track all these events for you and give you the information on those events. And what's really cool about that is you can use those predefined events to create custom events using only conditions. So this is an example that I did for a client of mine where we wanted to track a view promotion event. And so we told Google, hey, I know that you're collecting sessions with the page title parameter. So if anybody goes to a page with the title daily deals or that has the word daily deals in it, mark that event as a view promotion event. And right away, Google starts collecting that data and pushing all of it into an event dashboard specific to that event. So every event you have has its own dashboard and it shows you all that cool data. Even cooler, you get to refer to that event through all of Google Analytics 4, no matter what view you're in, if it's acquisition, behavior, any of those, you get to pull in that event. This makes tracking both micro and macro events super easy. And again, you don't have to involve the dev team all the time. What's even better is that you can do the same thing for conversions. Remember how you used to have to go into universal analytics after you created an event, and then you have to go in and set all of the goal parameters and all that fun stuff. Yeah, no, in Google Analytics 4, you just go into the event section, toggle it on as a conversion, and Google starts marking it as a conversion right away. Like I said, guys, this is super easy. I am not a dev person at all. And I could do this. I had it all set up in about five minutes. Now let's talk about those visualizations. We know that the future of data analytics is visualization, because data can tell a story, but visualizations paint the picture, right? So anybody can understand what's going on with the data. You're going to see far more graphs and visualizations in Google Analytics 4 than we did in universal analytics. And honestly, they're just a lot better looking. Here you can see a comparison between real time analytics in Google Analytics 4 and universal analytics. I'll let you guess which one is which. And you can tell which one's more fun to look at and easier to understand. But they're not just pretty, they're also smart. Remember, Google Analytics 4 is all about pushing that artificial intelligence and machine learning to the forefront. So anomaly detection is cooked into most every line chart that you're going to see in Google Analytics 4. And it's placed right on the chart. So you can see whenever Google has found something that's statistically significant, that's right. You no longer have to figure out if it's statistically significant yourself. Google is telling you they've put all the resources into telling you that something has happened that they weren't expecting. That's another keynote. It's what they were expecting. So in this instance, they expected a website to make X amount of money. And somehow they ended up making a lot more. This is telling you, hey, please go look at what happened this day. There might be an opportunity for you to scale that strategy or maybe it's something you need to look out because something went wrong on the website. Now they also use a lot of scatter plots in Google Analytics 4, which personally I like as I'm very visual. And I can picture a trend line pretty easily in my mind. And anything outside of that trend line is considered an outlier. In this instance, I looked at the outliers and there was a cluster of stationary specific outliers on this chart. So they were being viewed a lot, but they weren't being added to the cart. So I want you to remember that because now we're going to go in and create some of our own custom visualizations in explorations. When I created this presentation, it was called Analysis Hub. Now it's called Explorations. It's the same thing. But I want you to think of explorations as if Google Data Studio and custom dashboards from Universal Analytics had a baby. It builds like Data Studio where you get to pick your segments, your dimensions and your metrics. But it lives in Google Analytics 4 the same way custom dashboards lived in Universal Analytics. What's really, really interesting about this is that predictive analytics actually live inside of explorations. And again, this is something that's free that would have cost a lot of money for you to build out yourself or to purchase from another analytics platform. Google is now giving predictive analytics on seven day likely purchasers and seven day likely turners. So you can use those audiences or you can use the metrics in your charts and graphs in explorations. One of my favorite ways to use this is to compare Google organic traffic being organic traffic and seven day likely purchasers using the segment overlap using this one chart or this one graph I'm able to look and say okay all of the being organic traffic is likely to purchase in the next seven days when only about a quarter of the Google organic traffic is likely to purchase in the next seven days. But you can see that that's still a lot more traffic than being is bringing in. This is something that you could hand over to your CEO and they could understand in the snap of the finger, right? Now let's get back to that stationary. Remember there were a lot of item views but not a lot of add to cards. Well if we go into the explorations and we create an exploration table we are going to now add a new segment session specific segment and using the customizations I created a segment where if anybody visited a page that contained the word station in it they were put into one audience then I created another segment that was the opposite of that so sessions that did not include a visit to a page with the word station in it. Now we used to be able to do this in universal analytics but it would create audiences that we had to keep forever in explorations you can just use the segment in that specific report or you could create an audience that you can refer to all throughout Google Analytics 4. Once I did that I added the dimension of medium and added the metrics of item views and item add to cards and compared the stationary versus non-stationary with a heat map in a table and right away I was able to look and see yeah in row one there's that big discrepancy of people that viewed an item but didn't put it in their card and all that came from referral traffic so I right clicked referral traffic selected include only selection and added a source so now I can see all the sources that referred traffic to the website and I can see that again that big discrepancy is right there in that first in second line so Google Mallplex and Google merchandise shop are both sending traffic to the website that's prepared to add non-stationary items to the art to their cart but they're not prepared to add stationary items to the cart this just tells me we need to do a little bit more education on those sites before having them refer traffic to us and it was that easy it took about five minutes but you don't only make table charts and segment overlaps you have access to all sorts of charts and tables and graphs and you get to make your own line graphs which remember those line graphs come with anomaly detection should you want to use it in explorations you also get to select your own training period and sensitivity so you can customize the anomaly detection to your liking but now let's get to the exciting stuff is Google telling us secrets in Google analytics for a lot has changed and so we're going to use a little bit of inductive reasoning based on the information that we're given to make some assumptions about what Google finds important the first thing to note are all of those events that they're tracking right away they tracked them all along and they're just now giving us access to them but if Google is tracking those events all along they're probably important so that's definitely something to keep in mind they also gave us new metrics in Google analytics for we have engaged session average engagement time per session and average engaged sessions per user now this has replaced where behavior analytics used to go and if you look at it closely you see one very controversial metric missing that's right bounce rate is gone from Google analytics for I've not been able to find it anywhere instead everything is focused on this engagement now engaged is even defined in Google analytics for as something that has 10 seconds more 10 seconds or more in a session two pages or more in a session or a conversion in session they also defined what engaged time is and basically it just means that your app or website needs to be in the forefront of the user's browser now given this we don't have to worry about what are KPIs going to be for this engagement campaign Google just told us what our KPIs need to be they need to be 10 second sessions two pages per session or sessions with conversions there are a ton of these types of hints all throughout Google analytics for I could be here all day explaining them to you but I'm just going to hit on a couple more very quickly the first is that Google has defined a lifecycle for us in the new menu it's acquisition engagement monetization and retention that monetization isn't just conversions anymore because your absence filters into there so it's not just app purchases website purchases conversions it's also our people being served ads and are you making money on ads really really interesting we also see a definite split between traffic and users something we've not really seen Google hone in on before and I really think that could be a sign for something and lastly again with the new metrics we're seeing average views per user for specific pages and screens that might be something that we really need to look into and it all made me wonder is Google trying to tell us something about the future of marketing we really need to focus on on that omnichannel monetization Google is recognizing it as something that happens so we need to make sure that those user journeys are up to par also there is an increased focus on retention something Google has been working on for a long time lifetime value cohort analysis all of those things have been in beta for a long time in universal analytics and in Google analytics for Google really came out swinging with those retention specific metrics and lastly becoming a destination as opposed to a pit stop if you road trip to see your family every year you're going to have to stop along the way but those stops probably aren't like planned to the tee you're not stopping at the same place every time but the destination is always the same that's the difference between being traffic and having users so the traffic is going to stop at some different places but the users are what's really valuable where you can monetize and retain users now in marketing we've made this shift a lot where we've had to go from quantity to quality and I think Google is telling us it's about time to focus on that when it comes to our online presence so get started with Google analytics for today like I said it doesn't take too much time make sure you're tracking Google analytics for in universal analytics on all of your properties go in and create those events custom events and conversions and reports to specific what's specifically to what's important to your business then use the visualizations to find trends and outliers so that you can figure out what you can scale and what you might need to stop and then lastly consider what Google has given us in Google analytics for and whether or not you need to change any strategies or KPIs thanks so much for hanging out I'm Bri Anderson and I'll see you next time