Wix | Live Webinar: GA4 Lessons and Tactics One Year Later

Today we are talking about the lessons that we have learned, the things we have experienced our entire journey from GA4. It's been a year, a long, long year since we have been been blessed with GA4 and we today we have our illustrious panel here. Today we have myself. I am the head of SEO Communications here at wix. We have Morty Overstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix who who absolutely loves analytics and just cannot get enough.

It's like my favorite thing to do when I'm not having a lobotomy.

He absolutely loves analytics.

I was going to say that's a lie, but then, then we got there. Okay.

Okay. Then we have the fantastic Jaina Di Tomaso who's the president and partner at Cakepoint Analytics. She's written, spoken, done lots and lots of stuff, all about all of your analytics journey, knows all of the things about GA4 and we're really pleased to have her here. So thank you for joining us.

And I'm also from Vancouver island or I live on Vancouver island now, so Canadians represent. And also like if you live in Vancouver or West coast, please come say hi. I need more locals.

So yes. And then we're also joined by Nava Hopkins, who's a consultant and paid me, a strategy strategist over optimizer. She is over here. She's all about the GA4 and PPC. So she's got some great perspectives on how that all works and making sure that you are getting lots of information there. I've seen Nava and Dana speak at multiple events and they're both fantastic. So happy to have you both here.

Just here to make sure that there's a little bit of PPC empathy. I know that there's going to be a lot of SEO forward thoughts and just want to make sure that we're, we're all working together. We're not having fights. We have understanding, we know what we're asking for and that, that we're also being as positive as we can. Wonderful.

Cool. So with that, with that all said, let's get into a little bit of faq. So before we get going, just so that you know and so anybody else who joins. Yes, the webinar is being recorded. All of our webinars are recorded. If you have missed one previously, then you can go to our YouTube channel and you can watch them all and enjoy all of that wonderful stuff. And we will also send you the YouTube link with the recording when, when it's uploaded, which should be later this week and it'll be sent to you by email with, with the decks or sorry with the information. It's kind of a not deck this this time. And then we're also have a Q and a panel at the bottom of the screen where you can ask questions. We will answer as many as we possibly can in the chat now and we will also curate the themes and try to answer some questions at the end as well. And those of you who submitted your ask the expert questions before the webinar. Thank you so much for that. We are having a look through those. We've, we've pulled out some of the key points and tried to address those in in the session today. So than for that if you are interested in future webinars we will be running another one in July and we will be running more every month. So so go to wix.com SEO forward/learn forward/ webinars, lots of slashes and you can find all of our webinars. So do check that out. So we've done our introductions and we're now going to get into a quick, super, super quick overview for those of you who have joined us. If you're interested in other things other than other than analytics, specifically if you're interested in SEO generally, please visit the SEO Learning Hub. And we have lots of information that there, but today we're talking about Google Analytics and just a super, super, super, super, super quick overview of where we are with that. A long, long time ago when I started as a marketer, there was something called UA Universal analytics. And it was, you know, it wasn't perfect, but it worked. And most people, most people got to got the hang of it. And you could go in and you could browse and you could look around. And then in 2019, Google announced something called Google Analytics 4 because UA was actually Google Analytics 3. And they said that they launched it and everyone went, that's nice, but nobody really paid much attention to it. Then in 2013 they said, you know that thing that we launched, it's now going to become mandatory. And in fact we're deprecating universal analytics. And so now we have GA4 and that is where we are now. So in between then and now, they've told us that not only is GA4 or not not is universal Versal analytics deprecated, but your data is about to disappear too. And in between all of these, these, these key events, lots of other things have happened. And so I'd like to open it up to the panel and just ask, how is everybody doing? How was this, this transition for everyone here.

I don't know if Google hates Canada or something, but I don't know why Canada Day keeps being the deprecation date for things like I spent last year Canada Day dealing with last minute panicked emails. And then this Canada Day I'm going to be dealing with last minute. Oh, I forgot to download my UA information. So just I'm going to say to you and we'll probably address this more as we get into this. If you have not yet downloaded your universal analytics information, please do it like immediately. I don't wait last minute because things going to happen during this webinar. Actually I'm going to drop a link in the chat right now to a tool I've made in Looker Studio that will help you download your UA information. So I'm going to go dig that up and post it. Just don't leave it to the last minute please. I know everyone's going to be on vacation probably, you know, depending on where

you're in your world.

There's a lot of holidays happen in the next couple of weeks. So just, just take the time today right now to download it. Thank you.

And I think the thing that's important about that is that you might not need it just now. You might like you might not need it need it just now. But it's really, really useful to just have a copy of that file should you, should you need to, to see more of that information. A lot of people have had Google Analytics running for, in the background for a long, long time. So there's lots of really interesting data that you can, that you can get from that. So it's definitely worth downloading it.

So there's a really good question that I want to get to, but just I want to speak to this piece about how are we doing. So in the PPC world when it came to GA4 we have a bit of a mixed relationship because a whole bunch of us did the thing. We, we set up our GA4 properties but then Google decided that they wanted to create whole separate other GA4 properties and merge those with the domains we supply to everybody. But then they decided they wanted to be extra helpful and create conversion events in our Google Ads accounts that were primary conversion actions. There was this whole period where people had to remove a whole lot of conversion data because of duplicate conversion events. That was well intentioned. So I think right now we're on the Merry Brick road or the gold the golden road to Oz using Crystal's great theme from Mozcon of great intentions, weird execution There the question though about why do we need this data? This is another thing with Google Ads that's actually very important because we have decreased and decreased insights into our conversion data and our look back windows have kind of gotten a little bit wonky. Being able to have that lifetime value of your domain and kind of seeing how your traffic has trended is so incredibly important. So even if you can't have that data now, you can at least use your historical data to see how did you trend 3, 5, 10 years ago? Because right now with GA4, we are not going to be able to have that much of a look back window. So if you are in that place of privilege position where your domain is that old, that is a great way to shore up your data, especially as we may not have as much data available to us now.

And I think that given the timeline of where we are, like 20, 24, the last two or three years have been kind of weird for analytics, you know, because, because of COVID and because of things opening and things closing and you know, new new things like click and collect becoming more common or you know, click and collect at the curb or whatever it is. Um, and, and I think that, that you know, having some of that data, being able to, to benchmark it against times when, when it was more, you know, more standard operating hours, more standard footfall is something that's going to be really, really useful. I had a client who, they sponsored like a fun run or something and basically during COVID obviously they didn't sponsor the fun run. It just wasn't, there was no fun, there was no running. They're like, not for them. And, and so, so you know, they had, they had a year where there was none of that sponsorship data. And that's, that's very different from, from, you know, looking year on year, you'd say, oh, we're up 300,000% or something. Well, you're not. It's just, it's just a different year. So, so yeah, I think that's, that's, it's a super useful point. Did you share that link there, Dina?

Yeah, yeah. Morty passed it out to everybody. So thank you.

Wonderful, wonderful. Okay. And, and, and have you found that. So one of the things that also occurs to me in this time is that like, for somebody who's been on WIX for, for a while, you've got your WIX analytics data during, during that, like that's been running continuously. Are you finding that, that you had clients who were like not going to switch over to GA4 just going to use something else. Did you find that that happened with some folks?

For sure, that's happened with some folks. And I, but I think it really depends on whether or not people are using Google Ads, because if you are using Google Ads, you really do have to have GA4. So like I, and I've always said to people like the, the stuff I talk about when it comes to analytics, like, yes, I teach people how to use GA4ET principles of good reporting apply no matter what the tool is. And every analytics tool out there, whether it's GA4, whether it's Wix, built in analytics, whether it's Matomo, whether it's Fathom, they all capture the same kind of stuff. It's just a matter of taking that data and doing something useful with it. But the reality is that if you use Google Ads, you have to use GA4 in addition to whatever you're going to use as your source of truth, for lack of a better term. But I think part of it too, and this is where I think people really stressed out About UA to GA4 is first off, the timing was horrible. Know people had this global pandemic thing that we were recovering from and like there's like this collective global PTSD from that. And then in addition to that, then it's like, hey, by the way, learn this brand new tool. But I also think what happened is because people had time to Compare UA and GA4 side by side. And I'm sure you've seen this with your WIX analytics as well is people will say, but this is, you know, I see this data in GA4 and I see this in Wix, or I see this data in GA4 and I see THIS in UA, which is true. They're both true. And this is the problem with analytics, right, Is that multiple things can be true at the same time depending upon how the analytics tool interprets data. And I think that's one of the major struggles that UA kind of hid that because it was the thing that everybody used, it was the source of truth. And as soon as you look at something else, you're like, oh, this silly other tool, it must not be totally correct. And UA was regarded as like the, the Bible when it came to analytics. But then you get into GA4 which is just like there's all these different things to look at. Where are my reports gone? Why is this broken? And it's not broken per se, it's just measuring things in a different sort of way.

Yeah.

And I think that that's the Big thing where people were like, well, I don't like this and I don't like change. And so screw GA4. And then the SEO community. I think a lot of people were really mad. I mean, I don't know. I'm not as plugged into the PPC community, like, how do people feel on the PPC side of things when the switch was announced?

So it's actually really funny. We at Optimizer compare our rule engine to GA4 a lot because it's a blank canvas. So everyone initially was very frustrated, very stressed out, very, ah, what do I do? But those who are able to persevere and actually identify, okay, here's the exact use cases I need. What are the questions I actually want to ask my data. What are the questions that are actually useful to me saw it as kind of this freeing opportunity to do some spring cleaning with data. There's a lot of KPIs on the PPC side that are vanity metrics and they're lovely and like they're nice to fill out reports, but they're not actually really critically important. And I think one of the things that I would expect to see, especially as Google and other ad networks are following this are focusing on profit or POAS reporting is seeing how well can you connect your GA4 to all of your other E commerce integrations, but then also shoring up any CRM integrations. The other thing that's actually very interesting is that PPC professionals and I caveat, I am not speaking for every single PPC professional. I am sure there will be other PPC professionals that think I am full of it. But with that disclaimer out of the way, most PPC professionals will have GA4 and kind of traditional Google Ads tagging running simultaneously because they want to be able to have those enhanced conversions and that trusted tag that they know concretely with the reporting. And then GA4 is kind of a way to communicate between your PPC ARM and your organic ARM and your email arm and fill in every other marketing channel arm. So it's really more about we want to make sure that we're speaking the same language so that when the client sees the results, it's not two completely different answers.

And I think that data clarity and data consistency is something that I think it might have been a little painful, maybe ripping off the band aid, but I think that's worth doing regardless as to what platform we're on. So, yeah, great points, great points. So we've discussed how it went. Let's discuss how it's going right. So in our questions from the audience, we had a lot of questions about setting up. If you're joining us and you have not set up GA4 on Wix. Lucky you. We have a very easy to use, very straightforward setup process. It's really just a few steps. You go and get your code, you add your code into the little box and then you can. And then you're connected to GA4. It's pretty straightforward. We built this with Google for your analytics enjoyment and both of you have worked with folks data space. When I said analytics enjoyment is that if you. I had a lot of questions from, from folks about setting up, about the setting up process and, and I think, you know, y' all both talked a little bit about data and keeping data data together. So what are your tips for setting up? What makes a smooth setup? What are some of the things that, that people should avoid when they're setting up GA4?

Yeah, I typically recommend that people actually set up two GA4s. So depending upon how you're running GA4, the tool you use may not be so for example, if you're using like that WIX setup or you just put in the ID directly, you may not be able to mentor in multiple IDs. But if you're using a tool like Google Tag Manager, for example, you can have more than one GA4 running at the same time. And the reason why I Recommend Setting up two GA4s is that you have one. I actually have three running on my website. We have our main production live GA4, which is where the good stuff goes. And then we have one called literally Dana's Testing Ground. And that's where I try stuff out before it gets promoted to the main. And then I have a third one which is just our development and testing site. So I think it's really important to make sure that you're not polluting your main GA4 with stuff when you're just trying things out. And I do. Oh, did we lose Crystal?

Thinking about lost her.

Okay.

Oh no. Okay, well, I'll just keep going then. Hopefully she'll be able to reconnect. But what I was going to say is that it's really important to test things out first before you go ahead and push things to production to live.

Because.

Because it's really difficult to remove stuff out of GA4 once it's in there. It is possible to delete data. It's easier to use than it was in ua, but it's not great. You can't delete just this one thing. Or just that one thing. It's not as surgical as that. So I would strongly recommend having a testing ground. And even if it's, for example, you have a site on wix, you set up a second site on WIX that you use to try stuff out on, and then you add your test GA4 to that, I strongly recommend doing that sort of thing. And it does not hurt your site to have more than one GA4 running on it. The speed difference is very tiny. It's not going to cause any sort of speed hit with regards to Google's core web vitals, if you're familiar with those speed tools. So, yeah, just. Just have a GA4 that you can play around with. I think is one of the biggest

things, is that I just wanted to piggyback off that point because that's something I. I love universal analytics and I don't love analytics. I'm not an analytics. Like Maven. Yeah, really like universal analytics. And I. I really found that GA4 to really be a struggle initially. I still find to be a struggle. One of the things that kind of helped me is like, I'm just going to spend an hour, I'm just going to mess around. I'm going to see what's in there. Is that really there was nothing else to do back then because it was completely new. And that's the only way to go about it. You still recommend that to be a way for people to kind of get their, you know, dip their toe into the analytics pool. Is it at this point, because it's. We're a year into this. Does it make more sense, like to just go through like something like one of your courses or something like that in order to get more familiar with

day four, I'm always gonna say, yes, please take one of my courses. Yeah, I would say definitely, like playing around with it. And playing around with is actually a component of my courses too. I actually have a thing about setting up your own GA4 and setting up your own website and playing around with it there. Because I think that that's a really critical part of learning analytics. I think that what people get really hung up on when it comes to analytics is this idea of like, I don't want to break anything. I don't want to click on these things. I don't want to click on that things. I'm worried I'm going to break something. And I actually used to teach. There's an organization in Canada called Ladies Learning Code, and I used to teach workshops in there. And it really was an Age level sort of situation. Like if someone was older and like, I'm turning 50 this year, I count myself in that older group. So if somebody's older and they didn't necessarily grow up using computers all the time and like, I've been a nerd for a long time. I've used computers. Like my dad built me a PC when I was eight. Like, I've been using computers for a very long time. But if you didn't grow up that way, then using a computer you're like, I don't want to click that I'm going to break things. And I think that's where people are uncomfortable clicking around with stuff because they're afraid they're going to break something. And so that's why I say like, make a GA4 that's just for you to play around with. You can't break stuff, you know, in that same way it's not going to hurt your production data, but that way you can try stuff out. And I think that that's a really important way to approach GA4 is just like having somewhere where you know, you can have your own playground and try stuff out.

Yeah, sorry guys.

Well, I just want to give a shout out. GA4 actually has a setup assistant. And I know that for an experience, established GA4 technical person, it's honestly nonsense. But for someone who has no experience whatsoever and is just looking to kind of get some ideas of what sort of questions to ask, how to format information, what kind of events should be normal events versus key events. Dana and I had a little bit of a discussion about that before the webinar started. That's a really powerful way to begin. And then the other thing that I strongly, strongly recommend is building in set up time where you know, even once you have it set up and you're ready to go, that your conversion data is suspect. Pretty much every ad platform will have some ability to communicate that conversions weren't quite right. And even if you don't want to take advantage of that, you can still use things that are called secondary conversions to use your free GA4 events. And when you're sure that they're correct, then you can switch them over to primary and let those track. But there, there are a lot of kind of guardrails, safety nets, whatever metaphor you want to use to enable you to have that safety. But I could not agree with you more, Dana. Just, just get in and play with the kind of task. What questions do I want my data to answer for me? Because if you start from there, it's actually a lot, much, much easier than UA because you're asking questions of data, you're saying, okay, what things do I want to know versus how do I configure the existing reports to meet those needs?

Yeah. And I think approaching your reporting too, with like a jeopardy state of mind. Like I always say to people, it's not, you know, what are my sessions by channel, for example. That's not what I want to know. You're phrasing it in the form of a question. So you know, which channel is driving the most, you know, key events, slash conversions for me right now. And I say key events because I want to be precise in terms of the terminology GA4 uses. But let's all have a moment here and we realize that, like, people are not going to start calling it key event rate optimization. It's still conversions. It's okay to call it conversions. Just the word in GA4 is key events, so. And then apparently there's mediocre events. That was my joke. Screenshot is I had a report called key events, Mediocre events, Other events.

Yeah, well, I think I'm on the wrong slide. Okay, there we go. Got it.

There we go.

So.

So that was reporting. When we think about the. The other thing.

Sorry.

So that was setting up and I think the next thing we need to think about is reporting. So reporting in GA4 is different from reporting in EUA. This was one of the things I was most heartbroken about, if I'm completely honest, because I used to go into ua, browse, and you could see the reports and people were like, you can just make your own. And I'm like, I don't want to make my own. I just want to see the reports. But there are lots of different ones. What I will say personally is I think they've gotten better. So I think the reports have gotten better since they initially launched it, which I think is good, personally.

Yeah, yeah. I think part of it too is because. And if you haven't, you know, looked in GA4, when. So dimension. Dimension is a grouping of data, like text pages, et cetera. Metric is like a number. So just, just keep that in mind. So when you look at a report and you look at the dimension list, note that in a lot of cases that's a drop down and you can click that and look at another dimension. So for example, if you're in, say, the Tech Details report, which is under Users, and you used to see a separate report in UA for browsers and a separate report for operating system, as a Separate report for device. It's all there still. It's just hidden underneath that dimension. Dropdown. And I think that that's something where people went into GA4. They're like, I have 30 reports in UA. I see six options in GA4. This sucks. The data is all still there. It's just, it is hidden. And I totally agree that Google kind of missed the mark when it came to setting up the reports out of the box. I don't know why they assumed that people, especially small business owners, have all this time on their hands to just play around in an analytics tool all day, because that's totally what makes them money. They don't.

So I actually have a theory on this and it goes into how they set up their ad products. So there's a thing in Google Ads called smart campaigns. Most people on this webinar would absolutely hate them. Whereas you have no control. You say, like, I'm a beginner, I have no, nothing. Like, just set it up for me. And there's kind of an assumption that if someone is at that level, they don't need or want or care about the level of reporting that we've come to expect that we demand out of UA and now GA4 and moving forward, GA4. Then there's the kind of traditional campaign types and how they, they work. And there's lots of control and then there's performance maps where we're getting control back, which is kind of like the journey of GA4. But now we have that. So the reason I'm bringing up this kind of paid example is I, I truly believe that it wasn't ill intent. It was, we need to get this live, to get people testing, to see what we're going to engage with. And we don't think that the, the mom and pops, the SMBs are going to care. What's actually very empowering and very inspiring is how many of them do care and that these are really critical metrics and there is a lot of intelligence. So I think one of the things that's actually very important is understanding what reports you need, say on an everyday basis versus a quarterly chart.