363: What Bloggers Need to Know About Google Analytics 4 with Alison Bechdol

This episode is sponsored by our sister site, Clarity. C L A R I T I is how you spell clarity. All different iterations of how people say it, but it's clarity because it helps you to be clear on what it is that you need to be working on and really gives you direction around how you can go around improving and updating and tracking the content on your blog. We built it because we had been managing everything in a spreadsheet. So my guess is there's two people listening to this podcast. One would be you are people who track stuff, then you probably track it in a spreadsheet. Maybe air table, maybe notion. And my guess is it's a lot of manual work. There's another group of people who just aren't tracking anything. And that's okay, you'll get there eventually. But Clarity is going to be the tool that's going to allow you to do that more easily. It's going to allow you to not spend as much manual time doing the tracking, updating, improving, and just generally understanding the lay of the land with your content. And one of the things that I think is most important a lot of times we talk about hiring on this podcast, but one of the things we don't talk about enough, and I probably should talk about it more, is some of the first positions you should hire for are software. It's not an actual person. You're hiring software to come in and do a lot of the work that you are doing. And that's what clarity is for us. As the pinch of Yum Team Food Blocker Pro team. We use clarity to take manual work away from our day to day tasks and we automate that. It's one of the easiest ways to have your first hire. So if you're thinking, oh, you know, I hear people talk about hiring a lot, who should my next hire be? My encouragement for you would let your next hire be a tool like Clarity, where you're going to spend 25amonth and you're going to save an incredible amount of time. That's what it's all about. So if you want to check it out, if you want to learn a little bit more about what it is and how it works, you can go to clarity.com food and you can deep dive into the ins and outs of Clarity just by signing up for that list. And that's not going to sign you up for the app, it's not going to sign you up and, you know, process any payments or anything like that. It's just, it's just going to allow you to understand the tool better through some onboarding emails that give you a little bit of context around what Clarity does and and why we built it. So again, that's clarity.com food if you want to check that out. And as a last note here, we're halfway through this 25 forever deal. So when I say you can, you know, think of hiring clarity at $25 a month as a little like team member who's in the background working for you, that deal's not going to last forever. We're just wanting to get to our first 500 users as we're in the early stages with this. You'll still get a lot of value out of it. But the great thing is as the value within Clarity increases, as we build out more features, as we build out more functionality, you will be locked in at that $25 price as a thank you for signing up early, for getting, for being somebody who's using the tool early on, giving us feedback, but also finding a lot of value out of it. We've actually had two people this week. It was last week actually that followed up and one person said I love it was all L O V E Capital, this service. And somebody else said the same thing in the Slack channel, which you can join and be a part of that after you sign up for Clarity to see how other people are using it and the questions that come up and offer any insight or feedback along the way. So thank you to Clarity for sponsoring this episode. Foreign. Welcome to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. We're excited that you are here and I'm looking forward to sharing this interview with Alison Bechdal. She has an agency called Digital Aid and we've worked with Alison. She's a Food Blogger Pro expert, so you might see her on the forum and she's the expert in all things analytics and Google Analytics and number crunching and data and all of those important things. And she's going to be talking today about a really big change that's coming down the line and it's not happening until next year, but it's something that you should be aware of right now, a change that you should make. And that is a switch or adding. I shouldn't say it's just a switch. It's adding Google Analytics 4 as a tracking mechanism as analytics for your site. And she's going to be talking about the idea behind that, why it's not at this point just a switch over to it, but it's actually kind of layering that in so you can Start collecting data using Google Analytics 4 because there's going to be a switch and when there's a switch, the old version of Google Analytics, Universal analytics is going away and you won't be able to track your information with that. So she's going to be talking about why that change is happening, what that will entail and some of the strategies around it. It's an important interview and one that has some action items for you as a publisher with it. So let's go ahead and jump in. Alison, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's fun to have a conversation. Anytime that I talk to people that I've emailed a lot, we've emailed back and forth. You've worked some members of our team, but it's always really nice to be able to say, great, we're going to actually have a call. And also nice because a lot of times these calls are focused. We're focused on something that oftentimes we're both interested in. I'm interested in it. You're an expert in this. Sure. And we're going to be talking about that today with Google Analytics Fun News. You're actually the Google Analytics expert for Food Blogger Pro. For anybody in, in the, in the forums who has Google Analytics questions, we'll be seeing you around there a little bit more, which is really awesome and we're really excited about that. So thanks for your work there. But tell us a little bit about your story. Everybody here is a business owner in some way, whether in their startup stage, where they've been doing it for 10 years. So it's always interesting to hear about people who are doing business and business in different ways. And your focus is analytics data, focusing on Google Analytics, a lot of that work. So how did that start for you?

Yeah, definitely. So this was not what I thought I was going to be doing when I got into the business world. It was honestly something that kind of fell into my lap in a way that I joined a small agency. I'm located here in Milwaukee, so I was part of a very small website development agency and when you work for small agencies, you get to learn how to do a lot of different. So it was a lot of self learning. But luckily we have a lot of great resources specifically surrounding Google support and all that kind of their different platforms and user interfaces. So I was able to go ahead and kind of do a lot of self learning and got to really kind of hone down on the things that I enjoyed. So Google Analytics being one of those Then Google Tag Manager shortly followed from there. I kind of just really got into it and so you're able to find different insights and the more you're in this kind of space and understanding the data, it's a lot. You get to see those trends over different industries and different time periods and seasonality. So with that I kind of hopped around between a handful of other small web development agencies and then come Covid I was, I guess, little. I decided to split off on my own and be this one little, I guess, yeah. Birth of my digital strategy kind of business here, which has been really great. So being able to focus on more one on one clients, working with other agencies or partnering with other agencies in order to have these kinds of digital conversations. I also do training with a handful of agencies as well for people who don't have an analytics wing or analytics arm of their business. So it's been a really interesting ride. And yeah, I couldn't think about doing. Honestly, I'm kind of one of those people that now that I'm my own boss, I don't think I could ever imagine going back to having somebody else be my boss. But it's been great. I'm really enjoying it. And obviously now with Google Analytics 4, there's just even more stuff to keep diving into.

Yeah. And that's one of the things that we find to be so true. Sometimes I think it might seem like, hey, if you focus on one thing, you're going to learn all, everything you can about it and then that'll be it. Like if you become an expert in Photoshop, well, you'll learn it all and then it's done. Or you become an expert in Google Analytics or Google Ads or WordPress, but it just keeps evolving. Like those are not stagnant platforms and so you're constantly having to learn. Even way back when. I remember doing a Google Analytics course early on for Food Blogger Pro and while I was doing the course, they like updated the interface. It was like, it was like three days that I spent recording it and then like halfway through, like stuff switched around. It's like, oh, this is always changing and evolving. Yes, Google Analytics for a really important evolution and a really significant one. It's not like changing where things are located in the interface. And we're going to talk about that. But I want to go back actually you had mentioned something that I think a lot of people be like, oh, I don't know what that is. People know Google Analytics. It's kind of that core foundational thing. But then you Also mentioned Google Tag Manager and you know that's an important thing, but I think it's less known. What is that? And should every publisher, blogger be using Google Tag Manager or what is it?

Yeah, that's a great question. So Google Tag Manager is really a. I kind of like to explain it as a portal between your website and third party tools, Google Analytics being one of those third party tools. So other third parties can be social media platforms, your paid advertising platform. So Google Tag Manager really acts as this nice little middleware almost between the back end of your website and those third parties. So we can utilize Google Tag Manager for a handful of things. First off, what's really great about it is like Pixel implementation. So instead of having to, let's say you have a brand new Facebook pixel you need to install, instead of having to contact a developer or find a plugin on WordPress, you can you go ahead utilize Google Tag Manager. That's a one time install product. Once that installed, you can go ahead and manually add your own pixels in without having the assistance of a developer, which is really helpful. You have a lot more manual being able to decide when things fire. It is a different world when you think about it that way, but it's very helpful when it comes down to knowing exactly what's tracking on your website, knowing exactly where things are going. The other portion of Google Tag Manager, which is going to be increasingly important especially for Google GA4 is going to be this event implementation. When we speak about events right now with Universal analytics, it's essentially event tracking is going to be tracking any kind of interaction on your site. So clicks, downloads, video views. So things that Google Analytics, Universal analytics does not track out of the box. We can utilize Google Tag Manager to implement these events, to just help that overall engagement profile of what's happening on the site. So the events are really the meat and potatoes of GA4. So utilizing GTM or Google Tag Manager is definitely something I'd recommend not only for just the ease of being able to add those again, pixels and things as you might need, but also for this event implementation as you're starting to understand and really, you know, get to know what people are doing on your website.

Got it. So one of the things I love to do whenever there's something I'm trying to understand is like just break it down into components. So for Google Tag Manager, the two pieces that are easy to understand with that for me at least are Google. Okay, we can just kind of drop that because they're just branding it. That's the that's who owns it. And then the other piece that's easy to understand is manager. So it's something that helps you manage this thing.

Yes.

And the thing that it's helping you manage are tags.

Yes.

And if you think of like kind of tags at the top underneath tags, if that's kind of a generic term, there's different things that could be considered tags. Is that right? And those things are pixels.

Yep.

So that's one thing that you can kind of consider, tag that goes into your site. And for those who aren't familiar, a pixel is literally a one by one image that you can't see that allows, that goes on your site and that allows different sites to track in a certain way. Is that right? So like Facebook, Google obviously has their pixels that they would put on. And that's why when you hear these people saying like, have you been pixeled? It means like have. It's kind of synonymous with have you been tracked.

Yes.

And so it could go in an email too. Like, that's the pixel is what decides if or like tells you if an email has been opened or not. And so if you're, as a little kind of fun fact for people, if you block images in your email, that also means that you block tracking. So people wouldn't know if you open an email because images are blocked so it can't load, so it can't trigger that pixel. So tags could be pixels and a lot of times you want to put those under your site to track.

Yep.

Events. I think that's kind of an interesting one, a new one for people. And can you explain the idea of an event? Essentially it's like, you know, we've, I think a lot of people think of page views. Great. They understand that time on page sessions, all of these things that we know in Google Analytics. But it sounds like what you're saying is an event is kind of like somebody clicked on a button or maybe they pressed play on a video player. What are some other types of events? And should publishers be tracking every event possible or only certain events? What should you be doing with that?

Yeah, so events are a different tag type is exactly what you're kind of referencing. So the events themselves. Right now within Google Analytics, everything is being tracked through what we consider hits. So a page view is a hit type. An event is a hit type. When we're looking at your regular universal analytics. Yeah. Page views, those are things that you are just, you're accustomed to. So within universal analytics, there are really three things that we know out of the box. So Universal analytics help us understand user information. So it's going to be all of your audience reporting acquisition information. So where do the users come from prior to coming to the website? And lastly behavior information. And that behavior is only going to be that page view based behavior. So average time on page entrances bounce rate that what Universal analytics does not track out of the box is going to be more of those engagement or interaction points. So downloads video views, click a play, click a button, download an item. Those types of actual interaction is not currently tracked within Universal Analytics. So that's where we can supplement with events to help us understand that fuller picture. Hey, once someone comes to the website, what are they doing outside of viewing that page? Are they spending. Yeah, we know they're spending three minutes on that page, but what are they doing within that three minutes? So it just helps us understand a little bit more the actual engagement points that people are really interacting with.

Yeah. And that's done through Google Tag Manager. You can manage events.

Yes.

Were you saying that in Google Analytics 4 that that'll be like built in a little bit more or what were you referencing with GA4?

Yeah. So GA4, it's a totally different data model. So how I kind of mentioned hits and those page view hits, that is how Universal analytics is kind of tracking. It's rather linear with a page view and then another page view and another page just based on that kind of path through a website. GA4's data model is going to be specifically focusing on events. So now a page view hit is going to be an event that's established as a page view event. So everything is kind of just transitioning over from these all different types of hit types really just to events. The reason that this is helpful is that we do get that full picture in one area versus having to kind of differentiate. Oh yeah, during this page view this must have happened. We get that full picture as everything is going to be then tracked as an event versus different hit types. So that's something just to kind of consider as you know, this whole data model and really Universal analytics really should be thought of as a totally different platform and really different analytics tracking than GA4 just based on that data model itself.

Interesting. So I'm going to attempt an on the fly analogy and you can let me know if it's accurate or not when you look at the transition from Universal analytics to GA4. And I'm going to set the stage at. So I just got a text from my friend last night who's out in New York. He is shooting a documentary on. This isn't actually what it's about, it's just kind of interesting. He's shooting a documentary on these. This group of guys that did like, it was like crypto fraud. And they. They, like copied is at the peak of crypto 2017, they just like exactly copied a page of some crypto project that was launching. And they're like, here's our crypto project. And then they just changed the name.

Sure.

And they're like, here's our Coinbase account or something and send us your money. And they. And like, within weeks, they had like $20 million or something. Anyways, that doesn't have anything to do with any of this. It's just kind of interesting and I'm excited to see the documentary. But he sent me a text yesterday and he's like, jokingly, he's like, hey, would love to hang out with you, but too bad I have to be hanging out in this $20 million mansion in New York. They had this private show and it was this mansion. So I'm going to set the scene in a mansion. First it's going to be Universal analytics mansion. Okay. And what. What I would imagine happens is, let's say you're tracking the behavior of somebody who comes into the mansion. They open the door and you say, door was opened and you say, where did you come from? I came from Minnesota. Great.

Sure.

And then they go in a room and you say, great. They go in the room, they close the door, and then they come back out. You're like, okay, great. You were in that room and you were in there for one minute, and then you went to this room. You know, you went into the kitchen. You were in the kitchen for three minutes. Close the door, and then you came back out. Universal Analytics. So by the time they leave, you know that they went to, you know, the guest room, they went to the kitchen for three minutes, they went and went to the bathroom for a minute and then they left after that.

Yeah.

Whereas GA4 would be like, somebody comes in and then you're kind of following behind them and the door opens, you go into the room and you go in the room with them and you're like, oh, I see that you went and you open the window.

Yes.

And then after you open the window, you went and turned on the light. And then after you turned on the light, you adjusted the rug and then you left. Like, it's a more granular approach to tracking behavior where it's not just like going in and out of a room or in and out of a poster page. But it's saying actually what we want to know is like, what does the experience look like? What are the different events along the way? We're going to consider opening the window and turning on the light just as important as opening the door and going in. Use my mansion analogy. Somewhat accurate.

That's a great analogy. Very much so. GA4 is going to help us with that event integration within that user journey altogether. When you implement a GA4 property, there is already an enhanced measurements enhanced like event measurement that you can implement. It's just an enable. You just go ahead and click enable and there are these events that it's already going to be tracking for us out of the box without actually needing us to do anything. So those events are going to be like scrolling outbound, link clicks, site search. So things that right now we actually would need to potentially utilize an additional event for GA4 is going to do for us automatically. So it's nice that we already are getting some of those very basic user engagement points that we already know people are going to be doing doing. It's already going to be included with this enhanced like measurement model once you enable GA4.

Cool. I know that one of the things a lot of people and we have some questions actually from the Facebook group. So foodbloggerpro.com Facebook group. We have a dedicated podcast group there and when we are interviewing somebody, we can say, hey, do you have any questions? Yeah, a lot of times we'll get questions that we'll make sure that we ask live on the podcast. Tiffany's asking at what point do we need to make the switch? So she said, I know the date is July 1, 2023, so should we make the switch now to adjust to the transition or is it okay to wait until we absolutely have to move over? So I think that's one of the scary things with Universal analytics to GA4, Google Analytics 4 is. It kind of seems like it's not like, hey, with your computer you can make this update, you'll get some cool stuff and you know, but you could stay on the current version for two years and you won't get the cool stuff. Sure. There's kind of a hard cutoff where everybody has to move over. Is that right?

Yeah, there is. So Google initially announced GA4 and it's like prior name was the web and app property. So essentially the point of this was to be able, if you had an app and a website, you could track them seamlessly. So when that came out people who don't have an app, which is the majority of website owners are like, great, I don't need that because I don't have an app, so I don't necessarily need to worry about that. So nobody made that switch. But then Google kind of rebranded this as GA4. It's a new thing we all need to be kind of thinking about. And once again, everyone's like, no, I'm good with Universal. There's nothing wrong here. I'm all set.

Don't want to change, don't want to mess stuff up. I can see page views and that's what I want.

Yes. So when Google came out earlier this year saying, hey, July 2023 is the date that Universal analytics is no longer going to be collecting data, that obviously put everyone in kind of this freak. So one thing that's good to know about analytics and Google Analytics in general is that it is not retroactive, meaning that anything we implement today is not going to be. We're not going to see what happened yesterday based on today's implementation. Same thing happens with GA4. So kind of best practice for everybody right now is, hey, you can still maintain and utilize your Universal analytics. Totally fine. However, best practice, go ahead, create that GA4 property and install it on your website. So we have at least one full year of data that we can go back to when it comes to historical information. So that's really what we're kind of telling everybody right now. Have them be launched together synonymously so we can at least have, you know, a little bit of background knowledge that we can start utilizing when that switch does need to happen next year.

So in, in that way you'll have, you know, when you look at Google Analytics, you'll have your site or like I'm going to forget what all the different like levels sure of it are. What is the first like top level of Google Analytics?

So how this kind of goes. And if you actually go into your admin, which is that nice little icon.

On the bottom left.

Yeah. So left hand corner or left hand side, that column is going to be your account. So your account is going to, you're going to maintain your account. So your account is essentially like your parent organization or the overall account. That center column is your property. So right now properties are kind of differentiated by domain is what we like to essentially have those separated out as. So right now Universal analytics is on the property level. The next one on the right hand side are views. So views are related to the Universal analytics. And that's just going to be different reporting views of that property. So when you go ahead to create a new analytics or GA4 property, that's going to be in your center column. So when you see it there, honestly, I think it's just a button. It's the top call to action. Right underneath there is upgrade to GA4 or add a GA4. So that's what you'll want to do. It'll talk you through exactly how to go through and create that property. How it's kind of differentiating things. Again, there's a lot of different terminology that we're seeing here. Instead of having this property installed, we're calling it a web stream or different data streams is how we're kind of getting the information from one place to analytics. Reason we call it that way is again, if you have a website and an app, you might have two data streams going into that one property. But again, if you just have a website, totally fine. Just want to make sure you have that GA4 property with your data stream to the website implemented there so you can start getting that data.

So I see when I look at Food Blogger Pro, you have a few different properties, but the two that are worth mentioning are like foodbloggerpro.com yep. And that's where. And you can see underneath. It's a little bit weird to hear this on a podcast, but if people are kind of following along.

Yeah, yeah.

Like underneath foodblockerpro.com, the tag is UA- and then a number. So Universal Analytics. And then underneath that there's one foodblockerpro.com.com-ga4. When I click into that, then we have GA4. And this is really important to point out where you can have. What I hear you saying is you can have both Universal analytics and GA4 Active at the same time, and there's no harm. There's probably only benefit in Getting Google Analytics 4 up and running sooner because you can't like merge those. So there'll be like a start date. And that start date will be the date that you get Google Analytics 4 up and running.

Yes.

And you won't have any historical data for that in GA4. You'll only be able to go back and look at your Universal analytics. Is that right?

Yes, exactly. So you should still be able to see some of that historical data in Universal analytics, or if you're utilizing, utilizing a, you know, Google Data Studio, a kind of visualization tool, you'll still be able to see that data, but just nothing forward is going to populate come July 2023.

So you'll see. And I bet there'll be a lot of people who aren't, who use Google Analytics, who aren't listening to podcasts or reading, you know, Search Engine Land or whatever.

Yep.

Come July, they're going to be like, what? Oh yeah, all my traffic is gone. But that's because Google has said that they're going to shut, essentially shut that off at that point and you'll need GA4 and you won't be able to like install new Universal analytics. It'll be GA4 moving forward. And so I think one of the things that people think about is like, shoot. One of the things that I do is like I compare traffic in July or August to make it easier. How do I compare August 2023 to August 2022 if I didn't have GA4 in August of 2022? Is that when you'd use something like Data Studio?

Yeah, potentially. So Data Studio is a really nice. Another free Google platform. I should also mention Tag Manager, also a free Google platform. So these are all free to use. Google Data Studio is really a visualization tool. So it's very similar to, I mean, you might have heard of Tableau or some, you know, Power bi, some of these kind of higher tech visualization tools. Essentially what it is. You pump in your data and you're able to create your own little charts and your own data models so you can visualize them the best way or, you know, to whoever stakeholders might need them. This is beneficial if, hey, yeah, I've got a stakeholder who does not need to go into Google Analytics. They don't need to touch anything, just get them the data that they need. What we can do is do blended data. It is a little bit more advanced, but we can blend data from two data sources. Something I'm not actually quite sure on is what we're going to do as far as blending GA4 and Universal. I need to take a deeper dive into kind of that Data Studio model. One thing to note is because analytics and Google Analytics is really coming out with like 2, 1 to 2 small updates per month right now. So they're rolling out smaller things that I think just like, you know, right now, and I'm going to tell you in the analytics space and people who do kind of what I do, people are not thrilled. Like, you know what I mean? People. And I know that sounds terrible, but.

No, totally.

It's one of those where like, hey, Universal, no one thought it was broken, so why fix something that's not broken? However, as I mentioned, the data model is going to be much more scalable. It's going to be a lot more, you know, flexible and customizable to the actual business that you're running. Versus, hey, these are the three types of reports we have. So there are definitely like, there are, there are positives, but there are a lot of people who are just like, not quite convinced that this is ready yet. But Google is still rolling out with some of these updates slowly, which I think is the right thing to do just to help people also understand this new user interface trying to connect the dots between, you know, Universal and GA4. So I really do hope that Data Studio is part of that as well.

Got it. And one thing I thought I'd mention, we've seen this before and I know there might be somebody who's thinking this where I've seen implementations of Google Analytics where they double install it.

Oh yeah.

And then you get like, it looks like your site's doing a lot better than it should be because you have the same code installed twice. So it's loading twice. So it looks anyways. But just for anybody who's thinking that, kind of nervous about it, that isn't an issue with having Universal analytics and GA4 installed.

Correct. Those are two separate kind of platforms. So again, just think about the. Is completely different. They do not have, they're not aggregating the same. They're not going to aggregate into one platform. They're in completely separate interfaces. So no, those will not. You won't have any tracking duplicate like duplication issues there.

Great. Um, here's a question coming in from Allie in the Facebook group. Um, she's asking, how hard is it to figure out how to switch over ourselves? Are there people who can do it? For me, the answer to that is.

Yes, yes, yes, it is.

And we are talking to one of those people. And if I do it myself, is there any way I can massively mess something up by mistake? So for anybody who is going to earlier on, they know they want to do this, but they're. They're recipe creators, right? They're recipe developers or they're, you know, home DIY people. They're not people who want to like dig into Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics. Are they. Are we going to be able to do that on our own? Or, or do you. Is it best to work with somebody who can do it for us?

Yeah. So if this is something that you are interested in, if you have any interest in data and kind of how things are, you know what People are doing and that kind of behavior then yeah, you definitely can teach yourself. So there are really great resources out there. Google honestly being one of them. Support.google.com has a whole GA4, you know, I guess really instance of anything you could really ask. So that's really good place to start. They also have their kind of like skill center where that has kind of just some modules you can go through to kind of help understand how this is a little bit different. So those are free. Again you can go ahead and self teach if that's something you'd like to do. There are also a couple resources that even like that I like to look for. So there's two people that I really recommend to keep an eye out for. Julius who's with analyticsmania.com so he's really great. He's got videos on YouTube, he's got content on the website, really awesome. The other is Simo Ahava and Simo is he kind of has a company called 8 Bit Cheap and he also, he and his wife started Simmer. So it's another kind of integration with how people can be utilizing these tools. So those are two people I recommend taking a look at that have some really great resources out there if you are interested in self learning. So yeah it is possible for you to do so. One other thing as far as in GA4 there is this kind of nice new functionality that Universal analytics doesn't have. And this is the Explore tab. So you'll see within there once you kind of get in there. Explore is really a way to create your own reports right within analytics and GA4 without needing a data visualization tool like Data Studio as we just mentioned. So you're able to go in there and they have a bunch of different report types. They have cohort reports, they've got funnel reports, segment overlapping user exploration. So they got a handful of different report types that you can be able to actually go in, play around, put some of these together to see what kind of data you're looking to really see and understand. So you can't break that. I mean yeah, you might have some difficulty at first trying to think hey what metric and dimension, how do these really talk to each other? Do they talk to each other? But again because it's an explore and it is actually asking you to be touching and messing around with your data, it's a really great place to start.

That's great. Can you talk a little bit? Usually we have folks talk at the end, but what would it look like if people are like I know I don't want to do that. I have a little bit of a budget. Do you have like a GA4 package? Do you work with clients like on a, on an ongoing basis? We have some additional questions I want to walk through, but I know some people will be thinking that.

Yeah, so there's a lot of things to think about. I mean, obviously this is a totally new platform. There's so much happening really when it comes down to packages. And what's best is I like to have a one on one really conversation. And really we start really with any kind of analytics implementation in a goal and KPI planning session. So really, hey, we know, let's figure out what your goals are. Is it going to be ad clicks, it's going to be video views, is it going to be downloads, prints, what are your goals? Once we can establish those goals, we're able to then find the KPIs that are set like, you know, really speak to those goals. Is it going to be page views? Is it going to be time on page clicks, downloads, whatever those actual KPIs are that's going to help us speak to. What do we maybe additionally need to be tracking? What else do we need to be doing in order to make sure we're getting the full picture for you? So once we kind of have that conversation, we're able to really understand, hey, yeah, we have a lot we need to do here, or hey, let's just start at one place we can have it. A pretty small package. Let's just start, hey, let's start with that conversation. See what that means. We can be pretty flexible. So it really does is I hate to be like, oh, it depends.

But yeah, yeah, it really does.

Yeah, it does on an individual basis because you want it to be speaking to your organization as best as you can. You know, just what worked for Joe might not work for Jane. So it just definitely comes down to that.

Even, even our own businesses. You think of pinch of Yum vs Foodlogger Pro as an example, like KPI Key Performance Indicator for those who aren't familiar. For a Food Blogger Pro, a really key performance. You know, one of the key performance indicators is like how many people are signing up for an email, for example, to the email list. Or the obvious one is how many people are converting to paid customers. Whereas Pinch of Yummy, it's email isn't as important. It's so important but you know, and there's not like a conversion to customer. So then those KPIs look different. So obviously every business is really different. And so it makes sense when you say you have to have one of those one on one conversations to learn like what is it that you're really after?

Yeah, definitely.

So another question here coming in from the group. This will be the last one from the Facebook group. When we set up GA4 so that we are not tracking our internal traffic, is it normal we still see ourselves when we visit our website in real time? For example, I've excluded the tracking of myself, but When I view GA4 in real time, I see one user on my site, which I know is me, as I don't have any real traffic right now. So can you talk about that idea of why you want to block yourself either your IP address or. You know, one of the things I've done is I just install like block Google Analytics just so it doesn't register any of them. There's a little Chrome add on where it's just like it never registers Google Analytics information, which I think is more of a privacy thing for Google. But it's nice for me that I know I'm not having to like switch IP addresses if I'm working from a coffee shop or whatever. So why, why would you want to do that? And what are some ways that you could do that?

Yeah, so very good question. So GA4 does have kind of filterability. It's much different than Universal Analytics. So right now in Universal you go, cool, I filter out my IP address and we're set with a GA4. Filters are going to be a little bit different and there is actually a learning phase that's also associated with implementing these filters. So there is kind of this bot fact. The bot traffic is going to be taken out automatically, which is great. So that is also kind of part of that filtering when it comes to Universal. But within the internal IP addresses you can actually go in and set up a rule in. It's kind of in the data settings, set up a rule for internal traffic. So it's also then going to be tracked as an event. When any user comes to the site, the actual whether the user type is going to be internal or if it's not internal, for example. So you go ahead, set up an internal filter, say, hey, these are the IP addresses. The IP addresses start with this if it's an organization or whatever it might be. And there is going to be a little bit of a learning phase so that you know it's going to, you can enable it, but it might not be active right away. As soon as that kind of phase is over you'll be able to go back in into that data settings and see if it is active or not. So I would just recommend keep an eye on that. If you need to go in and then update those settings within that data kind of settings portion, go ahead and take a look. But that's really kind of at this point what I've seen within GA4.

Sure. So in to explain that for those who are kind of new to the idea of IP addresses or Google Analytics, like your computer, anytime you're using it, has a unique IP address. But that can change. Like you can even change if you're at your house where maybe you sign out of your computer and you sign back on. Like you might have a different IP address but you can get relatively specific with it. And you can say in Google Analytics, hey, anytime that you recognize this type of IP address or this specific IP address, don't count that as traffic right now. That's what it says. What I hear you saying is in GA4, you can set it up as an event where you can consider that internal traffic. So the example would be, the obvious example would be, you know, a huge company like Facebook where maybe they have thousands or tens of thousands of their own team members coming to facebook.com, they could filter those out based on the Facebook IP address. But for us, especially in the early stages, if we go to our site 10 times a day and we just launched yesterday, we don't want that to show as like hey, we have 10 people because that was actually you. And so you can filter out your own address IP address. And I think you could just do like a simple Google search like what's my IP address?

To see literally what you do. So yeah, what's my ip? It'll pop up right there for you, which is helpful.

And would you recommend doing like. So like if I find my specific IP address, would you recommend doing like a range potentially?

Okay, yeah. So there is kind of like a starts with or begins with kind of delimiter. So if you, you can do that, if you have a couple of them or you know that they're kind of all going to be related, that one thing to know, which is also a big part of GA4 and I haven't really touched on this is going to be the actual data collection and integration as far as cross channel tracking. So that's also been a kind of a chance, like a challenge with universal analytics is hey, if I am visiting a website on my phone and then later I go onto my desktop to convert or do something along those lines. That's going to be registered as potentially two users. And how are we going to know what that whole user journey is if we don't understand, hey, that cross, you know, device tracking. So we actually have a lot better and a lot more. There's actually three different levels that GA4 is going to be actually going through to help de dupe those sessions. So it's going to be utilizing Google Signals, the device id, which is currently what universal uses. And I believe there's one more and it's escaping me at the moment, but there are three different, different actual levels that it's going to be helping us with that, you know, Dedupe. So that's going to be helpful as well. If we have internal traffic and your cell phone is going to be potentially a different IP address than your desktop, it's going to help us also identify that internal traffic too.

Interesting. So idea with that is it's kind of shifting from thinking about devices to thinking about people.

Yes.

And so, you know, if I'm on my iPhone and I look up a recipe and then I'm like, actually I want to do some more research around this, or probably it's the other way around. I'm on my computer, I look up a recipe, I'm like, hey, I actually want to make this. I, you know, copy it, send it to myself, pull it up on my phone, it's still me.

Right.

In universal analytics, that would show as like, hey, there's two different people who came here.

Yes.

Or that's what it would appear to be. Whereas what you're saying is those will be deduped in the sense that like, it's not two different people, it's one person just using different devices. So you can see that more accurately all the way through.

Exactly. So that's again one of the reasons that GA4 is just scalable. It's obviously based on real life, what real people are doing versus what we're limited by the technology.

Yeah, that's great. Um, so is there, you know, as you think about the, the transition, Universal analytics to GA4, I think we hit some of the most important things. One of them is make the transition as soon as you can because there's not going to be any downside. You're going to have a longer history of data and you're going to be able to then see that earlier is better to be able to collect that. Number two would be the cutoff being. Is it July 1, 2020?

I believe so. I just keep saying July 2023. Because then if it's the 30th and awesome, then I have had a couple extra days. But yeah, just. Sure. The first.

I think that's, I think that sounds right. Yeah. Your universal analytics, like the, the account that you're using, will at this point, as far as we know, drop to zero and you'll have to start using GA4. Moving forward, it's going to be more accurate in terms of kind of seeing user behavior all the way through. It's going to be event tracking, so it's going to be more granular. Kind of that mansion example of walking through, being able to see it a little bit more. I think the next question is, when I think of analytics, I think of the. It seems like one of those things where we feel like we should collect everything, but then what we actually look at is like, how many people are coming to my site, how many page views am I getting? For people who want to take the next step in actually using analytics as a tool to inform decisions that they're going to make to improve their site, to grow their site to be more successful, what are some of those early steps that we can take to start using it as a tool? Not just to look back, but to say, looking forward, how can I make better decisions?

Yeah, I mean, great question. I think that the goal and KPIs, those KPIs, those key performance indicators, are really going to be what is going to help us. I think if, you know, because analytics has a plethora of all the different types of data that you can possibly potentially think of at this point. It's, it can be overwhelming and you can be, hey, do I, what does that mean? Is it important? I mean, we talk about all the time in the analytics space of, hey, there's a handful of metrics. For example, average time on page. Is that a positive metric or is that a negative metric? If someone spends five minutes on a page, is that a good thing because they were enjoying the content or is that they spent five minutes on a page because they couldn't find what they were looking for? We don't have that context. So it's really trying to understand the trends overall and trying to just perform better than you've been performing. That's, you know, I hear questions about benchmarks and what are other, what are other people in my industry? And that's really easy to say. I just want to compete with everybody else. However, we don't know so many things about that. We don't know organization size, we don't know what their budgets are. We don't know so many things. So it's always just to think about, okay, how can I be improving upon what I am doing based on the data that I am currently seeing? So it's really kind of understanding those KPIs based on what your organization is really trying to focus on, what is working, what isn't working. Based on some of these reports and these funnels and cohorts that we're able to now see with GA4, I'd recommend leveraging those just because right now we don't actually visualize the data in that way utilizing universal analytics. So looking at the data in different ways, trying to understand cohorts over periods of time, really understanding that is going to be, I think the most beneficial way for us to really start just gradually improving.

When you say cohorts over time, what do you mean by that?

Yeah, so we're cohort report, we're able to kind of bunch a bunch of, you know, users together and saying, hey, based on average time delay, something. For example, hey, if a user visits my site or converts in January, when is the next time most likely they're going to convert again. So we're able to see these time delay reporting based on user attributes, just as an example, we are able to start seeing those trends based on how we chunk this data together.

Yeah. How about in the case of. For a lot of people listening, podcast page views would be important.

Definitely.

Search performance would be important. What are some of the ways that you could in that, you know, if you know, is page use too generic of a KPI?

Yeah, no, that's a great question.

If it is, what would be the KPI underneath that? And then for people who are trying to optimize around that, essentially optimize around traffic if you don't have a conversion point.

Sure.

Any, any thoughts around how to use Google Analytics proactively with. With that kind of mindset?

Yeah, absolutely. So when it comes to. If you're just focusing on traffic, acquisition is going to be your best friend. Where are people coming from? How are you getting people to your website? Is it through search engines? So that's gonna be SEO trying to make sure that from an organic standpoint, we're doing well. We're ranking for the keywords we want. Great. If it's social media, wonderful. Let's make sure we're posting on social more regularly. How often are we posting? What days and times are people coming to the site? What content is performing best? So if you're really focusing from a traffic specific organization only. That's where I would really focus is what is the channel that is going to be the most successful for me? What are the channels that reach the user in order to actually get them to come back? So that's going to be what I would recommend most likely is try to focus on those channels. Those acquisition sources are really going to be your best friend.

Hmm. And I would imagine at that point what you start to do is, you know, Google Analytics, naturally you could push back on this if this isn't correct. But it feels like it's a historical tool. So it tells you what, what has happened in the past. Even if the past is just like five seconds ago.

Sure. Yep.

But looking at that data, then you can take that and start to make some decisions. Looking forward, potentially using other tools like Google Search Console or you know, any of the IT semrush or Ahrefs or however you pronounce it and start to pair those together. So if you see, you go into Google Analytics and maybe you see search traffic going down, let's say you could dig a little bit deeper and say, why is it going down? Is there a certain page that had a lot of traffic that now doesn't?

Yep.

Okay. And then you can use one of those tools like Google Search Console and say, hey, maybe this keyword changed in terms of performance and it was in a certain position and then it dropped. Great. So now we know that not great that it happened, but what do we do to go back and make those updates? So it almost feels like as I think about it, it maybe becomes kind of a multi tool type analysis. Are there other tools that you recommend that complement Google Analytics?

Well, yeah, great question. So what's really nice again from a visualization tool, Data Studio is really helpful because we can blend from other sources also in one place. So there are, as we mentioned, Analytics, Semrush, there's a handful of other tools that are going to be helpful. But if you're really trying to, you know, one of the, I think biggest challenges is social media. It tends to be really difficult. Hey, what is performing well? What, what posts are actually being clicked on? How many likes am I getting on those? Those things we just can't see because it's reported in other platforms with tools such as those. These are kind of like API tools is what we call these. Supermetrics is a really great one. So Supermetrics has these kind of plugins that you can say, hey, I want to get my data from Facebook to Google Data Studio. And we can use it all in one place, all part of one report. So I'd recommend that if you're really looking for a full picture based on all channels and trying to understand all of those, take a look at the super metrics or something along those lines to help you kind of fill in those gaps. But to other tools that I utilize all the time. Semrush, Google Search Console, Moz, I still use a handful. Moz is a really great tool for just beginner SEO, trying to understand what is good and what's not. Google Ads and Keyword Planner. I mean, even if you're not doing any paid advertising through Google or Bing, they both have Keyword planner tools which are going to help you understand search volume and how competitive those keywords are. So, yeah, kind of a blend of all of those in the space, I think are definitely tools to check out.

Cool, that's great. For those who say, you know what, that all sounds awesome and I don't want to do that. Yes, you have your agency. So as we close out here, can you talk a little bit about what it is that you do? You shared a little bit in the beginning, but if people are interested in working with you, what's the best way to connect? How do people know if they're a good candidate to potentially work with you? Because we'd love to shine a light on that and let you share a little bit about what you do.

Awesome. Yeah, thanks. So right now my agency is called Digital Aid. So kind of lemonade and helping people all kind of blended in one, if you will. So digitalaid.com is my website. Feel free to search my name or the that business online or Google. Essentially what I do is I, because as I mentioned earlier, have touched a lot of different spaces and a lot of different silos is kind of we call it in the world is of SEO and paid and analytics and all of these things as we've even just touched on, they all are related. They all touch each other in one way or another. So that's something that I like to say is beneficial about utilizing somebody that has or an agency that kind of has experience in all those fields. So we do all of those things. We build custom dashboards, we look at your analytics. We'll clean it up if we need to. We can do those goal and KPI planning sessions. Really? I haven't really met a client that's too small. I've seen a couple that, hey, I'm on wix and I'm not really sure what I can do or what I can't do or squarespace is a little limited. What is there, you know, what are the possibilities for me? So there are those questions. And if I can't help you, I definitely have people that I work with or have worked with or have their own little agency or their own little gig that they've got going that, that the network of people that we kind of find is really interesting and we tend to try to help each other out. So if you reach out to me and I can't help you for whatever reason, I'm sure I can connect you with somebody else. But yeah, there is. I mean, analytics is just what I like to think of is just it kind of just skims the surface of what all really lies underneath with to really get your website going. So yeah, I'd love to help out. If you've got some questions, feel free to find me on my website.

That's great. So digital-adea.com we'll link to that in the show notes as well.

Perfect.

Great conversation, Allison. I learned a lot, which is one of the great benefits of this podcast. And I know that people who listened will as well. So thanks for coming on.

Of course. Thanks so much for having me.

Hey there, Alexa here from the Food Blogger Pro team. Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I wanted to take a quick second to make sure you are aware of the Food Blogger Pro membership. So the Food Blogger Pro membership, Food Blogger Pro in general, was started when Bjork and Lindsay Ostrom. Lindsay is the content creator over at Pinch of Yum. When they started getting a ton of questions about starting and growing and monetizing food blocks. So people would come to them and say, hey, I see what you're doing. I love what you're doing. How can I do the same thing? So they decided Food Blogger Pro to be the place where food bloggers, food content creators can go to learn how to start, grow and monetize their own food blogs. So we have different courses, we have different events, we have different tools and deals for our community. We have a community forum where members can connect, collaborate and troubleshoot with industry experts and their fellow Food Blogger Pro members. And it's just a really active place.

Place.

I always like to say that your Food Blogger Pro membership won't look the same the next week after you join because we're constantly adding new content, new value to your membership. I wanted to read this testimonial from Food Blogger Pro member Alistair from the Pesky Vegan and he says starting a food blog can feel pretty daunting. More often than not, it's probably something you're trying to do on your own without much prior experience. Signing up to Food Foodblower Pro was one of the single best things I could have done, as it removed a lot of the worries I had and provided me with a supportive community and a wealth of invaluable information. When I think about the journey I've been on, I simply can't imagine getting to where I am without this membership. Thank you. So cool to see so many different experiences with Food Blogger Pro. We have tons of testimonials on our site. If you're interested in learning more, if you're interested in learning more about the membership, what that looks like, what you get when you sign up as a member, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com join. You get access to everything we have the moment you sign up. So no content is dripped. You can kind of just create your own journey through our content and access what is most meaningful and beneficial for you. So again, that URL is foodbloggerpro.com join if you're interested in learning more. Otherwise, we'll see you here on the podcast next week.

Week.

And until then, make it a great week.