Google Analytics 4 landed last month. It’s a big shake up for the world of analytics, and slightly daunting when you start to upgrade your Universal Analytics profile and step into a new data world for the first time.
I started my adventure with GA4 recently and found out I was venturing into the unknown. With new terminology during the set-up process, and no clear direction on how to migrate what I‘d become familiar with in UA into GA4, I needed lots of how-to and self-help guides.
To save you time hunting around for the good articles, and how to guides, I thought I’d share the ones I’ve found most useful. Thanks to all those brilliant data engineers out there who continue to translate the official guides into user-friendly, step-by-step versions.
Google Analytics 4 introductions
- Meet GA4: Google’s vision for the future of analytics: Search Engine Land’s first thoughts
- How will the new Google Analytics change how marketers approach measurement? Econsultancy’s view
- Meet the next generation of Google Analytics: The official starting point for set-up
- FAQs from DQ&A: Perhaps these can answer some of your immediate queries
- Bye bye bounce rate: Where did bounce rate go in GA4?
Google Analytics 4 set-up guides
- General tag settings: from cross domain tracking to IP filter exclusions, this is a brief guide to get you started
- Collection and configuration limits: You can’t have infinite options, check out the limits (this also applies to UA as well, in case you didn’t realise)
- Deciding on your Reporting Identity data collection method and its privacy implications: Device only, or User-ID and device. Find out what’s right for you.
Events
- How to translate and migrate events from UA to GA4: Official GA4 guide
- Automatically collected events: you won’t need any additional code changes for these
- Enhanced measurement: the events you can track without code changes
- Recommended events: the events you’re advised to track if relevant to your website
- Modifying events: fix tagging issues by renaming an event or deleting events or parameters directly within the interface
- Creating new events: when the default ones aren’t enough. Look to option 3 in this guide - creating custom events from existing event
Ecommerce
- Ecommerce guide for Google Tag Manager: Simo Ahava has created a user-friendly guide to complement the official documentation
I’ll try and update this post as more useful articles emerge, and I continue my journey to GA4 enlightenment.
