Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest generation of Google’s powerful analytics platform. First of all, it’s FREE (no brainer) and it’s designed to provide deeper insights into your website traffic. If you are totally new to marketing, by “traffic” I mean the measurement of people who visit your website.

Here are some key benefits:

Holistic View: GA4 offers a more comprehensive view of user interactions across websites and apps, helping you understand the customer journey better.
Event-Based Data: Unlike its predecessor (GA Universal Analytics), GA4 uses event-based tracking instead of session-based. Once you’ve got your head around the change, you can see that this event-based tracking does indeed allow for more accurate and detailed insights into user behaviour.
Predictive Analytics: As we all know by now, forecasts and predictions are a huge part of large language models and analytics-based platforms. GA4 includes predictive capabilities that forecast metrics like purchase probability, churn probability, and revenue (esp. if you’ve got ads set up), which help with marketing strategies.
Privacy-Centric: GA4 provides enhanced privacy controls, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations and giving users more control over their data. Great for the user, frustrating for the marketer!
Cross-Platform Analysis: GA4 is superb for analysing all your different digital platforms that are integrated into your website, i.e. social media, email marketing, Google, clicks on third party websites that include your content, etc. This cross-platform analysis gives you a combined view of performance across your website. Great for overview snapshots.

KEYWORD RESEARCH STRATEGIES FOR SEO & OPTIMISED CONTENT

Understanding GA4 Terminology

Here are the different meanings in GA4 under various headings:

Organic Search

Traffic: Users who find your website through search engines without paid advertisements, i.e. organic means work done via search engine optimisation (SEO) and other means of finding your webpages, including third party publishers (e.g. Legal Futures).
Keywords: The search terms users typed into search engines to find your website (e.g. “litigation lawyer for media business in Mayfair, London”).

Direct

Traffic: Users who visit your website by typing the URL directly into their browser or using bookmarks i.e. they know your brand already or are using a URL (e.g. http://www.elainepasini.com).
Source: The direct entry point to your website.

Organic Social

Traffic: Users who find your website through social media platforms without going through an Ad (e.g. Facebook or Insta ad). Organic social is great because it shows your brand is getting noticed and hopefully reaching the right audience by using great content and engagement.
Engagement: Interaction with your content on social media platforms. I always say, no point throwing content out there without engaging on people’s comments or of course, engaging on others’ posts.

Unassigned

Traffic: Users whose source of traffic is not identified or categorised. Google can only gather so much data on folk! GPDR and all that 😉
Unknown Source: The origin of the traffic is not tracked or recorded.

Referral

Traffic: Users who visit your website from another website through a link. In SEO marketing terms these links are called “backlinks” and are very good to build trust and authority for Google to rank your webpages. That being said, only trusted publishers and content worthy information is worth doing. Never pay dodgy SEOs for “links” because Google will spot spam a mile away. Think…if your content follows EEAT Guidelines, and a third party (newspaper or referring partner in law, banking, insurance, etc) uses your content and links it back to your website that is GOOD. Spammy content generated by AI without fact checking or caring who the audience is and uploaded by random sites, then not so good! Imagine you are a property law dealing with block management firms in Manchester and then you write an article on leasehold law for a car journal…. Google might think…. hang on a minute…something’s off here.
Referring Sites: Websites that direct traffic to your site. See above! I have written as a ghostwriter for many firms in law, legal finance and compliance that are published in Legal Futures, LexisNexis, local business mags etc and these are all great backlinks coming from reputable referring sites.

Getting Started with GA4 for a Marketing Strategy

If you’re new to GA4, here’s the best and easiest way to start using this platform to begin a marketing strategy:

Create a Google Analytics Account: Sign in to Google Analytics using your Gmail. If you don’t have one, create a free Google account/email.
Set Up a GA4 Property: Enter your property name, time zone, and currency. This will be the main property for collecting and reporting data.
Configure Data Sharing: Choose the data you want to share with Google for additional insights and recommendations.
Install GA4 Tracking Code: Add the GA4 tracking code to your website – I promise this is easier than you think ASSUMING you have access to your website. Installing the GA4 tracking code can be done manually or through a website builder. If in doubt, ask your website dev team or outsourced agency.
Explore Reports: Have a look around the methods of gaining different analysis and reports, such as the home report, real-time report, acquisition report, engagement report. I love heading straight to the acquisition overview initially. Remember, if your website is new or GA4 hasn’t had a chance to track website traffic yet, don’t worry – give it a few weeks, months and years to begin the digital marketing journey.
Set Up Conversions and Events: Define what constitutes a conversion on your website and set up events to track user interactions. Digital marketing folk normally do this and to be honest, it’s more for retail and eComms in my experience, as events can be tracked quickly through (e.g.) Mailchimp.
Use Insights and Recommendations: Use GA4’s insights and recommendations to optimise your marketing campaigns and improve user experience. Analytics are there to see what’s working and what’s not.

Different Reports on Google Analytics

Depending on your needs you can glean overviews for who your audience is, the behaviour of the users coming to your website, and if you have conversion goals set up, then tracking those can be really handy to analyse.

Personally, my go to is always the Acquisition Overview because it shows where your users are coming from, including new users and returning users. See image below, as an example. There are no Google Ads being used for this client, and we haven’t set up any sales or subscriptions or ads. Av value = for each user, Google Analytics calculates the sum of purchase, subscription, and ads revenue for their first 120 days. eComms and retail clients are always interested in “active users” but professional services tend not to require this information.

On a report or search in GA4 you can change dates you want to investigate, and for this image I asked for a past 90 days search. You can see new users, how many sessions, where the users came from (e.g. a Google search, LinkedIn, Facebook etc).

Other reports that are helpful to explore are:

Audience Overview: This report provides a high-level view of your website’s audience, including the number of users, sessions, page views, and bounce rate. It also offers insights into user demographics, interests, and geographical locations.

Behaviour Reports: These reports help you analyse how users interact with your website. The Behaviour Flow report visualizes the paths users take through your site, highlighting the most visited pages and common drop-off points. The Site Content report shows detailed metrics for individual pages, such as page views, average time on page, and bounce rate.

Engagement Overview: This report shows how users engage with your website and lists their most frequent interactions, as well as highlighting which pages of content are “sticky”. By this I mean, the ratios of active users per relative time periods (daily actives / monthly actives, daily actives / weekly actives, weekly actives / monthly actives). The engagement overview is easy to navigate, showing your

Tech Reports: Fascinating to see where your users are clicking through to your website from. It goes so far as to tell you what systems they use (e.g. Chrome) and how many come through on desktop v mobile. Why bother knowing this info? Well, if you are a family lawyer focusing on women in a certain age range, you might want to focus your marketing efforts on social media as they could well be on mobile. Or if you are a firm on insurers looking to work with law firms, why not find out which systems they use (Windows or Mac) as you could tweak your content and optimise for those differences. #justsaying

Now it’s over to you to start digging deeper into your ROI for your marketing, content creation, SEO, which complement your business development teams.

Interesting isn’t it? If you’re a data geek and love understanding if your marketing efforts working, or of course, understanding if they’re not, then Google Analytics is an easy what to decide the next steps.

If the above is too much of a headache and you’d rather some training or consultation hour or so, please get in touch with me via email: hello@elainepasini.com

Elaine

Why Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Beneficial for Digital Marketing and Business Growth