Google Analytics 4 guide for PPC

Like many of you, the first time I looked at Google Analytics 4, I immediately closed it and said “no!”

A year has passed. Then we learned that Universal Analytics was going away in 2023, which finally compelled me to explore GA4.

It’s like switching from Windows to Mac. You just need to know what you’re looking at.

Universal Analytics disappears

You really need to install GA4 on your website and set goals.

I can’t stress enough the importance of installing GA4 now, even if you’re going to wait until July 2023 to fully learn how to use it.

In July 2023, the AU will disappear. You will need to be able to compare data from one year to the next. You can’t do this if you haven’t installed GA4 on your website this year.

You will need to export the reports from UA and GA4 and combine them somehow. You can do this in Data Studio, but it’s very complicated.

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GA4 uses an event-based model, as opposed to the older session-based model used by UA. This allows much more data to be sent to your analyses.

The GA4 beacon can send up to 25 event parameters. UA could only send four per event.

GA4 can have up to 500 distinctly named events. The 500 event limit only applies to events you have configured. This limit does not count towards GA4 events provided by default like page_view, click or video_start.

I’m not going to go into detail on how to install GA4 because many people have already done it.

One thing you should do is turn on Improved measurement.

You do this by going to Administrator > Data Feed of the property you are working on. Click on the Internet and make sure the cursor for Improved measurement is on.

If you click on the gear icon on the far right you will see all the different things to measure like Scrolls And Outgoing clicks.

Configure conversions

If you already have goals set in Universal Analytics, Google has rolled out a tool to move your conversions to GA4. If you don’t have this, you will need to use Google Tag Manager to set up a custom HTML tag to pass your conversion data to the data layer.

Some third-party plugins and services can already do this for you. Once the events exist, you just need to go to the main menu and click on Configure and the first thing you will see is Events.

Always check here first when you want to create a conversion. What you want to count as a conversion may already be here. Simply find your event and click the slider to activate it.

New concepts

One of the main concepts of GA4 is to differentiate between user engagement and session engagement. The main difference is that user engagement statistics can span multiple sessions.

A session commitment includes data for each session. GA4 is all about engagement.

The biggest difference you’ll notice in GA4 is that the bounce rate is gone. It was replaced by “Engaged Sessions”. A session is either engaged or not.

To be considered engaged, the user must stay on the website for more than 10 seconds, trigger a conversion, or have 2 or more page views.

Instead of Average session durationwe now have Average engagement duration per session. If what you are looking for is not available in GA4 and many items are not available, you can go to the page Explore and create a custom report. Custom reports are a lot like Data Studio or Analysis Hub in Universal Analytics.

Google Ads

The first thing you’ll notice in GA4 is that the left menu is much smaller and there are fewer submenus and a lot of things are missing or buried.

Another thing I noticed is that not all sections have the option to change the time period you are viewing. Specifically, if you run a custom report in the library, you cannot change the time period for that report.

The solution is to navigate to another section like this Report main menu which has the possibility to change the time period. Then return to your report and it will reflect the change.

For paid search, we are missing the Google Ads section. The Google Ads section is located in the Overview of acquisitions submenu under Report > Acquisition on the second row, the third box at the bottom right.

One of the biggest problems with GA4 is that it no longer allows you to easily view reports that contain tables that you can click and drill down to see more details. If you go to the Google Ads report I mentioned above, it shows statistics about your campaigns by default.

You can no longer click on it and see the ad groups. You need to change the drop-down menu to show ad groups, keywords, or other Google Ads items.

If you select Ad Groups, all ad groups will simply be displayed. There is no way to only see ad groups for a specific campaign.

It’s the same with any dimension you choose. If you want to filter the table, there is a very simple search box at the top. It doesn’t allow regular expressions and doesn’t have the nice visual filter you have in Universal Analytics.

This feature, or lack thereof, is on all table reports. You’ll notice that each table has a little blue plus sign that allows you to add an extra dimension like a browser or a city.

For some reason this is not available in the Google Ads report. To see this information, you must go to Report > Acquisition > User Acquisition and look at the table in the second row of the report. Here you only have access to the Ad Groups dimension. You can now use the secondary dimensions drop-down list.

Advanced reporting is extremely limited

The default GA4 seems to be designed so that novice users can get general information quickly.

Many detailed reports that were easy to access and use are no longer available without advanced knowledge of GA4. The custom reports you can create in the Explore menu are extremely powerful if you know how to configure them.

There is a gallery of predefined reports, but not many at the moment. Once GA4 is around longer, there will be more custom reports and articles on how to create specific reports.