Are you one of these people who are
stressing about the change from Universal Analytics to GA4?
Well, there's still a little bit of time, but I would recommend everybody to get
used to Google Analytics 4 at this point.
Now, there are a lot of changes that are
going on, and it's not really an upgrade of Universal Analytics to GA4,
but a whole new tool that you need to get used to.
One part of our workflow here
at MeasureSchool is that we build dashboards for our clients when we work
with them to visualize the data that we have gathered.
You might not even give access
to Google Analytics anymore to your clients because Data Studio can perfectly
pull the data out of the system and then visualize it.
And maybe you have already built some
reports on your data sources in Universal Analytics.
But how do you now migrate this over to GA4?
Well, luckily, there is a Data Studio
connector for GA4 that can pull the data in.
In the past few days, I have taken a look at this GA4
connector and kind of tried to determine whether it's ready to be used.
So let's go on a little journey here to find out if there are any things
that are still missing, anything that you need to be aware
of and if it's actually ready to be used for that.
I have already my Google Data Studio open
here and we can go over to a blank new report and then add a new data source.
And this time we will utilize still the Google Analytics connector,
but we will connect our demo account from our merchandise store on GA4.
So let's add that here and you get your familiar interface on the right side.
You have all the different fields that are inside of this connector.
Now, if you are familiar with GA4, you have used it before.
You might find a report that you find interesting user acquisition or whatever.
And you say, oh, I want to replicate this
data inside of the Data Studio interface here.
Right.
So, for example, here we have the first user default channel grouping and you
would need to kind of find out where can I find this data in Data Studio itself?
So, let's put in channel grouping.
And here we have session default channel grouping.
I can just pull this in and we get our sources.
Now we can put in our users.
And here we have many users available.
Total users would be the natural thing.
But if you are familiar with the interface
itself here we have new users and new users should be available here as well.
So let's go ahead and put this in as
a metric and we should roughly get the same data.
It's not always going to be exact at how it is calculated, obviously.
Also, your time frame would need to be adjusted here.
So let's add a timeframe date control as well.
And then you can select the same time
frame that we have up here, 13th April to 10th May.
Now, one thing that you might already have noticed, that the way to actually
manipulate the data inside of this table here is a little bit diminished from what
we had in the other connector with Universal Analytics.
So what you might not be finding
and that might be a big part of your workflow is the segment feature.
So if you have built any segments
in Universal Analytics, you will not be able to utilize them in GA4.
Because GA4 actually doesn't have
segments, they have something called Audiences.
Now, audiences are not available here inside of this menu as well.
So you cannot utilize any kind
of audiences that you might have built inside of GA4 yourself already.
So all of these will not be available just yet.
Maybe at some point there will be if you
have started building something out in Data Studio already with this
connector, you might be sometimes asking yourself, I cannot find the dimension or
the metric that I was looking for in the interface.
Where is it?
Well, there are different possibilities here.
The first possibility is that it's just simply not yet available inside
of the connector and you will need to wait for this to be made available through
the API, but then also through the connector that is built by Google.
Unfortunately,
we cannot really do anything about this unless you utilize a BigQuery connector.
The second part would be that you don't
know the right name because as you might have noticed, some of the naming that we
have inside of our report might be off a little bit from the interface itself
and you might not get exactly the same data here as some of the pages.
For example, one that is just newly added Page Title and Screen class.
So let's just look for page and we have page Title, Screen Class.
These are available, but then we have also
Page Location, Page Title Page URL which are kind of familiar to the other ones.
So, which one should you choose?
Again, that's a thing that you would need
to try out in order to get it to the right place and make the data work.
A helpful tool here is maybe not to use
this list, but there's actually a great little tool here from ga4spy.com,
where under Data ga4Spy you can find all the metrics and dimensions.
And here's what I mean by different naming.
So, for example we have here attribution Campaign, if you click on it you can see
the category but then also the description.
And if it's available inside of Data Studio, yes it is.
And what the different namings would be?
The front end name and the back end name.
This is how the event, for example gets sent in with the right
parameters, but it might be shown differently in the interface itself.
So here's campaign name and let's see what is in the interface.
Here we have campaign.
I guess this would be the campaign name. Here we go.
And it seems to be a campaign name from Google Ads.
I don't know if this account has other campaign names.
So again here you see how I'm struggling a bit to know exactly what is what
in the interface, in the documentation and the different
naming and if the metric is actually available in Data Studio itself.
There are some other variables that are
for example the e commerce quantity not yet available in Data Studio.
So don't think you're crazy if you cannot
find the exact metric that you are looking for in Data Studio.
Now the third reason would be that this is
a custom parameter that you sent in via an event.
So if you have custom events that you send
in to GA4 already, then you might know that the new Data
model allows you to send any parameter in that you want.
And for example you could name your parameter High Score.
Now if you are then looking for this event
and the parameter of High Score and here you will not find it.
Why is that?
Because you will need to define your parameter as a custom dimension first
and activate this in order for this to show up in the interface inside
of Google Analytics 4, but then also inside of the Data Studio connector.
So this might take some time and up to 48
hours and it's best to make sure that you wait an ample amount of time before you
start trying out inside of Data Studio if the dimension is now available or not.
So all of this adds to a little bit
of the confusion of how we can actually build something inside of Data Studio.
You need to know the right name, it needs to be available inside
of the connector to actually be pulled in and you need to make your custom
parameters available as a custom dimension instead of the interface.
But then also it will be pulled into the Data Studio connector.
So all of this is not really optimal.
One other thing that is not yet possible,
you might utilize a control here called Data Control which allows you to basically
choose different accounts as a data source here.
Unfortunately these don't seem to work with GA4.
You only see UA accounts right here.
So this is a feature that only works with Universal at this moment.
The next step you might be asking yourself
can I now just switch over to GA4 if I already have a Universal Analytics report?
Let's put this to the test and go over
here to the sample Marketing Analytics dashboard and we'll edit this.
And here we have for example this little country report.
This is from our UA account.
This has the country dimension and we have
session and page views in here and let's look at the different configurations.
That's also important.
Are there any segmentations because that you cannot use that in GA4?
Any filters here?
No, that seems to be all fine.
Let's go ahead and actually change the data source around.
So I'm going to add a new data source
first of all and let's go with our GA4 account.
So again we're going to add this to our GA4 account.
It overtakes the metrics that we have and that we can find session and views.
So this is not page views but views.
And then as the dimension this is already
added, although here it says country, there's none here.
Let's look for a country dimension. Here we go.
We'll add that in as well.
And this was pretty easy to switch over to a GA4 report.
Obviously the data will differ from your UA reporting as sessions and views are
simply different metrics that are differently calculated in GA4.
So some data you can definitely just
switch over and make sure it works with others.
It's more and more harder to do.
Just as an example here, what if you wanted to have a landing page
report, you would need to look for your dimension of landing page?
Well that doesn't exist because the new
data model doesn't have actually a landing page.
What we will need to do is look for our
event name, pull that in, then we will look at the occurrences of that event.
So we have an event count as a metric.
And as you might also see,
Google Analytics 4 connector is not the fastest.
So if you want to have faster reports,
you probably want to go with BigQuery at this point.
Once we have our event count in here, we also want to look at these different
event names here and we want to filter actually the event name.
So what we are going to do is add a table
filter here and now you need to know what you're actually doing.
So this will be a filter for our session start event and we want to include
the field name event name equals session underscore start.
Let's save that and hopefully this will
only show us our session starts now and now we can add back in our page path
or page URL or page location however you want it.
Let's go with our page path here and we can actually get rid of the event name
and that should give us our landing pages and the views that came through on this
landing page with only the session start event.
So this would be the landing page report
that you might be familiar with and might want to utilize.
But as you can see this is something that would take you a little bit
of getting used to the data structure of Google Analytics 4 and some getting
used to and how to configure this inside of Data Studio as well.
So on a whole. Is Google Data Studio ready for GA4?
It's hard to say right now.
It's again a work in progress like everything in GA4 at the moment.
We will see a lot of updates in the coming months, I'm sure of that.
And Data Studio is hopefully one of those that we will see updates too.
So we'll actually be able to migrate over
our data and know how to do it without any unreliablity in terms of what dimensions do
I have to choose now or are they actually available or not?
All in all, this system doesn't quite stack up yet to a professional solution.
I would say that you can do everything with but Luckily GA4 gives us access
to BigQuery export so if you're familiar with that, you can export all your raw
data into BigQuery and connect it to Data Studio and utilize Data Studio as
a visualization layer for your raw data in BigQuery.
That makes it much more flexible because we can pre process our data in BigQuery
before we are sending it into Data Studio and make sure that everything and all
the dimensions are there for us to use in our reports.
That said, Google Analytics 4 Connector, is it ready?
Kind of. Some reports you can do with it,
some are not yet at that point where it's actually usable,
I'm sure I'm going to keep up my eyes on this one and make sure to update you
once we have news on the Data Studio front for GA4 as well.
Now if you enjoyed this video please give
us a thumbs up so we can share it with more people here on YouTube.
And if you haven't yet set up GA4
and don't know what to do quite yet, then check out this video over there where
introduce you how to install it and do double tagging so you have your UA data
and GA4 data and be ready for the next phase of Google Analytics.
Now my name is Julian till next time.