KRISTA SEIDEN: Hey, everyone.
I'm Krista Seiden, and I'm here with Breen Baker,
who is a Product Manager on Google Analytics.
Breen, thank you so much for being here with us today.
BREEN BAKER: Thanks for having me, Krista.
KRISTA SEIDEN: Of course.
So today, Breen is going to tell us
all about roll-up properties in Google Analytics 4.
Roll-up properties are a great way
to bring data from individual properties
together to see at a roll-up or higher level view.
So with that, I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to Breen
and he's going to walk us through roll-up properties.
BREEN BAKER: So I'd like to start with what
we designed roll-ups for.
As Krista mentioned, they're really here to unify your data.
So you'll find with different setups
that you need to, for whatever reason-- be them governance
or organizational reasons that you
have certain subsets of data, certain data collected probably
by brand in individual properties.
But you might have a group of folks above that, maybe it's
a larger company that's in charge of multiple brands, that
needs to see across all of those properties.
And that's what roll-ups have been designed for.
Second, I would just like to underline
that roll-up properties are just like all other properties.
Naturally, they will have more data,
but they do have the same limitations and quotas.
They have the same features and abilities to integrate.
So in reality, while they're rolling up more data,
they will behave just like ordinary properties do.
Roll-up properties were designed for that specific use
case of rolling up data together,
but they were not designed specifically for governance.
So there is no governing control between a roll-up
and its source properties.
You will not be able to push configuration from a roll-up
or push events from a roll-up into source properties.
Data actually flows from source properties into the roll-up.
And likewise, source properties have
no control over the roll-up.
So this is really an independent property
built for a special team of people
that are able to look across this portfolio of brands
or ordinary properties.
And last, just to underline, because
of the limitation between an app only
being able to be linked to one GA4 property, if you do
want to bring multiple apps together,
you will need a roll-up.
And of course, we want to make very clear
that roll-ups do come with an additional cost
and that should be a very key point in your consideration
for when you create a roll-up.
This does mirror the cost structure
that we had in Universal Analytics.
So hopefully it does not come as a surprise.
But it is there and it is definitely
worthy of consideration before creating a roll-up.
We'll end with a few examples and then a demo.
This first example shows a very classic case,
the one that I was going over, where
we have multiple brands and then a portfolio
company over the top, controlling
all of those brands.
There's no overlap between these brands, which
is pretty important in this example
because if there was an overlap, some fourth property that all
of these would share, that would likely
be broken out in a fourth property
and then again rolled up to make the full parent company view.
There's no governing hierarchy like we went over before.
And it does come with the 0.5 per event additional cost.
This second example is a little bit more tricky
and shows a specific team from a rewards program needing
a special roll-up.
In this case, there's a rewards program for each brand
and then there's a team at the parent company level
that looks over all of the rewards programs
across all of the brands.
We have in the gray boxes ordinary properties
collecting data for each brand.
Underneath those, we've created a subproperty for the rewards
program component of each brand, probably a set of pages
and a specific portion of their apps.
That is then rolled up off into the side up here
into the rewards program.
Additionally, they have a full parent company roll-up
which shows both the rewards program data along
with all of the other data.
And that's in the parent company roll-up.
And with that, we'll jump to a demo.
OK, so we find ourselves here in the Admin section of the Google
Merch GA4 demo property.
In order to create a roll-up, I'm
going to have to click this bright blue Create Property
button.
When I do so, I'll see that I have the ability
to create all three property types.
In this case, I will choose to create a roll-up property.
And here I am in the roll-up property creation experience.
I'll need to give my property a name.
I'll just call it test for now, and acknowledge
that I'm aware of the additional 0.5
cost associated with creating a roll-up property.
I can click Next, where I'm then given
the choice of what source properties to send
into this roll-up.
I can select one ordinary property or one subproperty
from every group.
So in this case, I'll go ahead and select the Google Merch GA4
ordinary property.
And I'll select this Canada subproperty-- again,
just for demo purposes.
I'll go ahead and click Confirm.
And it'll inform me that I've selected
two source properties and the quota
for all of the integrations.
I can go ahead and click Next.
And if I wanted to actually create this property,
I would fill out the business information and click Create.
KRISTA SEIDEN: Thanks so much for showing us
all about roll-up properties in Google Analytics 4, Breen.
These are super useful to get that holistic view
of your data, especially when you are something
like a large company needing to bring data
together and so forth.
So I hope you guys can see how useful these are,
and you can get started today with roll-up properties
in Google Analytics 4.