Ensure a Flawless GA4 Setup and Ongoing Tracking Functionality

Edited by Emilie Martin

While not everyone is on board, GA4 (Google Analytics 4) is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

So, it’s crucial to ensure the ongoing functionality is correct, especially if you opted into Google’s automation migration system (which has been known to create complex tracking mishaps).

For every single business, event, and conversion tracking are crucial for tying efforts to business growth, so be sure to check that the core source of this data — GA4 — is set up for smooth sailing.

To guarantee GA4 is set up for long-term tracking success, I’ll give a quick overview of what’s changed from Universal Analytics (the version before GA4), as well as quick fixes for common migration issues and steps to ensure GA4 functions well over time.

Whether you opted into automatic migration or updated GA4 manually, you’ll likely still have some changes to update, both to the data itself and for the stakeholders who review the data.

To break this down into a manageable process, here are three concrete steps you’ll need to take.

Step 1: Understand the differences between UA and GA4

Generally speaking, GA4 covers more than just traditional 'conversions,' but the extension of events now also heavily tracks customer engagement. Overall, customer engagement tracking is super important nowadays with so much competition for every industry, as well as a new focus on content optimization for long-term strategies.

Here is an overview of the differences between UA and GA4:

• Conversions are no longer just purchases and sales actions:

GA4 goes beyond the traditional concept of conversions, which typically refer to specific actions like purchases in e-commerce or demo requests in B2B SaaS. While tracking these conversions remains essential, GA4 recognizes that user engagement is a more nuanced and comprehensive metric to consider, which is why GA4 focuses on the concept of “event tracking.”

• Emphasis on Event tracking:

GA4 relies heavily on event-based tracking. It allows you to track a wide range of user interactions and events on your website or app. These events can encompass traditional conversions but also include a broader spectrum of user engagement activities like engaged sessions and other customer engagement metrics.

• Tracking customer engagement:

Customer engagement refers to the interactions and behaviors of users on your platform. GA4 provides the tools to track various customer engagement metrics, such as:

1. Content Consumption: Tracking how users engage with your content, including pageviews, time spent on pages, and scroll depth.

2. User Interactions: Monitoring actions like clicks on specific elements, video views, social media shares, and downloads.

3. Site Search: Measuring how often users utilize your site's search feature, what they search for, and how successful their searches are.

4. User Journeys: Using the path exploration report, you are able to understand the path the user takes through your site or app. You can see all engagement metrics for each touchpoint on your website, allowing you to understand the user journey better and make decisions around improving the lead or purchase cycle.

5. Audience Engagement: Analyzing how users engage with your website or app over multiple sessions and their frequency of visits.
   

Tracking customer engagement is vital because it provides insights into how effectively you're capturing and retaining your audience's attention. By understanding how users engage with your content, you can adapt your strategies to better meet their needs, address pain points, and create more compelling and relevant website experiences.

This step should also include comprehensively updating event tracking, which you can find instructions on in the section “How do I track an event in GA4?” below.

Step 2: Update all ongoing KPI reports & tech stack integrations

Many marketers use GA4 to live import marketing data to other dashboards such as Looker Studio, so updating these reports to ensure a smoother transition (particularly when stakeholders review them) is essential.

Another area to consider is utilizing the GA4 reports, including Event reports, User reports, and Conversions reports. GA4 offers more flexibility in customizing and creating reports, so it’s worthwhile to explore the options available.

You also have the ability to create endless custom reports tailored to your specific reporting needs. Use the "Analysis" section in the GA4 interface to build custom reports and dashboards that provide insights into your marketing KPIs

Step 3: Inform stakeholders of KPI changes

If you regularly share KPIs (particularly within dashboards like Looker Studio or GA4 itself) with individuals such as CEOs, CFOs, or investors, scheduling a meeting with them is essential. During this meeting, you can explain the recent changes in your data reporting and outline the new metrics that will be emphasized moving forward.

Once you've configured your customized reports and dashboards in GA4, you can then embark on the process of gaining the full support and engagement of all key stakeholders in this new platform. Consider organizing a demonstration to highlight the most pertinent areas they'll need to focus on and comprehend.

It's natural for people to resist change, but by ensuring a smooth transition process, we can make this shift more manageable for everyone involved.

Tracking an event in GA4 is an essential part of understanding user interactions and behavior on your website or app. Conversions in GA4 now span across a wide variety of events. Events are user interactions (may be termed conversions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean purchases) that you want to measure, such as button clicks, form submissions, video plays, event sign-ups, or any other action that you consider important for holistic conversion tracking.

To track an event in GA4, you'll need to follow these steps:

1. Set up a GA4 Property

If you haven't already, create a GA4 property for your website or app in your Google Analytics account. Go to Google Analytics and sign in to your account.

Click “Open” on the property where you want to track events, as shown in the below image, or create a new property if needed.

2. Define your event

Before you can track an event, you need to define what event you want to track. Decide on the specific user interaction you want to measure (e.g., button click, video play, file download) and determine the event's name and relevant parameters.

In the example above, the goal is to track clicks to a pop-up meeting scheduler. This link across the website is identified using the click id parameter “discovery-call,” so this event triggers when a user has clicked on a link that contains this parameter.

3. Implement event tracking code

Depending on whether you're tracking events on a website or a mobile app, you'll need to implement the appropriate tracking code.

To use Google Tag Manager (the tag management system that distinguishes one event from another), set up a GA4 configuration tag and create triggers and variables to capture the event details.

4. Verify event tracking

To verify that your events are tracked correctly, you can use the DeBugView in GA4 to see the events in real-time. This will help you confirm that your tracking is working as expected.

Quick note: Events can take up to 24 hours to be measured within GA4.

For example, here are all the conversion tracking events established on a particular website. In this case, only form submissions are tracked as a conversion, which is the most valuable event for this B2B company.

5. Set up event reporting

To analyze and report on the events you're tracking, set up custom reports or use the pre-built event reports available in GA4. You can also create custom conversions based on these events to track specific goals.

For example, this particular business below required a quick and easy way to find the “URL Path Query” by “source/medium,” so a custom report was added to the dashboard for quick reporting.

6. Ongoing monitoring and optimization

If you have successfully set up conversion and even tracking following the tips above, you want to ensure you are set up for success for all future marketing campaigns. Having accurate data helps you make strategic decisions about which types of campaigns are working and provides an overview of your website’s health.

I recommend reviewing data regularly (every quarter at minimum) and ensuring it is accurate. Especially when multiple people have access to the website, GA4, and GTM, it’s easy for things to get removed or a tracking code to be removed. Ideally, there should be a person dedicated to keeping track of all changes made to the website so that any discrepancies can efficiently be identified and fixed.

Furthermore, it’s important to point out that no form of tracking will ever be 100% — 90% of accurate data is more realistic if all is set up correctly. So don’t just rely on Google Analytics when reporting; use your website and CRM to support data collection, too.

For example, the screenshots below highlight discrepancies between GA4 and website e-commerce data:

In this case, the website is the most accurate for reporting on revenue. However, we can use GA4 to understand the customer journey and how they came to purchase. The discrepancies here are due to the technical infrastructure using PayPal Express payment gateway and Google not being able to track on PayPal’s i-frame, leading to some transactions not appearing in GA4.

To avoid such scenarios, here are a few tips for keeping GA4 in tip-top shape over time:

• Stay informed about updates: GA4 is continuously evolving, with new features and updates being released. Stay informed about these changes by regularly checking the official Google Analytics documentation and related resources.

• Document changes and customizations: Whenever you make changes to your tracking setup or customize your tracking, note these changes in a shared document. This document will be valuable for troubleshooting and maintaining tracking integrity.

• Monitor user permissions and access control: Control user permissions carefully. Ensure that only authorized individuals have access to your GA4 property and that they have the appropriate level of access (e.g., read-only, edit, admin) to prevent accidental changes or data breaches.

• Backup historical data: If you're transitioning from Universal Analytics (UA) to GA4, consider maintaining a parallel UA implementation for historical data continuity during the transition period.

This proactive approach helps you make data-driven decisions and maintain accurate insights into user behavior on your website or app.

GA4 automatically tracks several events without requiring additional configuration. These events provide valuable insights into user interactions and behavior on your website or app.

This includes:

• Pageview (Page View): GA4 automatically tracks when users view different pages on your website or screens in your app. This fundamental event helps you understand how users navigate your site or app.

• Scroll Tracking: GA4 can automatically track when users scroll down a page. This data can help you gauge user engagement with your content.

• Site Search: If you have a search feature on your website, GA4 can automatically track when users perform searches and what they search for, helping you understand user intent.

• Video Engagement: GA4 can track video-related events, such as video starts, pauses, completions, and other video interactions, if you have videos embedded on your site.

• Outbound Clicks: When users click on external links that lead to other domains, GA4 can automatically track these outbound clicks, helping you understand where users go after leaving your site.

• File Downloads: If users download files from your site, GA4 can automatically track these events, including the types of files downloaded.

• Engaged Sessions: GA4 can automatically measure the duration of user sessions and categorize them as "engaged" when users spend a certain amount of time or view a certain number of pages/screens.

• Scroll Depth: In addition to tracking scrolls, GA4 can measure how far users scroll down a page, providing insights into content engagement.

• Page or Screen Views per Session: GA4 can calculate the number of pages viewed by users during a session, helping you understand user engagement with your content.

Please note that you can turn off these features if you prefer to track everything manually.

In GA4, there is currently no fixed limit on the number of events you can track. You have the flexibility to track a wide range of events, and the platform is designed to accommodate a substantial number of events. Unlike Universal Analytics, which had a fixed limit of 20 goals, GA4 operates on an event-based tracking model that is more flexible.

Once you have set up your events following the steps in the first section, you can easily select which ones you prefer to be marked as a conversion, depending on what is important to you and your business. Conversions can be anything from form submissions to purchases. You can also create a combination or sequence of events and track this as one conversion.

You can track conversion value by associating a monetary value with specific conversion events or user interactions on your website or app. This allows you to measure the financial impact of those events.

Here's how you can track conversion value in GA4:

1. Define your conversion events: Identify the specific user actions or events that you want to track as conversions. These could be purchases, form submissions, sign-ups, downloads, or any other valuable interactions.

2. Implement event tracking code: Ensure you have implemented the appropriate event tracking code for the conversion events you want to track. Use gtag.js, Google Tag Manager, or the Google Analytics for Firebase SDK for mobile apps, depending on your platform.

3. Include the value parameter: When sending data for the conversion event, include a "price" parameter in the event parameters with your data layer. This parameter should represent the monetary value associated with the conversion. For example, if a user makes a $50 purchase, set the "price" parameter to 50.

Below is an example of what a data layer would look like for an online shop where the “price” parameter has the value of the item.

4. View conversion value in reports: Once you've implemented the tracking code with the "value" parameter, GA4 will capture this information. You can view conversion value data in various reports, including the Conversions report, as shown below, and other custom reports you create.

5. Setup e-commerce tracking (optional): If you're tracking e-commerce transactions, GA4 provides built-in support for e-commerce tracking, making it easier to associate conversion values with specific products and transactions, as shown in the below image. Most commonly used e-commerce CMS platforms will already have the ability to track ecommerce data, so check with the CMS on how to set this up and link to GA4.

6. Analyze and optimize: Use the conversion value data to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, website changes, or app improvements. It allows you to measure the ROI of your actions and optimize your strategies accordingly.

UA and GA4 have some gaps in how data is reported, so you’ll likely run into some areas where you’ll have to troubleshoot to ensure tracking is set up and functioning well over the long run. To help identify areas where there may be easily identifiable solutions, I’ll go over some scenarios with suggestions on how to fix them.

Problem: Duplicate event tracking

One of the key challenges during migration from UA to GA4 is ensuring that your existing data, especially custom events and dimensions, can be correctly mapped to GA4's event tracking model. GA4 relies heavily on event-based tracking, and the structure of events, parameters, and user properties may differ from what you had in UA. Ensuring a seamless transition of your existing event data and custom tracking can be challenging, and you may need to make adjustments to your tracking code and data layer.

If you opted into an automatic migration, Google has likely tried to transfer across the already existing events you have set up. This can lead to events being tracked twice, especially if you have used GA4 to track events previously.

Solution: Within GTM, duplicate your already existing tracking and change the tag type from Google Analytics to Google Analytics: GA4 Event. Re-add all of your event parameters if needed and reconnect all triggers. I recommend not choosing the automatic migration of events from Google Analytics to GA4. Once you have set up all of your events in GTM with the new GA4 tag, these events will begin to populate automatically.

Problem: Loss of historical data

When migrating from UA to GA4, you may face the issue of losing historical data. GA4's data model and tracking methodology are significantly different from UA, which means that you won't be able to import historical data into GA4 directly. This can make it challenging to analyze long-term trends and historical user behavior unless you've prepared for this transition by maintaining parallel UA and GA4 tracking for an extended period.

Solution: If GA4 has been installed for less than a year, keep Google Analytics running alongside it until you are confident you have enough historical data to make informed decisions. If necessary, take exports of important data to refer back to so you have another source of reasoning to ensure GA4 is tracking correctly. In the screenshot above, this particular website had over a year’s worth of data in GA4, so Google Analytics tracking was removed at the end of July.

Problem: Custom reports & integrations

Many businesses rely on custom reports and integrations built on top of UA. Transitioning these custom reports, dashboards, and third-party tool integrations to GA4 can be complex. The data structure and APIs may differ, and you may need to rebuild or adapt these custom solutions to work with GA4. This process can be time-consuming and may require additional development and testing.

Solution: While it’s not a “quick fix” to have to manually create reports and dashboards, GA4 excels far beyond UA with the level of customization. You can create dashboards for almost anything and even neatly file them within your dashboard. This is ideal when you need to access reports quickly: for example, if you need to send reports to different departments, you can structure your dashboard by department.

Every business, regardless of its size or industry, relies on accurate event and conversion tracking to drive growth — and mastering GA4 is the key to unlocking this potential.

To thrive in today’s evolving online landscape, commit to consistent conversion tracking and keep stakeholders informed about data and KPI tracking updates. By doing so, you'll harness GA4's power, ensuring it guides you to marketing success in the long run. Happy tracking!