A happier new year with GA4?

A white and red firework exploding in a clear dark sky.

I had lots of fun work stuff I wanted to do in 2023. But instead, I spent a lot of time learning how to use GA4.

For anybody who uses Google Analytics, GA4 gave 2023 the parody and meme content we all needed. I was just glad I wasn’t the only person who thought that GA4 was an atomic bomb on my to do list.

I spent a lot of early 2023:

1. opening GA4
2. pressing buttons
3. getting frustrated that I couldn’t make it do what I wanted it to do
4. closing GA4

But when the warning banners and countdown clock appeared I knew I had to start getting to know it. We had a lot of help with the setup from Graham at dotfound. I also attended Measurelab’s GA4 immersion course. This course really helped me, and Dan was fab. For anybody who, like me, needs to know the ‘why?’ for everything, this course answered that without making you feel like a nuisance. And no, they haven’t paid me to say this!

Now it’s the start of 2024 and I’ve had some time to learn to live with it. We’ve had some problems along the way, and I don’t love it for reasons I’ll go into. But it has given us some new data points. And we have new ways of measuring page performance which have helped us make better decisions. So hopefully 2024 will be a happier new year with GA4!

Accessibility

I’ll get this one out of the way first. Mainly because it’s just plain sad.

There are some positives. For example, GA4:

• announces when something is a text field, such as a search box
• reads tables from left to right

But, for all their work on assistive tech and providing support services like the Google Disability support team, GA4 is not accessible. I’d had higher hopes because:

• GA4 is brand new and could have been designed to be accessible from the start
• some of the accessibility issues are basic, such as having a structure and labelling buttons
• Google claim they’re co-creating a world where disabled people can thrive, just not if they need to use GA4 at work

Usability

As a user researcher, usability is obviously pretty high on my list of priorities. GA4 is a lot faster than Universal Analytics (UA).

But it’s not intuitive and it’s not user friendly. There are some big things like it is visually overwhelming. But then there are smaller things like only being able to search an entire data table rather than a specific column within the table.

On the plus side, the interface is customisable which means you can hide the things you don’t need. Being able to show only the data we need in a collection of reports has improved the usability for our team.

Learning to use GA4 after using UA is hard. I wonder what it is like for somebody new to digital analytics. The best advice I’ve had, and that I have since passed on, is forget everything you know about analytics.

Custom events

Now, onto the good stuff. If you work in an organisation where lots of people use analytics, but one person manages Google Tag Manager, GA4 lets you create events without adding to somebody else’s workload!

You can create new events using the User Interface (UI). You can give the event a custom name and set the parameters. The event will start collecting data straight away and be visible in your list of events, normally, the next day.

You create new events based on existing events, which means you can adapt the automatically collected events to meet your needs. For example, we have created 2 new events that only our team use based on the automatically collected Click event:

1. internal link click: link clicks to other advice and support pages

2. external link click: link clicks to any external organisations (this excludes clicks which have different domains such as our online community)

The addition of creating custom events on the UI also means you can add events beyond automatically collected events. So you can collect the data that will best help you to make decisions. My favourite custom events that we have are page_read and view_content.

page_read

Before GA4, we used to do what we called a red flag audit. It was a complicated spreadsheet that included UA data on scroll depth and link clicks. It included data from other sources such as a helpful rating that is collected in our CMS. We used it to identify the 5 pages we thought were performing least well so that we could look at ways to improve them.

Our hypothesis was that if people were not scrolling down a page or clicking on any links on the page, then the engagement rating for the page was poor. We had some great improvement successes from doing this, but it was time-consuming for the team.

With GA4, page_read tracks how many times users scroll to 75% of a page and spend at least 30 seconds on the page. Combined with the internal and external link clicks in 1 report, this gives us a better understanding of how pages are performing without having to export and manipulate the data manually.

view_content

Before GA4, we relied on scroll depth to try to work out how far down a page people were reading. But we could only guess exactly how far down a page 50% scroll depth was. We had trialled Silktide heatmaps which show you which part of the page people are reading to. This was useful for us, but not in our budget this year.

How far down a page people read is important for designing advice content. If there is something that is important or could cause harm to people, it needs to be where people will see it. But the order of information on a page must make sense too.

Sometimes we get feedback to say that something is missing from a page. When we check, the information is often there. But not near the top of the page. We wished we could see which headings people were reading to so that we could decide if we needed to change the order of the page.

With GA4, we now have the view_content event. This event tracks how many times users view each heading on a page. This event has a partner select_content event that tracks how many times users click on a heading title in a side menu. These 2 events show us how often users go to a specific section of the page. This makes it easier to decide if we should change the order of information.

2024 with GA4

This year, I feel more comfortable with GA4. We’ve updated our data report templates and built some Looker Studio dashboards for internal reporting. I like the freedom custom events offer and how they let you look at your data in a different way. Hopefully it’s something that we’ll develop and update as our design needs change. I’d be interested in hearing about the custom events other people have set up!