Recent articles and items of interest, mostly related to the Google analytics stack (GA4, GTM, Looker (Studio), BigQuery, CoLab), from Two Octobers Head of Analytics and co-founder Nico Brooks.
We spent a fair amount of time in June setting up and babysitting Universal Analytics data exports for our clients. During this process, I found myself in a dark place. My inner dialogue went like this:
I’ll spare you the rest of my internal back and forth, but the long and short is that context is everything in analytics. I am confident in the configuration of properties that my team audited and optimized, but even then if I look at a traffic surge from ten years ago, I couldn’t tell you whether it was legitimate or otherwise, without doing a bit of data forensics.
This realization was a helpful reminder for me that data is not truth. The page views, traffic sources, etc. we archived will come in handy, I’m sure, but it isn’t really feasible to uncover and record all of the context that would give me full confidence in the stories it can tell.
Google fixed a long-standing bug that resulted in a mis-attribution of Google Ads conversions to Google organic traffic. The fix just rolled out, but I did a comparison of a dozen GA4 properties that are linked to Google Ads, comparing the last seven days to the last seven days of May.
I’m going to call that inconclusive, but promising. It’s also possible that the change hasn’t rolled out to all of the properties I looked at, so it will be interesting to see how July numbers look.
Google introduced a potentially handy, but not-yet-ready-for-prime-time Tag Diagnosis feature for the Google Tag. It displays with the Tag Settings in GA4. To see it, go to Admin > Data Stream > Configure tag settings. It hasn’t rolled out to all properties yet, but if it is enabled, you’ll see a Tag quality rating above your tag’s settings like this:
The issues I’ve found with this feature so far are:
I’m excited for the kinks to be worked out because the issues it is meant to diagnose are some of the first things I look for when I audit a GA4 property. Auditing tasks that currently take 30 minutes to an hour will take less than five minutes.
I’ve been actively working with GA4 data in BigQuery for several years now, but it was only a few weeks ago that I fully grokked why sessionization is so important. I plan on doing a more detailed article on this topic, but here is the short version:
The answer is that GA4 counts a session that spans midnight as a single session, while your query counts sessions by day. So let’s say session 1234 starts at 11:45 pm and ends at 12:15 am the next day. Your query will count two sessions, one for each day. This problem is small for a local business that gets very little traffic at midnight, but it can be huge for a multi-national business that gets traffic around the clock. A similar, but worse problem happens with user counts. And any metrics that are based on sessions or users are similarly flawed.
The solution is to roll up metrics by session, and preserve user and session IDs in your sessionized table (user_pseudo_id and ga_session_id for anyone who wants to try this at home). You then create calculated fields on your datasource in Looker studio that do session and user counts and all of their derivations. In addition to solving the issue of overcounting sessions and users, this approach also means you can have one multi-purpose table that addresses most reporting needs.
This article helped show me the light on sessionization, and this github repository should go a long way towards helping you build your own sessionized goodness. I’m also a giddy fanboy of Johan van de Werken, but more on that in my comprehensive post.
Wait what?!? I can’t believe this is getting so little attention. Apparently, Meta has floated out a GA4 import function to select clients with the goal of releasing it to general availability soon. If, like me, you’d rather chew your own arms off than try to navigate the hellscape of Meta Business Managers, Ad accounts and company Pages to set up website conversions, this is really big news. It also means that your website conversion attribution is based on a first-party GA4 cookie, versus the doomed third-party Meta cookie.
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