Nitesh Sharoff of Growth Runner joined us for a webinar on the 8 Google Analytics 4 tips for SEOs. Nitesh is an analytics expert with over seven years of Data & Analytics experience.
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About Nitesh Sharoff:
Nitesh has worked in Data & Analytics for over 7+ years and has advised startups and enterprise customers, including Ramp, NET-A-PORTER, Stanley Black & Decker, and 60+ others. If he's not helping build analytics infrastructures, you'll find him showing off his ninja chopping skills in the kitchen.
Follow Nitesh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitesh-sharoff/
About Growth Runner:Growth Runner is a data & analytics consultancy focused on aiding companies track their behavioral user data, produce insights using the data and train people on how to use the industry tools.
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Nitesh: Great. So I want to talk through eight GA4 tips for SEOs specifically. So it's little tips and tricks after interviewing quite a few people in the industry to understand what they were trying to get out of the tool. And I've kind of compiled eight of them that I feel could be beneficial. So there are three parts to the webinar.
Initially, I'm just gonna talk through some of the features and the nuances I get. I do quite a few office hours for a few clients, and I get hundreds of questions around this. So I thought maybe we can start with that, make sure that we're all on the same page. And then I'll go into the tips and then, of course, Q&A.
There is a Q&A and dedicated Q&A at the end, but you're more than welcome to ask your questions, as Travis mentioned in the Q&A, and we can handle them as and when they come. Travis, I am assuming you're good to moderate those for me. I'm good to go. Great. All right, great. Well, everyone is welcome.
My name is Nitesh. I'm an analytics consultant at Growth Runner. I am obsessed with behavioral analytics data and now ai, and I've trained a lot of people in GA4 and Google Tag Manager, as well as other tools. And as Travis mentioned, I've worked with some great names in the industry, and if you don't see me, Nerding out in front of my computer.
I will definitely be showing off my ninja vegetable-chopping skills in the kitchen. I'll challenge someone on that one as well. And just a quick word about Growth Runner. So in our 80% of our business is tracking and analytics, so supporting you with GA4, tag manager and so on. And even getting data going into ad platforms such as Facebook Pixel, things like that.
We also do data modeling and engineering, and then we do training and upskilling as well. All right, so jumping onto GA4. Hopefully, you're all not feeling like this anymore, but GA4 did not have the best of receptions, and I've seen all sorts of merch around it, which was sadly very sad to see. Now, today I do want to talk about some of the cool things and the good features we have.
If someone were to put a gun to my head and say, are you pro or against GA4? It's definitely gonna be a pro. I feel there's a lot of benefits coming to this tool. I do feel it's not fully baked, so hopefully, in the future, you're gonna see better stuff out of them. But what you need to know about GA4 is that I'll do this as quickly as I can.
All right, so number one, one of the features that you may already know is if you have an app and a web offering, so I mean like an iOS, Android, as well as web. Now in GA4, you're able to combine this in one place. This is. Different from Universal Analytics, its predecessor, because previously, you'd have to have two separate places where you'd have this data, and getting it together was a pain, to say the least.
GA4, everything is available on one, and you can just set up a data stream for Android, one for iOS, and one for the web, and you're able to roll up your revenue, your users, your sessions, everything in one place. Great feature, in my opinion. Cool. The next one is data-driven attribution. So there are lots of attribution models.
Traditionally, universal analytics was all about the last click or last interaction. GA4 is all about data-driven. By default, you can switch back to last click, but data-driven just means that algorithms are gonna be used to assess whether those conversions should be credited to the channels used. And this is probably a good thing to know for SEO cuz I feel that's one of them that normally gets less credit than it should.
Now it's saying that if GA4 is essentially analyzing the behavior of people that did click on paid ads, and if it feels that, you know, whether they clicked on the ad or didn't click on the ad, they would've still converted. It's likely Organic will get a bit more of that credit. So just so that you know that these two are different, you're not gonna see parity between the two systems.
Part of it may be because of data-driven.
Machine learning. So now we're getting a little tiny data analyst built into the tool for free, and there are these insights and recommendations that'll show up in your reporting section in the home section, and down at the bottom, you'll be able to either switch this on or over time, it's gonna learn from your account, and it's gonna start suggesting some tips and things that can be useful or not useful.
It's still; I've seen this come and go. So it was on for a while, then I got taken off. But it's something that is important for you to know that is available and will be coming. So you'll have abilities to trend like it'll show you anomalies, anything that's unexpected, and you can then probe and deep dive from there.
Also, a cool feature channel groupings. So if you've used the tool inside of the acquisition section in Universal Analytics, you had. Attribution. So this is just depending on where you came from and what marketing channel you use; these get categorized. So if you think about organic, Bing, Google, all of that should go under organic.
And what we're seeing here is organic, so there's, there's new sort of groupings that have come out, including organic social, which is a bit more fitting. Instead of social seeing a social can be paid, you're seeing a separation between organic search and organic shopping. This has also been separated out, which is great for us, and there's a lot more to it.
And thankfully, in the last, I think it's a couple of months, we are now able to customize these further ourselves. So inside of your admin panels, you can change up the rules, which wasn't previously available a little late if you ask me. Cool. So this is some of the features. I do want to talk about some of the metrics that you're seeing in the account as well.
So I'm gonna start off with sessions cuz I get about 300 questions around this saying that my sessions don't match universal analytics. And there is a reason for this. The reason your sessions don't match is because they're measured differently in GA4. Previously in Universal Analytics, if you crossed over midnight, so think of one person using on the website, let's say at 1159 when they crossed over to midnight, that would increase the session count.
So that same person would be in two sessions instead of one. That is one of the reasons Univers GA4 has less sessions than Universal Analytics. The other one is if you were browsing in a short period of time, and let's say you. Clicked back on your browser, and you clicked in on organic, or you clicked on an ad accidentally, and in any way, analytics would think you came from another marketing channel.
It would start a new session. That's how universal analytics used to work. Both of these things no longer occur in GA4, so you're gonna see a smaller session count or should see a smaller session count in GA4. Don't be alarmed. It's good, and this new way of tracking, if you ask me, is substantially better.
All right, let's talk about a new metric that's come in as well. Engaged sessions. Now this has to be one of my favorite metrics that's come in. Anything around engagement rates versus our traditional bounce rate. And what GA4 has done is they have redefined how we measure engagement. And they're saying any session that had a conversion event, and this is a success event that you set up on your account.
Someone that's spent more than 10 seconds on the site or. Someone who had two or more page views. Any of these conditions now makes you an engaged session. And this is how I feel we should report going forward. Bounce rate I didn't like from the beginning because it could be manipulated on all accounts, so no one had a consistent bounce rate.
They were defined differently. This is now very consistent. So this is a great, great new metric to start sort of using in your reports. And the other one, you know, talking about bounce rate as well, bounce rate has completely changed. So this has nothing to do with how it was in universal analytics. And all they've done over here is they've just one minus engagement rate.
So it's the inverse of the engagement rate. So if every time you looked at engaged sessions, you subtract that from the total sessions, that is your bounces, you divide that over sessions, that is what your bounce rate would be. So at the bottom of the slides, I have some calculations there for those that don't believe me, but you'll see over here that the bounce rate plus engagement rate is a hundred percent.
So they've just done the inverse of the engagement rate. I prefer engagement rate. I think we should be reporting on users that engaged with our content versus users that bounced. But of course, this is just me. And, yeah, I spoke about conversions briefly before. I do want to talk about that. So conversions are now, they're, they're essentially the direct replacement of universal analytics goals.
And the difference is they're counted; they're measured slightly differently. In the sense that a conversion in GA4 is an event that has occurred. So whether that event happened and occurred with, you know, five times by one person, that'll be counted as five conversions. Universal analytics would count the session.
So if one, I'll relate this to something that you see more often. Let's say someone submitted a contact form. In Universal analytics, if you submit three forms in a span of a minute, you're counted as one goal. While in GA4, if you submit three forms in the span of a minute, you're counted as three conversions.
So there was a difference. So if you're seeing a difference between your goals and your conversions, this is probably why. Thankfully in the last few weeks, there has or months there, there is the ability to change this, to meet parity with Universal Analytics. And all you would need to do is pop into your admin section, find your conversion event, and just click on change counting method.
And if you switch that from once per event to once per session, you'll be on parity with Google Analytics with Universal Analytics rather. Alright? Now the next one is one that has frustrated a lot of people. You may have learned this the hard way already, but here it goes. Source, medium, and campaign.
Okay? They have changed in definition, and I do not know why. But I'll explain to you what the differences are, why they decided to recycle terms that everyone was happy with Beyond me. Again, I'm pro-GA4, but essentially whenever you're looking at, whenever you're looking at your reports, make sure that instead of using Source Medium and Campaign, you're either using first user source or.
It's better yet if you wanted parity with a universal analytics session, medium session, source session, campaign session, or default channel grouping. These are gonna give you better results and just to showcase how painful the results can be. If you have a look over here, I'm comparing if you did, if you just wanted to know how many sessions by source, medium.
Over here, I can see 15 conversions by 12 sessions. This would be extremely alarming. Yet, if I use session source and medium, this makes a lot more sense. 300 sessions, 15 conversions. So be very careful with the metric you use over there. Okay, we're done with sort of us understanding a bit more about GA4 and some of the nuances.
Let's go straight into the eight tips for s e o and Travis. If there are any questions, feel free to interrupt me at any time. Okay, great. So some of the questions I hear are, for example, I wanna see search performance within the platform. So this is just search console data inside of GA4. Is it possible?
It absolutely is possible. And this is something if you have gone into your admin panel and you have connected the two tools, there's a simple hidden set of reports. You just go into the library; you'll find this little collection called search console. Literally, go ahead and publish that. And you have this new section in your UI where you can see your queries straight within the tool.
And in some reports, you can mix up the data as well. So a very, very cool tool, very helpful from an SEO perspective. And not many people knew this, which is encouraging, well, encouraging for me, not so encouraging for how GA4 has been communicated. The cool features that they have. Great. The next one is businesses.
We all know businesses are different. You may have a SaaS business; we may have an e-comm business. Th there's, you know, no business is the same. And what I really like about GA4 is they've understood this, and they're giving us the ability to completely customize our navigation. Already. You may have noticed across different accounts, you may have slightly different navigation, but just to showcase on the left-hand side over here, you have the standard navigation, and you are allowed to completely change this.
Put reports in that you want to remove parameters from reports; everything is available. For example, just to showcase that this is possible. I have changed one of my accounts to be this, and if anyone remembers the Spice Girls from back in the day, yes, this is exactly what I've done there. Macha, you can change it to however you'd like, and this is how you would do it.
You would, again, pop into your library. Within the reports section. You have the ability to click on edit collection very easily, and you can just search for new reports, put them in sections, and delete reports from these sections. Everything is available inside the UI. There's a lot, a lot of cool things that can be done.
For example, from an SEO perspective, what I've seen people do are they've created a new section called SEO, and they've put all of the reports that were interesting to them, filtered by organic search automatically. So this could be very useful for you as well. Just have that section rather than applying filters, doing segments, all of that.
Everything can be done once. Okay, so now a bit more technical. When it terms in terms of content, one thing that is always useful is knowing when your content needs a refresh. Right? And I'm sure you have methods of doing this, but one thing that never hurt is the ability to get some of this data into GA4 as well.
So with GA4, everything is an event. And you have the ability to enrich your data with event parameters. And think of this as adding detail to things like page views or events as a whole. So this is an article I have on 40 gotchas that GA4 has, and I feel like it's started off with 40, it's now like 70, but it's available.
So this is my page. And for simplicity, this is how the data would come in. GA4 would when my page was loaded, GA4 would send in a page view, and by default, it would collect the page title. And what I could do is I can enrich this with the help of devel, with the help of a developer. I could get maybe the created date sent in, I could get the modified date, the author, I could get a lot more detail sent in with every single one of my posts.
So, then I could use the explore section to trend and see how the post created date does over time and how many views it's getting. And if I saw a downward trend, I could set up an alert, or I could somehow, you know, check this periodically, and I could then know that these are the articles that need a bit of a refresh.
This, the, the, what I'm showing over here is, is within the explore section, and the explore section is where you can do a lot of advanced reports, a bit like a data analyst would have in a real analytics tool. All of that is available for free in GA4, and you'd be able to trend a lot of this data as well.
So this is one of the things I really like. If you do have explorations there, you have the ability to do them quite nicely. Okay. I find it a little annoying that we'd need to jump into the tool to find traffic changes. So if something does occur out of the norm, I'd need to figure it out on my own, which I don't think is right.
And what I like about GA4 is you've got these custom alerts. Granted, they're not fully there yet, but the idea is available. So one of the things you could do is set up an alert when organic traffic drops below 30% for a given week compared to the previous week, and you would literally go into the insights, and you could set this up as shown on screen.
Now just choose your metrics, choose the period. And you'd be able to get an email alert telling you when something dropped that was a bit drastic. I found this very useful. I've tried and tested it. It had a few more bugs in the beginning. It seems like it's getting better, but I'm very sure that when they're happy with it, they're gonna make it very easy to do rather than burying it where it is currently.
So, I spoke to several s e o consultants, and I know page speed is well all sorts of. Metrics related to speed are huge. And sadly, GA4 does not have speed metrics that you can have a look at it, and I'm sure you're doing this in another tool, but with the help of Google Tag Manager, there is a way to get speed metrics into GA4.
And when I say speed metrics, I mean core web vitals, and you can get a lot of them in there. And Seymour Hava has been kind enough. To have created a little tool for us and we would just simply import this into our tag manager account. Switch this on, and with a little configuration, maybe with a developer, you're able to get this sent into the tool.
And as well as that as I showcased before in the Explore section, you'd be able to trend this over time as well. So you could look at your F C P and and just see how that's trending over time. All within GA4 rather than having another external tool or something else. And you can see how many users are experiencing it and so on.
Something I didn't know. And something that I learned was, s e o has its own micro funnel as well. And this was news to me, and there was a consultant that said this to me. I mean, we, I feel like we all know about sales funnels and moving people down the funnel, but I didn't know within s e o you can have your own little funnel.
So when I heard this, I was thinking of how can I, how can I give you something that you can do in GA4 that's gonna help you with this? So the best way to explain this is if we think, I have a client call is online, and they do personal training certifications amongst other things, and I was thinking for them maybe a funnel could look like at the top, maybe really high-level educational content.
Mid funnel sort of moving people down. It's, again, content, but more about their products, maybe their certifications. And then, finally, the bottom of the funnel is a product page or similar or something leading to a product page. So this would look at just the educational content could be what does a personal trainer do?
So just an explanation on personal trainers. Maybe the next article you wanna push them to is what are the certifications most personal trainers have, which is, again, closer to what ISA does. And then finally, viewing the certification, product learning a bit more, or so on. So one thing is knowing that people are doing this; the other one is being able to easily measure this.
And so, a way that we can do it in GA4 is by using some of the features known as audience triggers and automated events. And what this means is we set up some conditions in GA4 to say, when people go from, let's say, content one. So what does a personal trainer do? Down to what certifications do they have?
I wanna create a new event every time someone qualifies and moves down, create a new event called, I don't know. People move down the funnel or moved funnel or phase one to two, whatever you wanna name it. But now we have an event that we can count, and we have a count continuously going for people taking that action.
You could filter that by only organic search, and now you have a metric that not only can you say, okay, organic swayed X, many purchases, you can also say, these are the amount of people we've moved closer and we've made them more aware of your product, which I think is very beneficial if you go into a room of people that may not value you as much as I do.
So how you would set this up is inside of the admin panel, you have a section called audiences, and you could create a new audience and a custom audience, and you would tell GA4 what the sequence is. And the sequence is essentially going to step one, page one, which was the high-level page about what personal trainers do.
And hopefully, you can see that fairly well. If not, the slides will be available later, but it's just a blog post that's been selected. And step two is the second page that we'd want. So this is closer to some of the certifications. And once you have this, you could, of course, do the third step, but you can then create a new event based on this.
Which I think is very cool. So you can tell the tool that if anyone qualifies in this and someone moves down in this, then by all means set them and create this new event. And you have this event available in all of your reports as well. You could set it as a conversion; you could do whatever you'd like with it.
This I found quite cool, and I think I could benefit a lot of people. And, of course, it might be a little small on my screen. If it is, by all means, the slides will be available later. But yeah, hopefully, this feature is useful to you. I'd love to hear if that is; I'll go on. I have a couple more we'll get through, and then, of course, we'll have the dedicated Q&A as well.
All right, so something that I heard from SEO consultants was something negative finally about universal analytics was that a lot of organic traffic was actually falling into the referral bucket. And this is a. Duck. Duck Go, for example, was one of the organic that kept going into referral.
There are several others, and what I like in GA4 is not only have they improved the channel groupings for this, but they've also given us documentation. To tell us where all of the channel groupings are, what it matches, what it doesn't match, and from an SEO perspective, or specifically an organic search perspective.
They're also giving us a massive list of every site and where it gets classified. And as well as that, you have the ability to tell them about a site that you feel is misclassified. Now they have a disclaimer. They're saying they don't look at it too frequently, but just so that you know, you can sway where this falls into the bucket.
I think this is very cool. At least, at least out of the bat, you're not gonna see, you know, duck, duck go being lost into referral and, and some other ones that I may not know of. Okay. Another one that I like is I'm sure you have searched data or rankings data using a tool of your choice, whether it's Ush, h hrs, or.
Other tools, clear scope, of course. I don't know if it's exportable, but one thing that I really like from GA4 is you get free raw data. This is given to you. So rather than having, if you don't like how the GA4 reporting interface is working for you, or if you want more out of the tool, you get free data given to you into BigQuery, which with all the detail you can expect it's raw level data.
Previously, Universal Analytics users needed to be on GA 360, which is the paid version of Google Analytics, to be able to access this. It's now given to you for free. For up to 1 million rows a day. So some of the things that I've seen people do with this from an SEO perspective were they were trying to understand what keywords are driving organic or what drops in keywords are, are, are decreasing organic since we don't have clarity.
As to the actual amount of traffic being sent from keywords, that was taken away from us. Years ago. They were actually doing this using data science, and they were saying, okay, well, we are tracking where we are on these rankings, and this is the amount of organic traffic coming through. And they were able to find correlations using machine learning and all sorts of stuff, and this kind of raw level data is gonna be able to help you do that as well.
Cool. All right, so I'll do a quick recap on some of the eight tips. So number one, By all means, enable your search console collections within GA4, so you can see some of your search console data straight within the UI. Number two was to customize your GA4 navigation. So, by all means, you can edit the UI, and if you are feeling Spice Girl themed, you can, by all means, follow that too.
Number three is related to sort of the created date and getting post details in maybe the author of the Post and enriching your data with event parameters. Something I recommend you do. Number four, custom alerts. If you want to monitor big drops in organic or anything within the account, you can set those up with custom alerts as well.
Number five, if you're doing speed metrics, you wanna get those into the tool by all means. That is available with the help of Google Tag Manager. Number six, if you wanna monitor your conversions in your content funnel. So this was that little s e o funnel that I had no idea existed. You can do this with the audience and trigger events.
Number seven is, well, the channel groupings are finally improved. Maybe that's a win for us more than an action. But if you did need to sway them, there is a way of sending in a form and telling them about a new site, maybe in a country that's not as obvious as all the others. And number eight, if you wanna do some really cool stuff, Outside of the tool itself and sort of model data that is available, and you could partner with a data engineer, a data scientist, you can do a lot of cool, cool stuff.
You've done very well, listening to me ramble on for all this time, so well done. And what I have been doing and what I wanted to offer was a giveaway. And this giveaway, hopefully, you're as excited about it as I am, but it's gonna be a one-hour ask me anything session with me. And what I mean by this is there's nothing held back.
It's not a hidden sales pitch or anything like that. You come. With six people in your company, you can bombard me with questions on Google Analytics for BigQuery, tag Manager, or whatever you'd like. I'll screen share, and I will give that away for free, I guess. All you need to do is there's a little QR code or a link.
And that's g.run/clear scope. And all you need to do is there's a small form to fill out over there. You will get immediate access to the slides of today, and as well as that, you'll be entered into a little raffle, and I will be announcing the winners probably mid-next week. Once, yeah, once everyone has a chance to watch this as well.
Cool. So on to the Q&A.
Travis: I was I took a lot of notes. It's very helpful for me to kind of kick it off; Darlene had a question do you know, off the top, top of your head, if Google Business profile visits are tracked as organic or off the bat?
Nitesh: Ooh, tricky question.
I'm not too sure. Okay. I'm not too sure on that one. So that's, and then, yeah, sorry. Go on. And then
Travis: Anna had a question about custom audience sequences and moving people through the funnel. Do I have to set the sequence for each piece of content? Or is there a way of, is there is no way of collecting larger sets of data?
Nitesh: That's a good idea. That is a good question. There is something known as content groups, so you can work with the developer. And what I've seen done in the past is if you are on WordPress or a site like that, sometimes you can tag up the content with specific tags. What this company was doing is they created their own set of tags, and they just named it, you know, Like content level one, content level two and three, one being highest and three being lowest.
So down the funnel, and they had, with the help of the developer, they were exposing this and sending this into GA4, and now they could just say, show me people that move from level one to level two, and they created an event from that. So you can do it with content groups, you can do it with your own event parameter as well.
But there is a way to do it rather than doing it for every individual piece of content. Awesome. Awesome. That's good to
Travis: hear. And then Philippe asked back about the page load time, but he wanted the page load time, and that was in GA three or Universal. But not the core web vitals or Google page speed.
He's asking, is that
Nitesh: available? I guess that's something with the help of a developer would be able to send through. That information is even inside of Tag Manager. I know that when the DOM is loaded, or even when the entire page is loaded, both of them are available in Tag Manager, so someone could set up an event when that happens to send straight through GA4. I think that's definitely possible.
Awesome. And then
Travis: Amanda has the question, is there a workaround for the lack of annotations in GA4? Working on metal title testing to improve CTR, and the reporting for this is annual.
Nitesh: I didn't quite understand that question. Yeah.
Travis: She's asking if there is a workaround for the lack of annotations in G four.
I think she's like running some tests on meta titles and wants to kind of compare.
Nitesh: Of course. Yeah. Sadly, not just yet. I mean, some people are doing it in other tools and logging it separately, but having that lovely UI feature where you could say, oh, there's a big traffic drop, and you have someone that's left you a really nice note that's not available currently, unfortunately.
Yeah, I love that. That tool, Yeah. It was really helpful.
Travis: Yeah. And Darlene asked, how about recommendations on how to tag. Google business profile URLs. Do you, do you know
Nitesh: of any, so when we're talking about Google business profile URLs, do we mean things that show up on maps? Is that sort of the kind of piece around that?
Yes. Yeah. Okay. So if someone clicked on a map, they would open up, they would click on the website. I don't think there's a parameter that gets sent in. No, I don't think you'd be able to; they wouldn't be able GA4 wouldn't be able to differentiate something showing up on maps versus something showing up on organic search, to my understanding.
So I don't think there's something available. Trying to think if there's a parameter sentence. I don't believe there is. Unless you've Now, you can't even change up the URL. No, sorry. I don't think there'll be a way to solve that. Although I think it's a good suggestion to give to the GA4 team and just be, give us another category for channel grouping.
Is that be quite useful? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sorry about
Travis: that. And then another question is, where do I find the possibility in the library to link the Google search console again? Oh yeah, absolutely. Instead of in the
Nitesh: library and then, Yes, correct. So firstly, you just need to go into your admin panel, and in the midsection, you should see the ability to link the search console to GA4 only.
When that is done, and you pop in, then you would go into the report section. Into the library and at the once library, sorry, within the library, there'll be a section called collections that will load up. Just give it a few seconds. It takes a second. When it loads up, you'll see a box that says Search console, and you can just, there's three dots there.
You click on them, and you publish, and that will give you the ability to switch on the search console. Yeah, that's awesome. And then
Travis: are there any implications of the event-based data model four, GA4,
Nitesh: Implications? I think there's; there's a lot of changes. Universal analytics was all about sessions and hits inside of sessions, but the raw data was very much one session that you'd unpack.
GA4 is all about events, so it just fires in events continuously. So in terms of implications, do you mind clarifying that question a little as to some of the implications or some of them that you're worried about? Yeah, I can ask.
Travis: Great. And then, while we kinda wait, how does GA4 handle privacy-related changes such as the deprecation of third-party cookies?
Nitesh: Of course they are. What they've done is have promised by 2024, chrome browsers are not gonna use third-party cookies. Pretty much all of the marketing and analytics tools today are using first-party cookies as identifiers. GA4 comes with a tool, well, something you enable called Google Signals, which uses some of Google's proprietary data to.
Fuel your accounts, but I wouldn't think a third party is a big problem. Well, it will be a big problem for them cuz they've kind of owned the browser space, but there are a lot of changes in the industry around privacy. So just answering. Do I feel there's a concern around them identifying users? I feel like it's getting harder with iOS, but they have found ways of getting around it.
Whereas, for example, for Google Ads, you can send in email addresses. It's known as enhanced conversions, and they can do some matching if they don't know much about the data. And from a privacy perspective. A lot of consent managing platforms, and for those of you that don't know what those are, it's those annoying popups that say cookies and do you accept cookies?
Or anything along those lines. The Google Analytics four has something known as consent mode, and there is a way to track data anonymously as well. So it's just showing you page views and people that purchase so you can fuel your account with data without knowing who those people are. And I'm seeing more and more businesses start using that.
Some don't allow it, some do, but there is; there is a lot more control. Also, something I mentioned to Travis before we kicked off, the entire ecosystem Google's trying to create with GA4 and tag Manager is phenomenal because it means that even though you're using GA4 on your website, you don't necessarily need to send the data to GA4.
What I mean is they've kind of, they're trying to get, there'd be like, they're trying to be like industry leaders in how to track on websites and then you can send it wherever you want. And this gives a lot of flexibility. So if tomorrow there was a lawsuit and they said Google Analytics is illegal, like they did in France with GA4, you would.
In, in about two minutes, you could be switched off and using another tool, or maybe two hours, more than two minutes, but you could be using another tool very quickly without any data going to GA4, even though you are using the GA4 library on your site to track. So this might be a little technical, but it, it is very, very cool and, and I think it's a, it's a good move, especially from a privacy perspective.
Yeah,
Travis: I completely agree. That's pretty slick on their part. And then two more questions. First, from Amanda. We'll let you send another question. Is there a way to use statements and filters instead of statements to show me traffic that meets attributes A or B but doesn't have to match
Nitesh: both.
Would this be, where would this be that you're looking at this? Cuz depending on where you might have it, you might not.
Travis: Yeah, I mean, if you can chat that real quick. Within the acquisition reports,
Nitesh: I think if it's just inside of acquisition reports, you don't have that ability, but you do have the ability inside of something like Explore, where you could use a segment or similar, and you could get your information through that.
Awesome, awesome.
Travis: And then she followed up. Is there a way to use the same filter to include and exclude data at the same time? Do
Nitesh: Do you mind
Travis: giving an example? For example, include page, pa, page path a. Exclude page path B. And it doesn't matter, or does it appear possible to use the same dimension filter twice
Nitesh: though?
Yeah, I don't think you can do that. I believe they started doing Reg X recently. I need to double-check if that came out on all accounts or not. But if you are good at Reg X, you might be able to do it through that, which, yeah, it's tricky.
Travis: It's very tricky. And then I think the final question where can you learn more about GA
Nitesh: four?
Yeah, I think there's, there's good resources. Google Analytics themselves have released some training courses. I think they're quite basic, but everyone in the industry is doing workshops, so we're doing workshops as well. So like entry-level foundational training workshops on growth runner.com. If you want to attend a workshop, we run a few once a month.
Currently, you could jump in otherwise. I'm trying to think of a good resource that has good, I I'm unaware of any free resources or paid resources. There are a few industry leaders like Charles Farina, who's doing really good work with GA4 as well. Yeah, I think a lot of the knowledge there. Oh, there's also a forum, a Slack form called Measure Slack.
Over there, you have. Over 30,000 experts. I wouldn't say all of them are experts, but you have a lot of the industry leaders in there who will answer questions if you do get tripped up. So even though I, I would always recommend doing a foundational course of some sort to understand and get up to speed with GA4, maybe this webinar gave you everything you needed.
If it did, great, and then you can follow up some of the questions. Within these forums, measure Slack specifically, which I think is, to me, the best resource out there, with the most skilled people consistently monitoring that.
