Google Analytics 4 Checklist for marketing specialist

Base steps:

  • Create a GA4 Property and follow these steps to get started 
  • Enable Enhanced Measurement to measure interactions  like Scrolls, Site Search, Video engagement, File downloads etc.
  • Link to Google Ads for Bidding Optimization and Audience Activation 
  • Mark conversion events – Mark events as a conversion with a toggle to measure your users’ most important actions
  • Specify attribution settings – Define Attribution Lookback window and default attribution model
  • Set event data retention – retention of user-level data, including conversions, can be set to a maximum of 14 months
  • Create custom dimensions and metrics – in order to surface event parameters that you collect yourself in the Reporting (not necessary for automatically collected events, enhanced measurement and recommended events)
  • Add Recommended Events – measure additional features and behavior as well as generate more useful reports
  • Check your data stream settings – including cross-domain measurement (attribute activities to a single user across domains), unwanted referral (domains whose traffic you don’t want to identify as referrals) and session timeout conditions

Advance:

  • Finalize your GA4 account structure (sub/roll-up properties for 360 clients) and set up user management
  • Implement User ID – measure user sessions and activities across multiple devices and platforms, compare the behavior of signed in versus non-signed in users and create remarketing audiences based on User-ID data
  • Activate Google Signals and acknowledge user data collection terms – manage data settings and enable Google Signals for cross-device reporting and -remarketing as well as measuring YouTube Web Engaged View Conversion Events
  • Upload your Data to Analytics – Inject additional user, product or cost data via Data Import & or connect offline touchpoints using Measurement Protocol (currently only available via the GA UI)
  • Start exporting and testing GA4 goals for conversion bidding, audiences and audience trigger

Professional:

  • Start preparing the move of reports & dashboards [high effort] 
  • Export raw data to BigQuery – run highly performant queries of large datasets for advanced marketing use cases

If you have any ideas which step are essiantials for migration to GA4 please share in comments.

Thank you advance and Good Luck!

Why should you set up conversion at the MCC level if you have more than one Google ads account?

In this article, we will not analyse the reasons for splitting advertising campaigns in different Google Ads accounts. From a technical point of view, you can run ads from different accounts without any problems. In this article, we’ll break down the benefits of Google ads cross-conversions for you as an advertiser.

For 2023, automation has become an integral part of advertising campaigns (although without automation in principle, it is impossible to launch online advertising in any year). An important condition for a successful advertising campaign is data consistency. If you use multiple ad accounts for an advertising campaign, you must agree on the goals of these advertising campaigns and combine them in the manager account.

This opens up a number of technical advantages:

  1. By using fewer tracking tags, the amount of code is reduced, and the site loads faster accordingly
  2. Simplified reporting. You will be able to see the effect of all advertising campaigns and their synergy for different types of conversions.
  3. You avoid possible duplicate conversions when different accounts have different conversions for the same trigger.

You also get a number of non-obvious benefits:

  1. The marketing team has clarity on the number of conversions that all advertising campaigns bring.
  2. You can use simulations and built-in Google Ads tools such as the Performance planner to predict the impact of your ad budget change on conversions.
  3. You can conduct experiments not only at the level of advertising campaigns, but also at the level of different accounts using hollistic data.

To set up cross conversions, it is best to use the current Google ads instructions.

Moving from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4

All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023. GAll standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023, and 360 Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2024. After that, you’ll be able to access your previously processed data in Universal Analytics for at least six months. Learn more about what to expect.

If you need additional information:

Get startedFinish migrating
1. Consider account structure
2. Create a Google Analytics 4 property
3. Create data stream(s)
4. Enable data collection
5. Activate Google Signals
6. Link to Google Ads 
Import Google Ads links from Universal Analytics or create new Google Ads links		7. Map Universal Analytics custom events to Google Analytics 4
8. Migrate Universal Analytics goals and conversions to Google Analytics 4
9. Validate and bid to conversions in Google Ads
10. Migrate audiences
11. Migrate ecommerce measurement
12. Add users

Short Intro

Hi, My name is Kiril, I am Industry Manager, Measurement & Data from Ukraine.

This site is a sandbox for my personal testing of various features from Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and other technologies.

Every time I promise myself to add more useful information to this site, but reality finds more important things for me.

Hope in one day I found time and share all my ideas here.

Cheers,

Kiril