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GA4 Setup & Configuration

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From 1 July 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing new data (1 July 2024 for 360 clients). GA4 is now Google’s flagship analytics product, replacing the widely adopted Universal Analytics.

What does this mean for brands?

  • Universal Analytics will stop working and all data will be deleted — it’s important to back this up if you want a historical view of performance.
  • GA4 attribution models and channel tracking are very different to Universal Analytics — these need embedding into business reports to understand the differences before the change is forced.
  • You need to export data to BigQuery if you want custom reports to look beyond 14 months.

A successful GA4 setup is critical for a number of businesses to maintain continuity and quality of reporting, not only as a marketing function, but in providing vital business intelligence and market data.

What are the new features of Google Analytics 4?

  • Changes in tracking models
  • Robust web and app reporting features
  • Machine learning and AI-driven insights
  • Changes to data retention periods
  • Expanded options to suer and traffic attribution

What does GA4 mean for eCommerce businesses?

Enhanced eCommerce tracking and reporting: GA4’s event-based model allows for more detailed and customised tracking of user interest. eCommerce businesses can track activities like product views, adding or removing items from carts, checkout progress, and transactions.

Improved audience building and segmentation: GA4 allows for the dynamic creation of audiences based on user behaviour and engagement. Ecommerce businesses can target users who are interested in specific products or categories, abandoned carts, or have made purchases. Audiences can be consistently applied across various platforms and devices, enabling businesses to target users more effectively, regardless of where they interact with the business.

Predictive metrics and automated insights: GA4 uses machine learning to produce predictive metrics such as potential revenue. This feature helps eCommerce businesses focus marketing efforts on audiences that bring more value. As well as helping businesses quickly identify trends, issues or opportunities, e.g. identifying popular products, recognising changes in user behaviour, or spotting potential website performance issues.

What does GA4 mean for SaaS businesses?

Enhanced user engagement metrics: GA4 focuses on a more user-centric model, providing insights into user engagement, frequency, and retention. These metrics are crucial for SaaS businesses to understand user behaviour and product interaction. Custom events allow SaaS businesses to track specific interactions within their software, like feature usage, error occurrences, or user interactions with different product parts.

Advanced segmentation and audiences: Create dynamic audiences based on user behaviour, such as feature usage, subscription tier, or engagement level. This segmentation allows for personalized marketing or communication strategies. For SaaS businesses offering mobile or desktop applications alongside web-based services, GA4’s cross-platform consistency ensures that audience definitions and tracking remain consistent across various platforms.

Funnel and path analysis: Build custom funnels to visualise user journeys through different product parts. This can help identify drop-offs or areas where users might be facing difficulties. Understand the common paths users take within the application, helping to identify popular features or potential areas of friction within the user journey.

GA4 Setup & Configuration Elements

Below are some of the elements you will need to need to know how to set up and interpret the data from in order to get the most out of your new GA4 environment.

User & Event Data Retention

Google Analytics 4 only has two options for user and event data retention, these being two months and 14 months. This differs from Google Analytics (three) which allowed you to store data “forever”. As a result, you will need to make sure you’re new reporting is robust enough to stand scrutiny when looking back at historical data and trends.

Google Signals

In order to view user data such as Gender, Interests, and Age bracket you need to enable Google Signals data. This is done by accepting the Google Advertising Features Policy, and enabling the data collection.

It is vital that your company reviews the policy first before accepting, as it is a legal data transfer with Google.

Connecting GA4 to Google Ads

You can connect a maximum of 20 Google Ads accounts to your GA4 property.

During the setup process, you will need to choose to enable or disable “Personalized Advertising”. If you disable this, then the GA4 audience list (remarketing events and parameters) will not be communicated to the associated Google Ads accounts. During this stage, you can also set up Auto-Tagging.

Cross-Domain Tracking in GA4

Cross-domain tracking in GA4 works in a similar fashion to GA3 and works to track users as a single data point across multiple domains, subdomains, and digital environments within your suite. Unlike GA3, you don’t need to deploy any code to cross-domain track, but simply change settings within your admin panel.

eCommerce Tracking via Google Tag Manager

If you’re currently utilizing Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics, then making the change to GA4 will require a number of changes to your setup, for example, there are 38 schema changes between GA3 and GA4. When setting up your new data layers it’s important to ensure all variables, triggers, and ultimately your tag is set up correctly.

Event-scoped custom dimensions

Like GA3, GA4 offers event-scoped and user-scoped custom dimensions. GA4 has increased the limit on the number of custom dimensions you can create on each property but has deprecated the use of custom-parameter reporting. During the transition, it is important to migrate all custom-parameter reporting to the more robust event-scoped and user-scoped tracking and reporting.

Client Reviews

  • Jake
    Customer, Reviews.co.uk

    The team at SALT.agency were great to work with. I had a project in rebuilding a brand after a relatively damaging corporate crisis. Dan and the team were fantastic resources in their SEO expertise in building a strategy as well as the technical details related to migration to a new website as part of a larger branding effort. I cannot recommend this team highly enough!

  • Anonymous
    Customer, Reviews.co.uk

    We chose to work with SALT to enable a smooth international website migration. With the goal in mind to mitigate ranking and organic search traffic loss, the team at SALT carefully walked us through how to implement the necessary setup and monitored our performance throughout the process. The results were great and now we’re in a strong position to move into new markets and excel in our search goals!

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    Customer, Reviews.co.uk

    SALT has been a great agency to work with for our SEO efforts. They’ve been very helpful in ensuring we increase our efforts, find the best opportunities, and optimise our website and content in the most efficient manner. I highly recommend them to anyone looking for an agency that will always have your back and help you towards your growth goals.

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