Episode 23: Mastering GA4: Key Metrics Every Content Creator Should Track

Episode Transcript

Ashley Segura: So when you’re not at your desk looking at analytics and you find yourself in the kitchen, what is your go to dish to cook?

Brianna Anderson: If you find me in the kitchen, something bad has probably happened or we have no food. More than likely if I’m in the kitchen, I am making a wonderful peanut butter and jelly sandwich because that’s about as far as my cooking skills can take me.

Ashley Segura: And no bananas are added. No, like

Brianna Anderson: that’s a lot of work.

Nope. We’ve got peanut butter on one side, jelly on the other, and that’s it. Keeping it simple, leaving all the work for the analytics

Ashley Segura: space.

Brianna Anderson: Yes.

Ashley Segura: Yes. Yeah. That makes sense. You’ve been in analytics for over a decade now. So how have you seen the data from when you first started to now change in terms of what we have access to?

Brianna Anderson: Yeah, the data that we have access to, and the data that, we can and how we can manipulate the data even, I would say has gotten far more advanced, obviously, in the last 10 years. I would say the biggest change is the amount of data we have, because you have to think of how much the Internet has expanded in the last 10 years.

It’s doubling in size. Constantly, and the amount of users and the amount of content that’s available. It just makes for a lot of data. And the way that we’re able to splice and dice that data has gotten more sophisticated because the way that users are using the Internet is a lot more sophisticated.

10 years ago, apps were a lot faster. Just becoming like a big maybe not just becoming, but becoming a bigger thing. You know what I mean? People were now almost everyone has internet on their cell phone. 10 years ago, you still were like paying extra to have internet on your cell phone.

You know what I mean? And you get the random smart TV showing up in analytics or, whatever. Just really, The data has changed because of the way that our sites are accessed has changed significantly as well.

Ashley Segura: Yeah, that makes sense. How we use internet, even how we search for things we’re searching now, even more long tail queries, like getting really specifics into the nitty gritty of trying to get answers and trying to get very specific kinds of information.

Whereas before I was like, we’re all learning how to use the web from both SEO perspective and the user perspective. Now we’ve got it down, and now we know exactly what we want out of it, and how, pretty much, how to use content, and how to digest content. But moving into, yeah, now analytics, in terms of, say I’m a, Brand new business or a new brand who’s like really getting ready to start pumping out a lot of content.

GA4 needs to be set up and the search console needs to be set up and the essentials of where you’re going to get data needs to be sent up. But what do you do after that? Like where do you start monitoring data and how do you even go about that?

Brianna Anderson: Yeah. If you have search console set up and you have Google analytics for setup, the good thing is those.

To things can talk to one another specifically, you can port your search console data into Google analytics for and so then really, you only have to go into Google analytics for if. If you wanted to just specifically for content monitoring because you’re really only going to get those, the, the three metrics, which are page query, okay.

For page query device and like country, I think you get those four dimensions and then you get the. For metrics of clicks, impressions, click through rate and average position. All of that though, will show up in Google analytics. So that you’ll have access to, if you’re looking at like the technical side of things and you’re not going to get all of that, but really if you’re just looking at the core data then all of that can be viewed in Google analytics for and then that’s when you start like understanding, okay, search.

Console gives us a really good high level understanding of how people are finding us and accessing our website. Great. That’s still very top of funnel that we’ve got to see. Is this making a difference or an impact? Obviously, that means different things for different people. And it’s really important.

I think it’s very important to sit down. And have a real understanding of what success looks like for each piece of content that you’re creating. I know that part gets skipped a lot because we just want to dive into creating, but the reality of it is it should always serve a purpose. Even if it’s just an informational, we want people to know X, Y, and Z.

Or, what have you, because if you have something where it’s like, we want people to know that for me, I want people to know that I offer Google analytics for and Google tag manager audits that page. It’s really not so much that I need people to read through the entire page. It’s more.

So I need them to go to that page or see that content and then go to contact me. If they’re not spending a lot of time on that page, but they’re still going to contact in. Submitting a contact form, then I know that page has done its job. So it’s very important that you have an understanding of what that content is supposed to do.

And then once you have. That idea. Making sure you’re tracking it.

Is, the next big part. So if, the good news is Google analytics for out of the box in most cases does track a lot of the things that most folks are going to want to track. So it tracks file downloads.

So if it’s like a downloadable it’ll track that most forms that can track submissions on form submission. I will say to be careful with that 1, make sure you’re registering the form. I. D. dimension and G. A. 4, because it captures every form in your search box is a form. Your newsletter sign up is a form.

Your contact is a form might even be other things on your site. That are forms. So it’s important to be able to like, delineate which forms are being submitted. But yeah, making sure you have all that set and then you can go in and look at, under the engagement pages and screens, you can see by page, how each page is performing.

Creating the content to get people to the site is 1 thing, and we can see that in search console, and we can see that in our search console reports in 4, but understanding how that content impacts the user journey is a completely other ballgame. That still needs to be. Understood because it just shows even more value for SEOs, for content marketers, for blogs, for publishers, all of that.

Ashley Segura: Yeah. Cause then at that point, you’re now looking at the user journey stage and why didn’t they say on this piece of content for a really long time, or why did they go to this page instead of the internal link that I put in there? So how do you start diving into that and how often are you looking at that data versus just that initial data set?

Brianna Anderson: Yeah. Honestly, okay, to be completely transparent, I’ve taken a step back from the SEO game. I used to be very heavy in SEO in the last couple of years. I haven’t been as heavy and I’m very lucky because a lot of my referrals are all. A lot of my customers just come from referrals.

So I’m lucky I don’t have to focus on it a ton, but like for clients, I’m honestly, I’m looking at GA4 more than I’m looking at Search Console because there’s a lot going on in the SERPs right now that makes it hard to track. And I still am trying to figure out, are people coming to my website?

Sorry. My son just woke up from nap. Um, so there’s a lot that happens on the surface that we still aren’t able to track fully. So it’s almost like tracking traditional media at this point, because you have a lot more impression based, um. Analytics that you have to consider as opposed to actually people coming to your website.

But when it comes to what, how, when I am evaluating content, I’m looking at how did people get to the site? So that’s, did they come through Google? Did they come through being, did they come through discover, all of those kinds of things. And then I’m looking at individual pieces of content to see, do we have.

Things that are rising, we’re seeing a ton of an increase in page views. Are we seeing, people spend a lot of time on a page if they’re not spending a lot of time on their page? Are they exiting from that page or are they going to a different page? Okay. And then, it’s, are they still completing whatever it is that we want them to complete?

But again, it’s tough because. But the goal does change for everyone, it could be e commerce. They want someone to buy something. It could be B2B where they need them to call or fill out a form or send an email, or it could be, I’m working more and more with folks that have blogs.

And it’s we need people to stay on the site because we’ve got to sell ad space, or we just need more people to the site because we have to sell out space. So yeah it’s all about understanding that and then diving in and seeing how Each page can or piece of content can impact that user journey.

Ashley Segura: What’s your take on time on page? Because I know it’s like, it can be very controversial in the SEO world and some SEOs are like, it’s the most important metric ever. And other SEOs are like, just ignore it. It’s always wrong. What have you seen with time on page and how Much of an importance do you put on that metric?

Brianna Anderson: I think it’s important to remember that all engagement metrics are averages in GA4, all of them. And so what an average means is if you have one person that spends an hour on the page because they keep getting distracted, they come back, they wiggle the mouse or their cat’s been sitting there and playing with the mouse.

And then you have another person that. Leaves after a second. The average is still 30 minutes. So they can be heavily skewed. So understanding that is, is crucial. And that’s why we get a lot of it’s not like a very trusted metric, which sure can be true. But if you have a lot of traffic, it’s going to be very hard to skew, 10, 000 page views.

So on, on that front, I feel okay about it. If, as long as you have a good chunk of data, if you have very little data, then maybe we need to look at other metrics. As far as Is it a good metric just in general, I have a saying that any metric looked in at, in isolation is a vanity metric because there’s just no telling yeah I would be hesitant to say that you don’t need to look at engagement time.

Because that’s not necessarily true. All the time, or it’s not true that you have to look at engagement time because maybe you don’t again, maybe it’s not so much that people need to spend time on the page. It’s more. What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to keep someone on that page specifically?

Because you. Have a really high CPM like you can sell it at a really good price. And you can rotate 3 or 4 ads after a while. You know what I mean? If that’s the case, then sure. That’s what we need to be looking at. But for most people, I would say it’s really not that big Concerning like it’s not that big of a deal if it’s really low.

And then you also have to understand other factors. So are we sending a ton of paid cold traffic to that page? If so, even if we have 10, 000 views on that page, there might be a thousand of them that are like warm users and then there are going to be 9, 000 that are paid cold users that could skew our data.

So you have to be aware of those things. Yeah. So it’s really, you really have to look at the bigger picture. I tried to very rarely look at any metric in isolation, but specifically those engagement metrics are just they’re tough cookies. Are there

Ashley Segura: any other metrics that you’re like, whenever you go into GA for, you just don’t even look at, or just, it doesn’t matter what the goal is, or if you’re like analyzing a piece of content or how many contacts more fills out, you’re just like, I’m ignoring this metric entirely.

Brianna Anderson: I’m not a I’m not huge on. Talked about it a lot already, but I’m which makes that an interesting point, but I don’t really look at page views or like traffic counts in general. Because. To me, like the, that for most of my clients, that’s not the goal. And even if it is the goal, if you have the most page views I’ve ever seen, if 95 percent of those people have bounced if 95 percent of those views are less than a second and they’re leaving the site and they’re not completing any of our, goals, then it’s just not worth it.

And. I’ve yet to find a client where the actual goal is just to send as many people to the site, no matter how, no matter what they do on the site, even if they just leave it automatically, that’s just not, nobody’s business can be sustained that way.

Ashley Segura: No, even, even from ad revenue, like counting impressions and you’re still accounting, where did they go after that?

And how long are they being on there? There’s plenty of metrics to still support that path and that user journey. That’s just a bounce off.

Brianna Anderson: And that’s an interesting thing to talk about just quickly is that in GA4, we actually don’t have bounce rate. I say bounce rate because that’s what people resonate with.

We have an engagement rate in GA4, which I thought was a very interesting take by Google to change that over to engagement. And what’s even more interesting to me is that they gave us an actual definition of what an engaged session is so used to like bounce rate was this very cryptic we all think that we have an idea of what bounce rate is, but nobody actually knows because they never defined it.

And it could honestly be something different every day because it’s self teaching. The algorithm is but NGA4, they gave us a definite definition of what an engaged session is. And it’s anything that’s 10 seconds or longer, 2 or more page views, or has a conversion event. So now you have, okay, what are the percentage of people that do this?

And now you have that engagement rate and so the bounce rate if you do add it to your reports in GA4 is literally just the opposite of that. I do still have folks that ask for it. Yeah. And they get it. But I try and be mindful of reminding people like Google gave us this definition, that, that definition doesn’t come from nowhere.

There’s no way they could have just been like, Oh. Sounds good, right? Yeah, this is what it’ll be.

Ashley Segura: Yeah. So you brought up reports. Let’s dive into reports a little bit. How often should you be going in and collecting data inside of GA4? And what kind of reports do you recommend setting up?

Brianna Anderson: Yeah, so there are a lot of good reports out of the box.

As long as you. Didn’t choose one of the objectives. If you just set up your GA4 account within the last year and a half or two years they gave you the option to select what your objectives are. And what happens when you select one of those objectives is you get access to a very limited amount of reports, which Stinks.

The original setup with the life cycle reports is what I’ve still found to be best, especially for folks that used universal analytics because it’s the most similar. And that gives you access to like the traffic acquisition report, right? Which is session based and the user acquisition report, which is user based.

For anyone, those 2 reports are going to be important. I tend to stick with traffic acquisition just because that’s what we were used to in universal analytics. So all of the user stuff is new in GA4. You, we got a count of new and returning users, and we could segment them new and returning in GA4, but are in universal analytics, but in GA4, we have a completely separate report for how new users are acquired.

And that’s what that user acquisition report is. I will say I don’t like the default channel groupings in GA4. So I try and. Caution people about those it’s really easy to get lose data because you are relying on this thing that Google has created, which was like a decent idea, but it didn’t take into consideration that a lot of folks are using UTMs these days because we have to.

And also that, not everyone categorizes things the same way. So like you have organic search and then you also have organic shopping. And if you have my the merch, merch center set up, that’s, it goes into a completely different, bucket where it’s like the technically that’s still like SEO stuff that we’ve done.

So I just get a little bit worrisome when people rely on those default channel groupings. So I always recommend changing that to either session source medium or first user source medium. And that just gives you an idea of how people are getting to the site, right? Yeah. And then I Then a lot of time looking at the pages and screens report, which we’ve talked about, which kind of all of the reports.

It’s really nice. They start the left hand side is always going to be like top of funnel and right hand sides always going to be like, bottom of funnel. So you start with, like, how many views did it have? How many sessions? Were there, how many users were there? Then it gets into your engagement metrics, which again, are those averages of pages per session or views per user or time on site and engagement rate, and then we get into the events.

Which is like annoying because they’re all grouped together. It gives you an event count, but under the word event count, it says all events. If you click on that, you can select specific events, which is really nice. So you can see how many people downloaded, right? So you could change it to file download and then it would automatically update.

And now you see all of the pages and how many downloads were on each of those pages. Same thing with like form fill or really. Literally any report or any event speaking of events, a few disclaimers to put out there just because people don’t know them. 1, every GA4 account is going to have a click event in it.

That does not mean they’re clicking on your stuff. It means that they’re clicking off the site. So if you have outbound links, so whether it’s the Facebook or, a Wikipedia or wherever, if they’re clicking off the site, that’s when that click event fires. In the scroll event fires at 90 percent scroll.

It means somebody scrolled to the bottom of the page. Those get misinterpreted a lot. So I’d like to caution people about those. Oh, my gosh. One second.

Ashley Segura: Oh, no, you’re good. Bless you, maybe, or just a cough.

Brianna Anderson: And then. Really, really, those are the 2 reports that I spend the most time in. Everything else that I use, I build and explore, but that’s like a whole other beast. And I will say, I, a lot of my SEO friends never go into the advertising section of GA4 because it’s I’m Poorly named that should have been called attribution.

That’s where all of the attribution data lives. So we had multi channel funnels and universal analytics and we have advertising in GA4 and under the advertising section is where you’re going to find those conversion or attribution paths is what they’re called. So you see how many touch points to conversion, how many days to conversion and what those touch points were.

So I really like to use that Really for anyone so that they can get an understanding of where their strategies fall within the user journey. So maybe we see that somebody comes through ads most of the time, like that’s their first touch, but then they come back through organic search later on or vice versa, right?

Maybe they come through organic search early on, then they see ads and then they convert. And that’s not to say Oh, ads are what’s making people convert a hundred percent of the time, because. Would they have ever gotten the ad if they didn’t come to our site in the first place, there it’s always that.

So it’s really good to understand how all of our strategies are working together.

Ashley Segura: So how those two main reports that you mentioned in the beginning, how often are you going in and pulling those reports and looking at that data? It depends on what you’ve got going on.

Brianna Anderson: If it’s something where you’re like putting out a bunch of content or you’re like actively trying to recover from an update or, something like that, then yeah we’re going in and we’re checking pretty frequently every other day or so, probably if not more how we all can get about our data and metrics.

So it’s easy to get sucked into that. But just in general if you’re like just in a stage of sustaining, then maybe, we’re going in once a week doing a big review at the end of the month and see what’s working, what’s not working. So it, marketers favorite answer.

It always is Depends on what’s going on.

Ashley Segura: Yeah, no, it really does. It depends on, like you said, how many pieces of content you’re producing right now. Depends on what your goals are for each campaign, which are, like, always very different. And if you’re not producing a ton of new changes on the site, Then, there’s only so much new data that you can get same with, if you’re not actively sending traffic to sites through ads and whatnot.

So there’s definitely a lot of variables there, but I like, you’re like into the month looking at the data. So then you can at least get a general idea before you’re into the next month. I feel like a lot of reports are pulled on the first to dictate what to do that month, and by then it’s already now you’re behind.

Brianna Anderson: Yeah you can’t pull monthly data on the first in GA4 anyways, because the data can take up to 72 hours to actually like populate. So what will happen if you try and get that data early is you’re going to see a bunch of not set data or unassigned data or whatever, because Google has to go in and aggregate everything and use their data driven cross channel attribution.

So it’s still working through all of that. So I really try and. Encourage clients to look on 4th or the 5th. But I think just keeping a pulse is important because. Even at the end of the day, even if you’re not like, let’s say you’re not actively, creating new content, whatever, you still need to be checking your analytics frequently because the only guarantee in digital marketing is that something is going to change.

So you might think that, Oh, our site is fine, but you’re using WordPress and some plugin broke. And now all of a sudden you have, No traffic or something’s not being tracked because the developer went in there and they went to change something and then they, got rid of the backslash.

And now there’s, there’s just so many things that could change. Or there was a big algorithm update. You were hit significantly. Now you just went from 100, 000 page views a month to 50, 000 and you’ve got to figure out. What you’re going to do that’s really it would really suck to come in and look at your reports and start up, at the very tippy top.

And then all of a sudden, you’re down at the bottom for the last 3 weeks because you haven’t looked at it in a month. Yeah. And it happens. Yeah, totally. So it’s the same thing with that’s just because your ads were working this week doesn’t mean that next week they’re going to be working. So you you always have to keep a pulse on everything just because it does change so much in, in, in big ways.

Even when you’re not thinking they are.

Ashley Segura: Yeah. There’s been so many changes since helpful content update, as far as like people just seeing traffic, just,

Brianna Anderson: yeah,

Ashley Segura: just being demolished and okay, now we have the August update. I’m seeing some good looking graphs and like some hopefully smaller websites and medium sized websites, but let’s, but we’re still early.

So there’s

Brianna Anderson: no telling that it’s not just testing and it can go back down. And that’s the thing, like it looks hopeful and I get very excited for people when I see that, everybody’s posting their graphs and I’m like, yeah, but please make sure you watch it because they’re known for testing, like everything gets tested.

And anytime. You create new content, it gets tested, it gets put up high, it gets put down low, it gets, it moves around. Yeah, you just make sure you keep a pulse on it. I hope for a lot of people that this is a good update.

But yeah, just gotta keep your thumb on it.

Ashley Segura: Yeah.

And definitely keep checking the analytics. So say you, you go in one day and you do experience that example that you shared the a hundred K to 50, 000, where do you go next inside of analytics to start figuring out why, what happened? Like maybe you didn’t know that an update just happened. Like, how do you find out that information?

Brianna Anderson: So I would do a comparison. So I would look at, okay, the last three weeks that we’ve done. Poorly versus the previous 3 weeks and then I would go into traffic acquisition and see where did we lose that? Where was it from? A specific channel. Because if it’s a specific channel as. While as it sounds, that’s going to be a lot easier fixed.

And if it’s like a like a similar decline across all of our platforms, because that would be a little more troublesome. That’s telling me, okay, something is happening somewhere more likely on the site. Then, externally, and then that’s going to require us to do a little bit more digging.

Yeah. And then also looking at pages. So you look at those traffic sources. Okay. A lot of it’s coming from if you see it’s from like Facebook ads, it’s great, let’s go talk to the ads manager. Why did our ads get turned off? Because that’s more than likely what happened. But if you see it from Google, then it’s okay, then you go to landing pages, right?

And it goes which pages were hit. We have two or three pages that. Saw a really big hit. Because a lot of sites, that’s what happens is you have three to 10 pages that bring in. 80 percent of your traffic. Yeah. So then it’s great, now we’ve got to go see what’s going on those SERPs because something has clearly happened.

Either they added a feature snippet, or we’ve got somebody that just posted new content or yeah, maybe there’s an update that we need to look into.

Ashley Segura: Yeah. And kind of address. I like that approach because that’s really telling a story with it too, to try and figure out what the heck is happening and what’s not happening.

As we wrap up, I’d love to know what your current secret sauce is when it comes to analytics. Is there a new book, a podcast episode, a resource that you’re loving right now, or even a strategy inside of analytics that you’re really hyped on right now?

Brianna Anderson: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I am back in deep learning mode when it comes to analytics, because even as someone who literally started using GA for the day that it came out, because I was teaching a class and I really.

Thought that I was going to be able to just go through the setup and all of a sudden everything was different. It was very weird. Even as someone who literally worked in GA for from day one, I’m realizing that a lot of things that I thought I understood or knew I didn’t or not that I didn’t understand them.

It’s just that there’s more to it. So I’m, honestly, I’m back in, in deep learning mode. And I think that And I’m willing to be there. And I think that’s something that a lot of folks, when it comes to GA for right now can, need to get to is being back, being comfortable, being back in deep learning mode, because it is different and it is hard, but it’s not going anywhere.

And the alternatives, while they might sound good now, just aren’t up to par and they’re not free. So, even if you’re not using it on a day to day basis, having Set up correctly is is a must. So I guess maybe that could be the secret sauce. Go into your admin section and open every single option because there are a ton of things hidden in the admin section under see more or see all options or whatever that a lot of people never see.

And then. They want to look back at their data and they only have two months worth of data versus 14 months of data. Or, they’ve been accidentally collecting personally identifiable information or, all that data. It happens all the time. So just go check it out.

Ashley Segura: Smart, but that’s a great secret sauce on top of keep learning because it’s like our heads are down.

We’re getting through our to do or we’re trying to get through our to do list the best we possibly can. And so often forget that, there’s also a ton of articles and news coming out all the time that we need to continue to learn and also just throw yourself into it, throw yourself into the tool.

That’s the best way to figure things out. And then when you get stuck, then go search. Hey, how do I do this?

Brianna Anderson: Yeah. And don’t ask chat GPT because it’s not trained in GA4 yet. Sorry.

Ashley Segura: No. That’s definitely not one of the things to ask it. Thank you so much for being on the show and everything that you shared today.

Really appreciate it. Of course. Thanks for having me. Okay. I am going to press stop recording.