Updates for the week ending 7/23/2021
I added an optional process, this week, to help us with our continued struggle with GA4.
As I’ve said before, at this point I don’t recommend you use GA4 on your website yet. Although Google has been pushing hard on it (even tricking you into using it on new accounts), it’s not ready for public use yet. For one, reports are totally different (I have yet to wrap my brain around them but suspect they are similar to Google Data Studios reporting). Another essential issue: GA4 cannot track ecommerce sales yet. This is a terrible oversight.
However, good news: I’ve written-out a process to allow you to track your form submissions as goals in GA4. This is helpful in a couple of ways:
- It’s essential in any marketing campaign- let alone SEO- to know how your efforts are helping your business. Tracking goals (especially lead forms) is how you start. I elaborate on this more in the conversion tracking process for Universal Analytics. I beat the dead horse in a recent article about why tracking rank is stupid.
- Even if GA4 is not ready yet, you can still start to collect data. In fact, I’d still run Universal Analytics alongside GA4 even while only using Universal Analytics to measure and adjust your marketing campaign.
When looking into how to setup a conversion in GA4, I found a lot of the processes out-there to be confusing and complicated. It doesn’t have to be- especially if you’ve done the right thing and setup a confirmation page to your lead forms.