6 Things You NEED To Do After Installing Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Google’s Universal Analytics is now gone. Which means Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the only option we have for website tracking from Google. Therefore by now everyone should have GA4 installed and working correctly if they want to continue to track their website visitors.

However, merely installing GA4 does not guarantee that you will be tracking all of the necessary information by default or even that GA4 is set up correctly for your specific business needs. In fact to get the most use out of GA4 you have to optimize its implementation to fit the context of your business needs and website.

Below are six steps to take after installing GA4 to optimize your implementation and customize its reporting specific to your business needs.

1) Turn on Proper Data Streams

When you first install GA4 you set up an initial data stream which is most likely connected to your website. However you can receive data from other properties and devices that you maintain as part of your marketing experience. These can entail mobile apps or other web properties. Essentially you should connect all digital touch points to your GA4 account so you can get a complete picture of how your customers are engaging with not only your website but your entire brand in the digital space.

How To Turn on Proper Data Streams:

1. Click the Admin link in main navigation.
2. Click “Data Streams” under “Data collection and modification”.
3. Review existing Data Streams.
4. To add a new Data Stream, click the blue button labeled, “Add Stream”.
5. Input the app or web site’s details.
6. Add tracking codes to your app or web site.

2) Turn on Enhanced Measurements

Turning on Enhanced Measurements is important because it automatically tracks additional key user interactions without requiring custom tagging or manual setup. Enhanced Measurements include automatic event tracking for actions like:

• Scroll tracking: Monitors when users scroll down 90% of a page, giving insights into content engagement.
• Outbound clicks: Tracks when users click on links that lead to external websites.
• Site search tracking: Captures queries users enter in your website’s internal search bar.
• Video engagement: Tracks YouTube video views, plays, pauses, and completion data.
• File downloads: Monitors when users download files like PDFs or other content.

This provides deeper insights into user behavior and engagement with minimal setup, helping you optimize the user experience and better measure key conversion paths.

How To Turn on Enhanced Measurements:

1. Click the Admin link in main navigation.
2. Click “Data Streams” under “Data collection and modification”.
3. Click the data Stream that you want to enable Enhanced Measurements.
4. Under Events, find the section labeled Enhanced Measurements.
5. Click the toggle switch to the right to enable Enhanced Measurements.
6. Click the gear icon to view and enable all of the Enhanced Measurements available.
7. Click the Save button before exiting the Enhanced Measurements section.

3) Activate Google Signals

Turning on Google Signals is crucial because it enables advanced tracking features that provide deeper insights into user behavior, especially across devices and platforms. Here are the key reasons to enable Google Signals:

Cross-Device Tracking: Google Signals allows GA4 to track users across different devices (e.g., from desktop to mobile) by leveraging data from signed-in Google users. This helps build a more complete view of the customer journey and user interactions across multiple devices.

Demographic and Interest Data: By enabling Google Signals, GA4 can collect anonymized data about your users’ demographics (age, gender) and interests, allowing you to better understand your audience for targeted marketing efforts.

Remarketing Audiences: Google Signals allows you to create more refined remarketing audiences. This can improve ad targeting by identifying users who have interacted with your site across multiple sessions and devices.

Enhanced Reporting Features: With Google Signals activated, you can access additional reporting features such as cross-device reports, enabling a clearer picture of how users interact with your site at different stages and on different platforms.

Consent Mode and Privacy-Friendly Tracking: Google Signals respects user privacy and complies with regulations such as GDPR, enabling privacy-friendly tracking when users have given consent.

How To Activate Google Signals:

1. Click the Admin link in main navigation.
2. Click “Data collection” under “Data collection and modification”.
3. Find the “Google signals data collection section”.
4. Click the blue button labeled “Turn on”.
5. Select “Turn on” in the popup dialog.

4) Increase Data Retention Period

After installing Google Analytics 4 (GA4) on your website, increasing the Data Retention Period is important because it ensures that you have access to historical data for a longer time. Here’s why this is valuable:

Longer Historical Data for Analysis: By default, GA4 has a data retention period of 2 months, which may not be enough for long-term analysis. Increasing the retention period (up to 14 months) allows you to analyze trends and user behavior over a longer timeframe, which is essential for year-over-year comparisons, seasonal trends, or tracking long-term marketing campaigns.

Improved Audience Segmentation and Remarketing: A longer data retention period enables better segmentation of users based on their historical activity. This can improve your ability to target specific audiences with remarketing campaigns or personalized content over a longer period.

Better Insights into Long-Term Customer Journeys: Certain types of user journeys, especially for businesses with long sales cycles or customer retention strategies, may span several months. A longer retention period allows you to study and understand these extended journeys and interactions.

Increased Reporting Flexibility: If your analysis requires deeper historical data, such as custom reports or more sophisticated user pathing analysis, having a longer retention period gives you more flexibility to examine past data and generate insights.

Impact on Predictive Metrics: GA4 uses historical data to generate predictive metrics (e.g., purchase probability). By increasing the data retention period, these predictive models can be based on more comprehensive user behavior, potentially improving the accuracy of these metrics.

Increasing the data retention period in GA4 ensures that you retain more user data, allowing for deeper analysis, more accurate reporting, and improved decision-making based on longer-term trends.

How To Increase Data Retention Period:

5) Link Search Console and Other 3rd Party Apps

After installing Google Analytics 4 (GA4) on your website, linking Google Search Console and other third-party apps is beneficial because it provides comprehensive insights and a more holistic view of your website’s performance. Here’s why this is important:

Access to Search Query Data (via Search Console): By linking Google Search Console, you can integrate organic search data into GA4. This helps you:

• Understand SEO Performance: Gain insights into which search queries are driving traffic to your website, along with impressions, clicks, and average search position.
• Optimize Keyword Strategy: Analyze which keywords are generating the most traffic and adjust your SEO strategy accordingly.
• Track Organic Search Trends: View search traffic trends over time, helping you monitor the impact of your SEO efforts and identify opportunities for improvement.

Enhanced Reporting and Insights from Third-Party Apps: Linking other third-party apps, such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or e-commerce platforms, brings additional benefits:

• Multi-Channel Attribution: Understand how users interact with your brand across multiple marketing channels (e.g., paid search, social media, email campaigns). This allows for more accurate attribution of conversions to specific campaigns and channels.
• Improved Ad Campaign Performance Analysis: If you link platforms like Google Ads or social media accounts, you can view performance metrics (such as impressions, clicks, and conversions) directly in GA4, helping you analyze which campaigns are most effective.
• E-Commerce Data Integration: Linking e-commerce platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce allows you to track product performance, transactions, and revenue. You can analyze the customer journey from acquisition to conversion and optimize your online store accordingly.

In short, linking Search Console and other third-party apps to GA4 helps you gain deeper insights into your website’s performance, streamline multi-channel reporting, and make better decisions based on a complete picture of your users and their interactions with your brand.

How To Link Search Console To GA4:

6) Enable Site Search Tracking

Enabling Site Search Tracking in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is important because it provides valuable insights into how users interact with your website’s internal search feature. Here are the key reasons why you should enable this feature:

Understand User Intent: Site Search Tracking allows you to see what keywords or phrases users are searching for on your website. This insight reveals what content or products your visitors are looking for, helping you understand their intent and needs. By analyzing these search queries, you can:

• Identify common user questions or problems.
• Discover content gaps or areas where your website’s navigation could be improved.
• Uncover new keyword opportunities for your SEO strategy.

Improve Website Navigation: If users frequently use the search function, it may indicate that they are having trouble navigating your site through menus or links. By reviewing search queries, you can identify areas where your site’s navigation could be optimized to make content more accessible without needing the search feature.

Optimize Content and Products: The data from site searches can highlight high-demand content, products, or services that users are specifically looking for. If certain search terms are popular, you can:

• Create or optimize content around those topics to meet user demand.
• Promote frequently searched products or services more prominently on your site.
• Improve product descriptions or add missing information based on search behavior.

Enhance User Experience: Understanding what users search for and how often they use the search feature can help you improve the overall user experience. For example:

• If users search for specific terms that aren’t leading to expected results, you can tweak your search functionality.
• You can optimize your search results pages to ensure they display the most relevant content, making it easier for users to find what they need.

Monitor Conversion Opportunities: Users who perform searches on your website often have high intent, as they are actively seeking specific information or products. Tracking these searches can help you:

• Identify potential conversion opportunities by promoting relevant products, services, or calls to action based on common search queries.
• Understand whether certain search terms lead to high-value actions, such as purchases or form submissions, allowing you to optimize your site around those queries.

Track Internal Search Performance Over Time: By enabling Site Search Tracking, you can monitor trends in user behavior over time. This helps you:

• See how search patterns change based on seasonality, campaigns, or updates to your website.
• Measure the impact of improvements to your search functionality or content based on user search behavior.

Gain SEO and Content Ideas: The terms users search for internally often reflect what they are searching for externally (via Google or other search engines). Analyzing site search queries can help you discover new content ideas for blog posts, landing pages, or product descriptions, which could also improve your external SEO strategy.

Site Search Tracking in GA4 provides crucial insights into user behavior, helping you enhance navigation, content, and the overall user experience while also optimizing conversion opportunities based on user search intent.

How To Enable Site Search Tracking:

BONUS: Increase Session Duration

Increasing the Session Duration setting in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can provide a more accurate reflection of user behavior, especially for websites where users may spend extended time on a page without taking active actions (like clicking links or navigating). Here’s why you might want to increase session duration, along with an explanation of why it’s subjective to each site’s unique user base:

Longer User Engagement on Content-Heavy Sites

If your website features long-form content (e.g., blogs, articles, or videos) or users tend to spend a lot of time reading or consuming content without actively interacting (e.g., clicks, form submissions), you might need to increase session duration. By default, GA4 terminates a session after 30 minutes of inactivity. If users typically stay on your pages for longer periods without triggering any active events, increasing the session duration ensures that their full engagement is captured within a single session.

• Example: If users on a news site or educational platform spend 45 minutes reading an article but don’t click any links during that time, the session might be inaccurately considered “inactive” after 30 minutes. Extending the session duration provides a more accurate reflection of their engagement.

More Accurate Reporting for E-commerce and Complex User Journeys

For e-commerce or service-based websites, users might browse through multiple products or explore various services for an extended period before making a decision. In such cases, extending the session duration helps track longer, uninterrupted browsing sessions, which are common during detailed product research.

• Example: On an e-commerce site where users may spend an hour or more comparing products before making a purchase, extending the session duration avoids breaking their visit into multiple sessions, which could distort metrics like session count and average session duration.

Impact on Engagement Metrics

In GA4, sessions are a key component of several important metrics, including average session duration, session count, and engagement rate. If the default session duration is too short relative to your users’ behavior, it may lead to under-reporting of engagement and activity. Increasing the session duration for websites with longer user interactions ensures that engagement metrics better reflect real user behavior.

Avoiding Session Fragmentation for Inactive Users

If users are regularly inactive for more than 30 minutes (e.g., multitasking or leaving tabs open), their sessions could be fragmented into multiple shorter sessions. This fragmentation can skew your data, making it look like you have more sessions than actual user engagements and reducing the average session duration. By extending the session duration, you minimize session fragmentation, resulting in cleaner, more accurate data.

Subjective to User Behavior

The optimal session duration is subjective and depends on the nature of your site and its audience. For example:

• Content-heavy sites: A longer session duration is needed because users may spend more time reading, watching videos, or interacting with immersive content without clicking frequently.
• E-commerce or research-heavy sites: Users may browse or compare products for extended periods, so longer sessions more accurately reflect the time they spend evaluating options.
• Simple, action-based websites: If your website’s primary goal is quick conversions (e.g., lead forms or small transactions), a shorter session duration might be more appropriate, as users are likely to complete actions quickly.

Better Understanding of User Behavior

By increasing the session duration, you get a more accurate picture of how users interact with your website over longer time-frames. This helps you better understand the customer journey, whether it’s browsing, reading, or completing tasks across multiple pages.

Increasing session duration in GA4 should be considered based on how your specific user base engages with your content. For websites where users spend significant time consuming content or conducting research without interacting directly, increasing session duration helps capture their full activity and avoid breaking their sessions into shorter, inaccurate ones. However, for sites with quick user actions, the default duration may suffice. Tailoring session duration to your users’ behavior leads to more accurate reporting and deeper insights into engagement.

How To Increase Session Duration in GA4:

Optimizing your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) setup involves several key actions that enhance data accuracy, reporting insights, and overall website performance monitoring. Enabling Enhanced Measurements allows you to track critical user interactions automatically, while Google Signals provides cross-device tracking and demographic insights. Increasing the Data Retention Period ensures that you can analyze long-term trends and optimize campaigns. By linking Search Console and other third-party apps, you gain a holistic view of performance across channels, improving marketing attribution and decision-making. Enabling Site Search Tracking reveals valuable insights into user intent and content optimization, while increasing Session Duration ensures accurate reporting for sites with longer user engagement. Tailoring each of these settings to your site’s unique audience and behavior leads to deeper insights, better decision-making, and ultimately, a more successful digital strategy.

More Random Advertising