This article will take you through everything you need to know about Google Analytics 4. What it is, why you should use it and how to set it up on your Ticketsolve account.
Before You Start
What is it?
Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It is an essential tool for website owners, marketers, and businesses to understand the behaviour of their audience and measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
Why should you use it?
Customers should use Google Analytics to gain valuable insights into their website performance and customer behaviour.
The tool provides a wealth of data, including the number of visitors, where they came from, what pages they visited, and how long they stayed on the site. This information can be used to optimise your website and improve the user experience.
There are many benefits to using Google Analytics, including:
- Understanding your audience: With Google Analytics, you can see the demographics of your visitors, including their location, age, and gender.
- Measuring marketing efforts: Google Analytics helps you measure the success of your marketing campaigns and track the source of your website traffic.
- Improving website performance: The tool provides data on which pages are performing well and which are not, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to improve website performance.
- Maximising conversions: With Google Analytics, you can track conversion rates and identify areas for improvement to increase sales or lead generation.
The best bit!
Ticketsolve has done all the heavy lifting for you. We do all of our Google Analytics tracking from Google Tag Manager. You need to set that up first and then follow these simple steps below to set up your Google Analytics 4 property.
Google Analytics 4 Setup
As soon as GTM is set up and added to your website and Ticketsolve, you will now need to change some settings within Google Analytics so that you get the most out of the integration.
If you haven’t yet set up Google Tag Manager and imported the Google Analytics 4 tags then you should do that first. Here is an article that takes you through those steps and remember, you will need to add your GA4 tracking ID into the GA4 Configuration Tag within GTM.
If you need to set up GA4 from scratch, you can follow the step by step guide here. If you already have GA4 in place, you can follow the steps below to ensure that it is fully integrated with Ticketsolve.
Step 1 - Cross-domain tracking
In GA4, this is configured within the GA4 admin section:
- Click Data Streams in the right-hand column.
- Select the data stream for your website then click Configure tag settings.
- Click Configure your domains.
- Add your website and ticketsolve.com.
- Click Save.
Step 2 - Referral exclusions
In some cases, a person might temporarily leave your website and come back as part of the ticket-buying journey. You don't want to see things like payment gateways or waiting room solutions showing up as traffic sources, so GA4 needs to be told to ignore these.
In the Admin section:
- Click Data Streams in the right-hand column.
- Select the data stream for your website then click Configure tag settings.
- In the Settings panel, click Show more on the right-hand side.
- Scroll down and click List unwanted referrals.
- Depending on the services you use across your website, you may want to add some or all of the following domains:
- hpp.realexpayments.com (recommended)
- waiting room systems such as queue-it.net
- other payment providers such as paypal.com, stripe.com
Please note, if you have set up cross-domain tracking then you won’t need to add your website or ticketsolve.com to this list.
Step 3 - Data retention
You can choose how long GA4 retains your raw data before automatically deleting it. The default is 2 months, but we recommend increasing this to the maximum 14 months.
In the Admin section:
- Click on Data Settings in the right-hand column.
- Select Data Retention and choose 14 months from the dropdown.
- Click Save.
Please note, this doesn’t affect the main reports in GA4 as these don’t use the raw data directly - they use ‘aggregated data’ which will be kept for longer.
However, there are times (ie if using GA4’s Explore section) when you will be accessing the raw data, so it’s worth giving yourself a longer period to analyse when needed.
Step 4 - Custom dimensions (optional)
It’s possible to send additional data to Google Analytics in the form of ‘parameters’ attached to tags. The contents of these parameters can then be saved in GA4 as ‘custom dimensions’ so that they are available in your reports.
The GA4 tags included in the Ticketsolve Google Tag Manager container include a ‘parameter’ with the name of the GA4 tag that is sending that data. This can sometimes be useful for debugging.
To configure GA4 to receive this data, follow these steps.
In the Admin section:
- Click on Custom definitions in the right-hand column.
- Click the Create custom dimensions button and enter the following values:
- Dimension name: GTM Tag
- Scope: Event
- Description: The name of the tag in GTM that sent this data.
- Event parameter: gtm_tag (if it’s not available from the dropdown then just type it in)
- Click Save.
Step 5 - Data redaction (updated to include this step April 2024)
In the Admin section:
- Click on Data Streams.
- Click on the data stream to open up your settings.
- Scroll down until you find the Events section and click on Redact data.
- Turn on the URL query parameters.
- Add in the following query parameter: 'uid' (type in and then hit the enter key to add it).
- Click Save in the top right hand corner.
Improving the Google Analytics reports
The default reports in GA4 are rather lacking in detail. They’re intended to be customised so that you’re able to view the data you need.
Helpfully, our partners at One Further have produced a resource that is available for FREE to the Ticketsolve community.
The Google Analytics 4 Reporting Kit includes instructions and guidance on how to tailor the GA4 reports to your needs, with specific details on how to create:
- Marketing reports for each channel (email, social media, paid social, referrals, and more)
- Content reports for areas of your website (ie productions, news and articles)
- A ticket purchase pathway funnel
- A website overview dashboard
Getting the most out of Google Analytics
As well as the above resources, our success team is very knowledgeable and experienced in using Google Analytics and can provide support and guidance to help our customers maximise the value of the tool.
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