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NEW ANALYTICS TOOLS

🗞️ Hot off the press - A GA4 Report Builder 🗞️

Last week, Steve Lamar, a GA4 expert and trainer, released a free tool that streamlines the creation of GA4 reports, including those that were in Universal Analytics (eg breakdown by channel).

Simply add your GA4 property ID at the top, select the report from the left hand side, and then load and save it into GA4 in a relevant menu.

Here’s the top 5 GA4 reports I’d recommend importing for my ecom friends:

Channels (ecomm) - this is already in the default reports, but includes more useful metrics for ecommerce like session conversion rate and transactions.

Campaigns - a good overview to show you how individual campaigns are doing (and point out if you’ve structured your UTM parameters correctly 😜)

Channels section (all): All of this section is great to deep dive into individual channels, which GA4 doesn’t have reports for out of the box.

Sales by transaction ID - A great one to deep dive into individual transactions to troubleshoot any misaligned orders.

Coupon Codes - A report of all the coupon codes used in orders, and their popularity. Any there you’ve left on mistakenly? 😳

So how does it work?

It’s all in the URL! When you create any custom GA4 report in the interface, the URL updates to reflect this. So Steve has cleverly mapped out each of the variables of the URL and put it into a friendly interface.

Of course, the reports are only as valuable as the quality of the data that is fed in, so if something looks off when you’re reviewing, let me know.

You can try out the report builder here:

ICYMI:

How do I use the Shopify x GA4 order accuracy check template?

We touched on this last week, but I wanted to deep dive into the process of checking your GA4 order accuracy with this template, as it’s a fundamental element of trusting your data. These instructions are for Shopify, but it’s a similar process for any platform.

1️⃣ In GA4, create a new exploration with the following:
↳ Date Range: Last 30 days
↳ Dimensions: Date
↳ Metrics: Select Purchase revenue THEN Purchases
↳ Double click to populate into the table, and order date chronologically
↳ Show rows: 50

2️⃣ Then, in Shopify go to Reports > Create custom report > Sales over time
↳ Date Range: Last 30 days
↳ Columns: Gross Sales THEN Orders
↳ Save as Sales by day checks
↳ Export

3️⃣ Then paste them into the following template and check the % discrepancy: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15wE-4FcA0g1XmOR9zaTchpKsSen7uZr92dQBrFUcunY/template/preview

Seeing big discrepancies?

This gap is usually closed by installing a server-side tracking app, which sends all orders directly from Shopify to GA4, rather than through the browser. You can see the recommendations and next steps for this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8hEGxFyGWo&t=1307s

Other news

📩 Google made it easier for users to unsubscribe from emails by adding more prominent placements in Gmail. What does this mean for your email analytics? A slightly higher unsubscribe rate, and a lower spam rate. Read more

📊 GA4 Custom Channel Groupings are today available in Looker Studio. What does this mean? If you use Looker Studio for your reporting, and have custom channel groups to categorise your traffic better (recommended!), then this update is for you!