to optimize your digital strategy using GA4

Marketers who want to optimize their campaigns digitally must know how to use Google Analytics 4(GA4). You need to first get some basics down.

Six classic questions are asked by journalists when gathering information.

• Who?
• What?
• When?
• Where?
• Why?
• How?

You can use this framework to determine how best to use GA4 in your organization.

You must be able answer six out of seven of the questions below to make the most of your analytics platform.

• What are the target audiences of our company or our client?
• What kind of events should we put on our website to promote?
• When should micro conversions be measured?
• Where should we customize our reports?
• Why is the integration of Google Ads into GA4 the first stage?
• How can B2B marketers make use of GA4?
• How can B2C marketers make use of GA4?

This article outlines a framework to maximize GA4 and improve your digital strategy.

What are the target audiences of our company or client?

Audiences can mean different things even within the same organization.

Remarketing is a way that the advertising team can refer to audience members.

The SEO, social media, content, or digital PR team might refer to audiences as a segment of their users who share similar demographics, have similar behavior, or are otherwise important to the brand.

These teams rarely segment their audience by demographics, behavior or conversions, since they report traffic acquisition by channel.

GA4 suggests several audiences that you can segment. This includes users that:

• Conduct item searches
• Watched a video.
• You have finished watching the video.
• You have not completed a tutorial.
• You have completed a tutorial.
• Please provide an email address.
• Leads are potential leads for business.

The GA4 allows those in Editor and Marketer role to create audience triggers for when users achieve key milestones such as initiating X sessions or reading Y articles or crossing Z thresholds.

These features allow you to:

• Find out what audiences are looking for and how they engage with it.
• Discover how customers are unexpectedly moving through their customer journey.
• Learn how to optimize your digital marketing strategy.

Why should advertising take all the credit when it comes to remarketing audiences who aren’t “paid”?

What kind of events should we put on our website to promote?

When you configure GA4, most events that show your contribution to the bottom-line are automatically collected. They are not reported, and they cannot be used for audience creation until enhanced measurement is enabled.

SEOs can enable seven events to be automatically collected for improved measurement.

• File_download : When an user clicks on a link that leads to a presentation, audio or document.
• Form_start : The first time a user interacts a form during a session.
• Submit_Form: The user submits the form.
• Scroll : A user has reached the bottom 90% on a page for the very first time.
• Video_start : When the video begins playing.
• Video_progress : The video will progress beyond 10%, 25% 50% and 75% duration.
• Video_complete : After the video has ended.

After you’ve determined the events that are worth measuring, navigate to Admin and click Data streams > Website. Slide the switch on under enhanced measurement in order to activate your choices.

Consider adding the following events:

• Generate_lead : An user submits a request form for information.
• Login: A user logs in.
• Purchase A user makes a purchase.
• Search: A user searches for your content.
• Share: A user shares your content.
• Tutorial_Begin A user starts a tutorial.
• Tutorial_complete A user has completed a tutorial.

It is possible to create custom events. I won’t even attempt to guess.

GA4 is based on event-based rather than session-based information. Now you have to track specific user interactions once they arrive on your website and what default channel they used.

When should micro conversions be measured?

Micro conversions are important for completing macro conversions.

Executives seem to be more interested in macro-conversions. Micro conversions were not worth the effort until GA4 was introduced.

Most of the time, it is as simple as clicking Events and then selecting the toggle under Label as a conversion.

You might, for example, want to measure micro-conversions of the following:

• Scroll down to 90% or more of an article or blog post.
• Play at least half of the video.
• Complete a tutorial.
• Download the white paper.
• Fill out the registration form.
• Register for a Service
• Add items to your shopping cart.

You can make executives more aware of the importance of micro-conversions by associating monetary values to them.

Say 10% of people who sign up to a newsletter become customers and the average transaction is $500. You might then associate $50 (10% of $500) with a sign-up for a newsletter.

Add a value to a completed registration form

• Click Admin -> Events on the left.
• To see the list of custom events, click Create an event.
• Click on the event you wish to change.
• Click Add modification in the Parameter Configuration section.
• Enter currency in the Parameter box.
• Enter a currency in the Value field (e.g. USD).
• Click Add Modification.
• Enter the value in the Parameter box.
• Enter a value in the Newvalue field (e.g. 50 for $50).
• Click to Save.

Where should we customize our reports?

GA4 provides different report collections depending on the information entered during setup.

The Life Cycle collection is the first set of default reports that you may see. It helps you understand the different stages in the customer journey, from acquisition to engagement, monetization to loyalty.

If you selected the Collection of Business Objectives during setup, it will be replaced by that collection if you chose “Raise brand recognition,” “Examine users behavior,” “Generate Leads.” or “Drive Online Sales.”

You can also create a user collection to help you better understand your users, their demographics, and technology (e.g. browser version, mobile app version).

You can also:

• Change the primary dimension of a report.
• Add a second dimension to your report.
• Use a filter to display a subset your report data.
• You can change the date range of a report.

Explorers is a collection of tools for audience comparison and discovery that will help you gain deeper insights into your customers’ behaviors. This includes:

• Funnel Exploration: Identify where customers abandon the customer journeys you have laid out in your website and how they are doing at each stage.
• Path Exploration: View the paths that your users follow as they interact with your website.
• Segment Overlap: Check if there are overlaps between different segments of users. This technique can be used to find new user segments that satisfy complex criteria.
• User Exploration: Analyze users who make up segments that you create. You can also drill into the individual activities of users.
• Cohort Exploration: Gain insights into the behavior and performance in groups of users who share common attributes.
• User life: Analyze the behavior of users and their value throughout their entire customer lifetime.

Why is the integration of Google Ads into GA4 the first stage?

GA4 offers direct integrations to a wide range of platforms.

Google Ads Integration is one. You can see the entire customer journey, from clicks on ads to micro and macro conversions. This step also allows remarketing to be done in Google Ads by using lists created from the audiences that marketers and SEOs create in GA4.

Google Ads Integration is only the first step.

Search Console and GA4 are required by SEOs to analyze the organic traffic on their site.

This integration allows you to see:

• Your site’s position in the search results.
• What queries are clicked?
• The clicks are translated into the user’s behavior. For example, which landing pages attract more users and how they convert.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is often required by B2B marketers to be integrated with GA4. This integration allows you to track and analyze the customer journey through your GA4 property.

These sound like plumbing jobs. How can you use the data generated by these GA4 integrations to improve your digital marketing strategy and optimize it?

Avinash Kaushik has some advice for you:

“I have learned that the desire to achieve more comes with a heavy price – it drives suboptimal behavior. Instead, I suggest this as your #1 goal: Suck Less, Every Day. “Whatever you do today, deliberately suck less.”

– “Stop Exceeding Expectations, Suck Less First”

Though I was shocked when I read this article five years back, I realize now that it is the perfect way to optimize your digital strategy using GA4 today.

How can B2B marketers make use of GA4?

B2B CMOs might not want to share with the rest of their C-suite how they are implementing a digital marketing strategy to “suckless every day.” Instead, they could rebrand the approach as “flywheel” marketing or “digital transform” strategy.

This approach, whatever it is called, will allow marketing teams to use the insights Analytics Intelligence, which will be displayed soon on the GA4 home page, to nurture audiences and subscribers, as well as leads.

Analytics Intelligence is a machine-learning system that uses conditions and conditions you can configure.

Analytics Intelligence is based on a statistical method called anomaly detection. Two weeks of training is required to detect hourly anomalies.

For daily anomalies it takes 90 days. For weekly anomalies the training period is also 32 weeks.

Here is where B2B marketers should focus: Analytics Intelligence uses “contribution analyses” to identify user segments (also known as audiences) that are contributing to anomalies.

It then calculates “anomalous metrics values” for each segment of users. It then surfaces segments of users on “anomaly insights cards.”

The non-profit 412 Food Rescue in Pittsburgh needs more volunteers to help deliver food from retailers and to people who are food insecure.

You can learn more about this by watching the video ” Google Analytics Case Study: 412 Food Rescue.” Automated insights revealed that weekend engagement and volunteerism was a bit lower.

They adjusted their social media campaigns to drive traffic to their site.

The company also reduced their reporting time to 50%. This allowed them to expand their staff into new cities.

How can B2C marketers make use of GA4?

How can the top 100 B2C advertisers in the country use GA4 to optimize digital marketing strategies?

GA4 now offers a way to measure video advertising campaigns online. Engaged-view conversions are a new method that measures the effectiveness of your campaign. This is done by measuring how many people watched your YouTube advertisement for at least 10 second and converted within three days.

This new KPI is based on consumer behavior. The people who come to YouTube are very intent on watching the content. They tend to remain on the platform, even if they see an advertisement during their viewing session.

Many people do not take action immediately after watching a YouTube video advertisement. They often do not act immediately after watching a YouTube video ad.

EVCs are also responsible for 70% of YouTube users buying a product after discovering it on YouTube.

EVCs are available since September 2019. Three announcements made at Brandcast, YouTube’s 12th annual advertiser show, part of Upfronts 2023 gave the top 100 US advertisers even more reasons to use this geeky KPI.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan:

“We are witnessing a massive shift in how people consume content. YouTube is increasingly being viewed on the largest screen at home. According to Nielsen, YouTube has the most streaming time on television screens in the U.S.”

According to Nielsen data, YouTube was viewed by over 150 million Americans on TVs connected via the internet. This is a larger audience than what advertisers can reach at the Super Bowl.

Mary Ellen Coe, YouTube’s Chief Business Officer, said:

“Nobody does sports better than YouTube.” You can access all the content you love, live and on demand, from leagues like the NFL, NBA and others. “We’re the top sports destination for Gen Z.”

According to Archrival, Gen Z (18-24 year old) YouTube users rank YouTube as their #1 platform to interact with the things that they are passionate about.

Roger Goodell, NFL commissioner, said:

The fact is that millions of football enthusiasts are on YouTube for all things NFL. In the past year, NFL video on YouTube has seen a 27% jump in views year-over year.

This gives you a new reason to optimize your digital strategy with GA4 before September 10, 2023 when YouTube becomes the new home for NFL Sunday Ticket.

You don’t want the tough questions to be asked about your inaction after the “big game” when other advertisers were reaching football fans through YouTube’s full array of NFL content.

The first post Search Engine Land : How to Optimize your Digital Marketing Strategy appeared on Search Engine Land .