Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Mastering GA4: Key Metrics Every Content Creator Should Track
49 Plays7 months ago
In this episode, Ashley Segura chats with Brie Anderson, an expert in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Brie shares her insights on how to effectively use GA4 to track and analyze your content's performance.
Discover the essential reports within GA4 that every content marketer should be monitoring, from traffic acquisition to engagement metrics. Brie reveals the key metrics to track in GA4 and how to use them to measure the success of your content strategy.
Tune in to learn how to unlock the power of GA4 and achieve your content marketing goals.
Subscribe now for your bi-weekly dose of content strategy wisdom that's practical, actionable, and twice as likely to make you question everything you thought you knew about SEO and content marketing!
Website:
https://contentyum.com/
Socials:
https://www.instagram.com/contentyumm/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/contentyum
https://www.tiktok.com/@contentyum
https://www.facebook.com/contentyumm
https://www.youtube.com/@Content-Yum
Follow Brie Anderson :
Website: beastanalyticsco.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brieeanderson/
Follow Ashley Segura:
Website: www.contentyum.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-segura/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ashleymadhatter
Recommended
Transcript
Engagement Metrics and Outliers
00:00:00
Speaker
I think it's important to remember that all engagement metrics are averages in GA4, all of them. And so what an average means is if you have one person that spends an hour on the page, because they keep getting distracted, they come back, they wiggle the mouse or their cat's been sitting there and playing with the mouse, and then you have another person that, you know, leaves after a second, the average is still 30 minutes. So they can be heavily skewed.
Introduction to 'Content in the Kitchen'
00:00:35
Speaker
Welcome back to Content in the Kitchen, where we gather in the kitchen and chat about content marketing. Today, we're exploring the world of analytics with none other than Brie Anderson, the founder of Beast Analytics. Brie is an the analytics expert with a passion for strategy, and for the past decade, she's helped businesses of all sizes use data to drive actual results.
00:00:55
Speaker
From demystifying analytics to executing data-driven strategies, Bree's on a mission to make numbers ah way less scary and way more accessible. In this episode, we're going to explore just how to do that while decoding GA4 and figuring out how to really foster culture of testing and using data to guide your content decisions. So whether you're an analytics pro or just getting started, grab your favorite cup and let's dive into the conversation with Bree.
00:01:28
Speaker
So when you're not at your desk looking at analytics and you find yourself in the kitchen, what is your go-to dish to cook? If you find me in the kitchen, something bad has probably happened or we have no food. ah More than likely, if I'm in the kitchen, I am making a wonderful peanut butter and jelly sandwich because that's about as far as my cooking skills can take me. And no bananas are added? No. That's a lot of work.
00:01:56
Speaker
Nope. We've got Peter, put it on one side, Jolie on the other, and that's it. Keeping it simple, leaving all of the work for the analytics phase. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Decade of Data Evolution
00:02:06
Speaker
That makes sense. and You've been in analytics for over a decade now. So how have you seen the data from when you first started to now change in terms of what we have access to?
00:02:18
Speaker
Yeah, ah the the data that we have access to and the the data that we can and and how we can manipulate the data even I would say has gotten far more advanced, obviously, in the last 10 years. um I would say the the biggest change is the amount of data we have, because you have to think of how much the internet has expanded in the last 10 years. It's doubling in size constantly. and the amount of users and the amount of content that's available, it just makes for a lot of data. And the way that we're able to splice and dice that data has gotten more sophisticated because the way that users are using the internet is a lot more sophisticated. 10 years ago, apps were
00:03:02
Speaker
just becoming like a big maybe not just becoming but becoming a bigger thing, you know what I mean? and People were now almost everyone has internet on their cell phone. 10 years ago, you still were like paying extra to have internet on your cell phone, you know what I mean? And you get the random smart TV showing up in analytics or whatever, just really, the data has changed because of the way that our sites are accessed has changed significantly as well.
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. How we use internet, even how we search for things. We're searching now even more long tail queries like getting really specifics into the nitty gritty of trying to get answers and trying to get very specific kinds of information. Whereas before I was like, we're all learning how to use the web from both yeah SEO perspective and the user perspective. Now we've got it down and now we know exactly what we want out of it and how pretty much how to use content and how to digest content.
Setting Up GA4 and Search Console
00:03:59
Speaker
But moving into yeah out like analytics in terms of say I'm a brand new business or a new brand who's like really getting ready to start pumping out a lot of contents. GA4 needs to be set up and the search console needs to be set up and the essentials of where you're going to get data needs to be sent up. But what do you do after that? Like where do you start monitoring data and and how do you even go about that?
00:04:27
Speaker
Yeah, if you have Search Console set up and you have Google Analytics 4 set up, the good thing is those two things can talk to one another. Specifically, you can port your Search Console data into Google Analytics port. And so then really, you only have to go into Google Analytics 4 if you wanted to just specifically for content monitoring.
00:04:47
Speaker
Because you're really only going to get those, the the three metrics, which are page query, okay, for page query, device and like country, I think you get those four dimensions, and then you get the four metrics of clicks, impressions, click through rate and average position. You All of that, though, will show up in Google Analytics. So that you'll have access to. If you're looking at the technical side of things, then you're not going to get all that. But really, if you're just looking at the the core data, then all of that can be viewed in Google Analytics 4. And then that's when you start understanding, okay, Search Console gives us a really good high level understanding of how people are finding us.
00:05:30
Speaker
and accessing our website. Great. That's still very top of funnel though. We've got to see, is this making a difference or an impact? Obviously that means different things for different people and it's really important. I think it's very important to sit down and have a real understanding of what success looks like for each piece of content that you're creating. I know that part gets skipped a lot because we just want to dive into creating.
00:05:54
Speaker
But the reality of it is it should always serve a purpose. Even if it's just an informational, we want people to know X, Y, and Z, or what have you. Because if you have something where it's like, we want people to know that, like for me, I want people to know that I offer Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager audits.
00:06:14
Speaker
That page, it's really not so much that I need people to read through the entire page. It's more so I need them to go to that page or see that content and then go to contact me. If they're not spending a lot of time on that page, but they're still going to contact and submitting a contact form, then I know that page has done its job. So it's very important that you have an understanding of what that content is supposed
Tracking Downloads and Form Submissions
00:06:40
Speaker
to do. And then once you have That idea, making sure you're tracking it is the next big part. So if the good news is Google Analytics 4 out of the box, in most cases, does track a lot of the things that most folks are going to want to track. So it tracks file downloads. So if it's like a downloadable, ah it'll track that. Most forms that can track submissions on form submission, I will say to be careful with that one, make sure you're registering the form ID dimension in GA4 because
00:07:12
Speaker
It captures every form, and your search box is a form, your newsletter sign up is a form, your contact is a form. Yeah, but even be other things on your site that are forms. It's important to to be able to delineate which forms are being submitted. But yeah, making sure you have all that set. And then you can go in and look at under the engagement pages and screens, you can see by page,
00:07:36
Speaker
how each page is performing. Creating the content to get people to the site is one thing and we can see that in Search Console and we can see that in our Search Console reports in GA4, but understanding how that content impacts the user journey is a completely other ballgame that still needs to be understood because it just shows even more value for SEOs, for content marketers, for blogs, for publishers, all of that.
Understanding User Journey Impact
00:08:01
Speaker
Yeah, because then at that point you're now looking at the user journey stage. And why didn't they say on this piece of content for a really long time? Or why did they go to this page instead of the internal link that I put in there? So how do you start diving into that? And how often are you looking at that data versus just that initial data set?
00:08:20
Speaker
Yeah, honestly, okay, to be completely transparent, I've taken a step back from the SEO game. I used to be very heavy in SEO. In the last couple of years, I haven't been as heavy and I'm very lucky because oh a lot of my referrals or all a lot of my customers just come from referrals, so I'm lucky. I don't have to like focus on it a ton. But like for clients, i'm honestly, I'm looking at GA4 more than I'm looking at Search Console because There's a lot going on in the SERPs right now that makes it hard to track, right? And I still am trying to figure out, are people coming to my website?
00:08:56
Speaker
Sorry, my son just woke up from now. please oh There's a lot that happens on the surface that we still aren't able to track fully. It's almost like tracking traditional media at this point, because you have a lot more impression based analytics that you have to consider as opposed to actually people coming to your website. But when it comes to What how when I am evaluating content I'm looking at how did people get to the site so that's did they come through Google did they come through being did they come through discover all those kinds of things and then I'm looking at individual pieces of content to see ah do we have a
00:09:36
Speaker
things that are are rising. We're seeing a ton of an increase in page views. Are we seeing people spend a lot of time i'm on a page? If they're not spending a lot of time on their page, are they exiting from that page or are they going to a different page? out And then it's are they still completing whatever it is that we want them to complete? But again, it's tough because the the goal does change for everyone. It could be e-commerce. They want someone to buy something. It could be B2B where that they need them to call or fill out a form or send an email, or it could be I'm working more and more with folks that have blogs and it's like, we need people to stay on site because we've got to sell ad space. yep yeah Or but we just need more people to the site because we have to sell ad space. So yeah, it's all about understanding that and then diving in and seeing how each page can or piece of content can impact that user journey.
Time on Page and Context
00:10:28
Speaker
What's your take on on hey time on page? Because I know it's like it can be very controversial in the SEO world and some SEOs are like it's the most important metric ever and other SEOs are like just ignore it. It's always wrong. and What have you seen with time on page and and how much of an importance do you put on that metric?
00:10:49
Speaker
I think it's important to remember that all engagement metrics are averages in GA4, all of them. and so What an average means is if you have one person that spends an hour per on the page because they keep getting distracted, they come back, they wiggle the mouse or their cat's been sitting there and playing with the mouse, and then you have another person that you know leaves after a second, the average is still 30 minutes.
00:11:13
Speaker
so They can be heavily skewed. So understanding that is is crucial. And that's why we get a lot of, it's not like a very trusted metric, which sure can be true. But if you have a ah lot of traffic, it's going to be very hard to skew 10,000 page views.
00:11:32
Speaker
on On that front, I feel okay about it. if As long as you have a good chunk of data. If you have very little data, then maybe we need to look at other metrics. As far as is it a good metric just in general, I have a saying that any metric looked at in isolation is a vanity metric because there's just no telling. yeah I would be hesitant to say that you don't need to look at engagement time because That's not necessarily true all the time or it's not true that you have to look at engagement time because maybe you don't. Again, maybe it's not so much that people need to spend time on the page. It's more what are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to keep someone ah on that page specifically because you have a really high CPM, like you can sell ah it at ah a really good price?
00:12:23
Speaker
and you can rotate three or four ads after a while, you know what I mean? like If yeah that's the case, then sure, that's what we need to be looking at. But for most people, I would say it's really not that concerning. like it's It's not that big of a deal if it's really low. And then you also have to understand other factors. So are we yeah sending a ton of paid cold traffic to that page? If so, even if we have 10,000 views on that page, There might be a thousand of them that are like warm users. And then there are going to be 9,000 that are paid cold users that could skew our data. So you have to be aware of those things. So it's really, you really have to look at the bigger picture. I tried to very rarely look at any metric in isolation, but specifically those engagement metrics are just, they're tough cookies.
00:13:13
Speaker
Are there any other metrics that you're like, whatever you go into GA for, you just don't even look at, or just it doesn't matter what the goal is, or if you're like analyzing a piece of content or how many contacts more fills out, you're just like, I'm ignoring this metric entirely.
Beyond Page Views: Engagement and Conversions
00:13:25
Speaker
I'm not a I'm not huge on I've talked about it a lot already, but I'm which makes that an interesting point. But i I don't really look at page views or like traffic counts in general, because to me, like the that for most of my clients, that's not the goal. And even if it is the goal, if you have
00:13:47
Speaker
the most page views I've ever seen. If 95% of those people have bounced, if 95% of those views are less than a second and they're leaving the site and they're not completing any of our goals, then it's just not worth it. and I've yet to find a client where the actual goal is just to send as many people to the site no matter how no matter what they do on the site, even if they just leave it automatically. that's just not Nobody's business can be sustained that way. No, even even from ad revenue, you're still counting impressions and you're still counting where do they go after that and how long are they being on there. There's plenty of metrics to still support that path and that user journey yeah just about off.
Engagement Rate vs. Bounce Rate
00:14:32
Speaker
And that's an interesting thing to talk about just quickly is that in GA4, we actually don't have bounce rate. I say bounce rate because that's what people resonate with. We have an engagement rate in GA4, which I thought was a very interesting um take.
00:14:45
Speaker
by Google to change that over to engagement. um And what's even more interesting to me is that they gave us an actual definition of what an engaged session is. So U2 bounce rate was this very cryptic, we all think that we have an idea of what bounce rate is, but nobody actually knows because they never defined it. and It could honestly be something different every day because it's like self-teaching, the algorithm is. But in GA4, they gave us a definite definition of what an engaged session is. And it's anything that's 10 seconds or longer, two or more page views, or has a conversion event. So now you have, okay, what are the percentage of people that do this?
00:15:28
Speaker
And now now you have that engagement rate. And so the bounce rate, if you do add it to your reports in GA4, is literally just the opposite of that. I do still have folks that ask for it. Yeah. And they get it, but I try and be mindful of reminding people like Google gave us this definition, that that definition doesn't come from nowhere. There's no way they could have just been like, oh, it sounds good, right? Yeah, this is what it'll be. Yeah.
00:15:56
Speaker
but So you brought up reports. Let's dive into our reports a little bit. How often should you be going in and collecting data inside of GA4 and what kind of reports do you recommend setting up?
Using Lifecycle Reports in GA4
00:16:09
Speaker
Yeah, so there are a lot of good reports out of the box. As long as you didn't choose one of the objectives, if you just set up your GA4 account within the last like year and a half or two years, they gave you the option to select what your objectives are. And what happens when you select one of those objectives is you get access to a very limited amount of reports.
00:16:32
Speaker
which stinks. The original setup with the lifecycle reports is what I've still found to be best, especially for folks that used universal analytics, because it's the most similar, and that gives you access to like the traffic acquisition report, right which is session-based, yep and the user acquisition report, which is user-based. Anyone, those two reports are going to be important.
00:16:56
Speaker
um I tend to stick with traffic acquisition just because that's what we were used to in Universal Analytics. so All of the user stuff is new in GA4. We got a count of new and returning users and we could segment them new and returning in GA4 or in Universal Analytics. But in GA4, we have a completely separate report for how new users are acquired and that's what that user acquisition report is.
00:17:22
Speaker
I will say I don't like the default channel groupings in GA4 so I try and caution people about those. yeah It's really easy to get lose data because you are relying on this thing that Google has created, which was like a decent idea, but it didn't take into consideration that a lot of folks are using UTMs these days because we have to. And also that not everyone categorizes things the same way. So like you have organic search and and then you also have organic shopping. And if you have ma the merch center,
00:17:57
Speaker
merch center set up that's it goes into completely different bucket where it's like the technically that's still like ah SEO stuff that we've done.
00:18:08
Speaker
so I just get a little bit worrisome when people rely on those default channel groupings. So I always recommend changing that to do either session source medium or first user source media medium. And that just gives me an idea of how people are getting to the site, right?
Pages and Screens Report in GA4
00:18:25
Speaker
yeah And then I spend a lot of time looking at the pages and screens report, which we've talked about, which kind of all of the reports It's really nice. They start the left hand side is always going to be like top of funnel and right hand side is always going to be like bottom of funnel. So you start with like, how many views did it have? How many sessions were there? How many users were there? Then it gets into your engagement metrics, which again, are those averages of pages per session or views per user or time on site.
00:18:55
Speaker
an engagement rate. And then we get into the events, which is like annoying because they're all grouped together. It gives you an event count, but under the word event count, it says all events. If you click on that, you can select specific events, which is really nice. So you can see how many people download it. You could change it to file download, and then it would automatically update. And now you see all of the pages and how many downloads were on each of those pages. um Same thing with like form fill or really literally any report or any event. Speaking of events, a few disclaimers to put out there just because people don't know them. One, every GA4 account is going to have a click event in it. That does not mean they're clicking on your stuff. It means that they're clicking off the site. So if you have outbound links, so whether it's the Facebook or
00:19:45
Speaker
But Wikipedia, wherever, if they're clicking off the site, that's when that click event fires. And the scroll event fires at 90% scroll. It means somebody scrolled to the bottom of the page.
00:19:57
Speaker
Those get ah misinterpreted a lot. So I like to caution people about those. really Really, those are the two reports that I spend the most time in.
Advertising and Attribution Data
00:20:05
Speaker
Everything else that I use, I build and explore, but that's like a whole other beast. And I will say, i a lot of my SEO friends never go into the advertising section of GA4 because it's poorly named.
00:20:19
Speaker
that should have been called attribution. That's where all of the attribution data lives. So we had multi-channel funnels in Universal Analytics and we have advertising in GA4 and under the advertising section is where you're going to find those conversion or attribution paths is what they're called. and So you see how many touch points to conversion, how many days to conversion and what those touch points were. So I really like to use that ah really for anyone so that they can get an understanding of where their strategies fall within the user journey. So maybe we see that somebody comes through ads most of the time, like that's their first touch, but then they come back through organic search later on or vice versa, right? Maybe they come through organic search early on, and then they see ads and then they convert. And that's not to say, oh, ads are what's making people convert 100% of the time because
00:21:13
Speaker
Would they have ever gotten the ad if they didn't come to our site in the first place? yeah It's always that. So it's really good to understand how all of our strategies are working together. So how ah those two main reports that but you mentioned in the beginning, how often are you going in and pulling those reports and looking at that data?
Frequency of Checking GA4 Data
00:21:29
Speaker
It it depends on what you've got going on. If it's something where you're like putting out a bunch of content or you're like actively trying to recover from an update or something like that, then yeah, we're going in and we're checking pretty frequently every other day or so, probably, if not more.
00:21:46
Speaker
how we all can get about our data and yeah metrics. So it's easy to get sucked into that. But just in general, if you're like just in a stage of like sustaining, then maybe we're going in once a week, doing a big review at the end of the month, kind of see what's working, what's not working.
00:22:04
Speaker
So marketers' favorite answer, it always is just depends on what's going on. Yeah, no, it really does. It depends on, like you said, how many pieces of content you're producing right now. It depends on what your goals are for each campaign, which are like always very different. And if you're not producing a ton of new changes on the site,
00:22:25
Speaker
Then there's only so much new data that you can get same with if you're not actively sending traffic to sites through ads and whatnot. So there's definitely a lot of variables there. But I like your like in the month looking at the data. So then you can at least get a general idea before you're into the next month. Like a lot of reports are pulled on the first to dictate what to do that month. And by then it's already now you're behind.
00:22:49
Speaker
Yeah, you can't pull monthly data on the first in GA4 anyways, because the data can take up to 72 hours to actually like populate. So what will happen if you try and get that data early is you're going to see a bunch of not set data or unassigned data or whatever.
00:23:05
Speaker
because Google has to go in and aggregate at everything and use their data driven cross channel attribution. So it's still working through all of that. So I really try and encourage clients to look on the fourth or the fifth. ah But I think just keeping a pulse is important because even at the end of the day, even if you're not like, let's say you're not actively creating new content, whatever, you still need to be checking your analytics frequently because The only guarantee in digital marketing is that something is going to change. So you might think that, oh oh, our site is fine, but you're using WordPress and some plugin broke and now all of a sudden you have no traffic or something's not being tracked because the developer went in there and they went to change something and then they
00:23:54
Speaker
got rid of the backslash and now there's there's just so many things that could change or there was a big algorithm update, you were hit significantly. Now you just went from 100,000 page views a month to 50,000 and you've got to figure out what you're going to do.
Regular Analytics Checks Importance
00:24:09
Speaker
that's really That would really suck to come in and look at your reports and start up at the very tippy top and then all of a sudden you're down at the bottom for the last three weeks because you haven't looked at it in a month. yeah And it happens. So it's the same thing with ads. Just because your ads were working this week doesn't mean that next week they're going to be working. So you you always have to keep a pulse on everything just because it does change so much and and in big ways, even when you're not thinking they are.
00:24:39
Speaker
Yeah, there's been so many changes since Helpful the Content Update as far as like people just seeing traffic just yeah just being demolished. And okay, now we have the August update. I'm seeing some good-looking graphs and like some hope for these smaller websites and medium-sized websites. But let's go we're still early, so there's no telling that it's not just testing and it can go back down and that's the thing. like It looks hopeful and I get very excited for people when I see that everybody's posting their graphs and I'm like, yeah, but please make sure you watch it because they're known for testing. Everything gets tested and anytime you create new content, it gets tested, it it gets put up high, it gets put down low, like it it moves around. so Yeah, you just make sure you keep a pulse on it. I hope for a lot of people that this is a yeah good update, but
00:25:31
Speaker
Yeah, just got to keep your thumb on it. Yeah, and definitely keep checking the analytics.
Addressing Traffic Drops
00:25:37
Speaker
So say you you go in one day and you do experience that example that you shared the 100k to 50,000. Where do you go next inside of analytics to start figuring out why? What happened? Like maybe you didn't know that an update just happened. Like how do you find out that information? So I would do a ah comparison. So I would look at, okay, the last three weeks that we've done poorly versus the previous three weeks. And then I would go into traffic acquisition and see where did we lose that? Where was it from a specific channel? Because if it's a specific channel as well as it sounds, that's going to be a lot easier fixed than if it's like a like a similar decline across all of our platforms. because That would be a little more troublesome. That's telling me, okay, something is happening somewhere more likely on the site than externally.
00:26:27
Speaker
And then that's going to require us to do a little bit more digging and then also looking at pages. So you look at those traffic sources. Okay. ah A lot of it's coming from, if you see it's from like Facebook ads, it's great. Let's go talk to the ads manager. Why didn't our ads get turned off? Because that's more than likely what happened.
00:26:45
Speaker
But if you see it from Google, then it's okay. Then you go to landing pages, right? And then it goes, which pages were hit? We have two or three pages that saw a really big hit because a lot of sites that's what happens is you have like three to 10 pages that bring in 80% of your traffic. yeah um So then it's great. Now we've got to go see what's going on those SERPs because something has clearly happened. Either they added a feature snippet or we've got somebody that just posted new content.
00:27:12
Speaker
Or yeah, maybe there's an update that we need to look into. Yeah. And kind of address. I like that approach because it's really telling a story with it too, to yeah try and figure out what the heck is happening and and what's not happening.
Mastering Analytics: Continuous Learning
00:27:25
Speaker
Um, as we wrap up, I'd love to know what your current secret sauce is when it comes to analytics. Is there a new book, a podcast episode, a resource that you're loving right now, or even a strategy inside of analytics that you're really hyped on right now?
00:27:41
Speaker
That's a good question. I don't know. I am it back in deep learning mode um when it comes to analytics, because even as someone who literally started using GA4 the day that it came out, because I was teaching a class and I really thought that I was going to be able to just go through the setup and all of a sudden everything was different. It was very weird. Even as someone who literally worked in GA4 from day one, I'm realizing that a lot of the things that I thought I understood or knew, I didn't.
00:28:09
Speaker
or Or not that I didn't understand them. It's just that there's more to it. So yeah I'm honestly I'm back in in deep learning mode and I think that and I'm willing to be there and I think that's something that a lot of folks when it comes to GA for right now can you know need to to get to is being back being comfortable being back in deep learning mode because um it is different and it is hard but it's not going anywhere and the alternatives while they might sound good now just aren't up to par and they're not free even if you're not using it on a day to day basis having it
00:28:47
Speaker
set up correctly news is a must. So I guess maybe that could be the secret sauce. Go into your admin section and open every single option because there are a ton of things hidden in the admin section under see more or see all options or whatever that a lot of people never see and then They want to look back at their data and they only have two months worth of the data versus 14 months of data or they've been accidentally collecting personally identifiable information or you let data. It happens all the time. Just go check it out. Smart, but that's a great secret sauce on top of keep learning because it's like
00:29:27
Speaker
Our heads are down. We're getting through our to-do or we're trying to get through our to-do list the best we possibly can and so often forget that. There's also a ton of articles and news coming out all the time that we need to continue to learn and also just throw yourself into it. Throw yourself in. So the tool, that's the best way to figure things out and then when you get stuck, then go search. Hey, how do I do this?
00:29:48
Speaker
Yeah. And don't ask to chat GPT because it's that train in GA4 yet. Sorry. No, that's definitely not one of the things to ask it. Thank you so much for being on the show and everything that you shared today. Really appreciate it. Of course. Thanks for having me.