Additional GA4 properties to consider

In our earlier articles, we took you through the steps to set up the essential GA4 properties, and the GA4 properties relating to Google Ads. The following article goes into further detail about GA4 properties, discussing different properties that were not mentioned in the previous article but might also be useful for your business.

Setting up eCommerce events

For any website with an online sales portal, we recommend that you add eCommerce events to your website or app in your Google Tag Manager. Setting up these events will populate the eCommerce purchases report.

There are several events that can be set up, which would be useful for any eCommerce store. These events can be found here. In addition to this list, there are a number of pre-built eCommerce events that GA4 provides. These pre-built events include:

• Promotions: promotions are when you advertise on one section of your website, directing users to another section. You can measure the performance of these promotions on GA4 by adding the view_promotion and select_promotion events,
• Refunds: using this event, you can measure both full and partial refunds.

These events aren’t set up by default, because they require additional context to be meaningful. Following the set up of these events, you will start to see this data in analytics once users engage in activity on the website or the app. It can take up to 24 hours to see these reports and explorations to pop up in your eCommerce data.

You also have the option to add parameters to these eCommerce events, to provide additional context to the way in which customers interact with your products or services.

Cross-domain tracking

By implementing cross-domain tracking, you can track the activity of a single user even as they cross domains. With this feature, analytics uses first-party cookies to set identifications for each unique user and session; without this measurement, new cookies and identifications will be created for each domain a user visits on the same device and will be recorded separately.

To set this up, navigate to the admin portal, and click data streams under the properties tab. Once here click web, and choose the web data stream. At this point it will prompt you to configure your tag settings and domains.

Setting up data streams

Unlike in Universal Analytics where you had a unique property for each source of data, in GA4 you now have a single property that contains several data streams. These are your sources of data (website, iOS, or android), and you can include all three of these in a single GA4 property.

To set these up, navigate to the admin portal and under the property tab select data streams. Click set up platform – at this point it will prompt each of the steps you need to take to step up your new stream. Once this is done, click create stream.

Exploration reports

Reports are a vital tool for data analysis and evaluation – you can read all about reports in GA4 in our two helpful articles:

• An all-you-need-to-know guide on GA4 report basics
• Which reports should you add to your GA4 collections?

New to GA4, explorations are an expansion of the reporting analytics that use advanced techniques to uncover more in-depth insights about consumer behaviour. Explorations gives you access to further data that is not available in the standard GA4 reports. This new element consists of three sections:

Canvas: this section has multiple tabs, which allows you to use several techniques in a single exploration, such as the following:

• Free-from exploration
• Cohort exploration
• Funnel exploration
• Segment exploration
• Segment overlap
• User exploration
• Path exploration
• User lifetime

Variables: the variables section gives you access to the dimensions, metrics and segments you can use in the exploration. When you create a new exploration, it comes with a default set of variables – you can however add more variables as appropriate for your business.

Tabs: you can use the options in the tab settings to configure the variables you have currently selected. Through a combination of selecting a technique (the way in which the data is analysed), and adding items from the variables panel you can configure technique-specific options.

The explorations element does have some limitations:

• You can only create up to 200 individual explorations per user per property OR 500 shared explorations per property
• You can apply up to 10 segments per exploration
• You can apply up to 10 filters per tab

Channel groupings

Channels refer to the rule-based definitions of the traffic sources to your website, allowing you to monitor the performance of all the channels driving traffic. There are both default channels and custom channels available.

The default channel groupings are as follows:

Default channel group: an event that defines the channels by which a user has arrived on your website

Session default channel group: when a user initiates a new session, this records the channel by which they arrive to your website

First user default channel group: this records the channels that the first users that arrive on your website have come from

GA4 also gives you the option to create custom channels; you can do this by copying an existing channel group and making modifications. Navigate to the admin portal, and in the property column select channel groups.

The GA4 properties best for your business

All GA4 properties provide invaluable insights to businesses and marketers; it is important to grasp an understanding of the platform’s capabilities in order to understand which properties are the best for your business. The GA4 properties mentioned above are able to provide a comprehensive understanding of human behaviour and engagement across your various channels, allowing you to optimise your digital strategies and enhance user experiences.

Regardless of whether you choose to add the above properties to your GA4, exploring the properties GA4 has to offer equips you with the tools for success in the world of digital marketing.