Heads In Beds Show - One Year Later: What's Up With Google Analytics 4 For Your Vacation Rental Business?

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about the 1 year later (or so) mark of Google Analytics 4 and what they like, love and hate about using Google Analytics 4 day-to-day with guest and homeowner marketing.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101Google Analytics 4 One Year Later🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads in Bed Show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Good afternoon, Paul. How's it going today? Well, it is a wonderful afternoon here. Good afternoon, Paul. How's it going today? It is a wonderful afternoon here. It's for people. People don't know exactly the inner

workings behind the scenes of the Heads and Tails show, but it's been a little while since we've actually done this. I'm a little concerned. I'm going to be rusty. I'm not going to lie to you. I got not the jitters, not the yips, but something's going to happen. I can feel it. But how are you doing, sir? I'm doing pretty good. The weather is absolutely horrible here. So in the off chance that we have any I'm like pre I'm like, I'm not speaking into existence. I'm just saying that this could happen if the power goes out or lose Internet or something. It's probably because there is lightning and everything.

But I see a speck of blue over there. So maybe that'll maybe that'll push its way this way. Yeah, not a great day for the weather here as we record. As you said, it's been a little while since we recorded. We've had things going on. We've done some new outlines. We've got some new ideas for the show. We get to know new ideas for where we're going with things,

which is maybe TBD will discuss those ideas later. But we came up with this idea the other day. We thought this would be a fun one. As of the time that we're recording this, at the middle of July, this might come out more towards the end of July, beginning of August. But anyways, it's been a year, we've had some time to reflect,

since the official sun setting of Google Analytics Universal. So the old Universal UA analytics profile has been about a year since it died off. So you and I have had a year at this point we were forced to use GA4. I've used it quite a bit, obviously on the guest marketing side, used it quite a bit,

mostly on the homeowner marketing side. We measure slightly different things, which I think would be good to get some different perspectives. So we made a bit of a list of what are some good things, maybe that GA4 has done well or things that we like. Okay, this is interesting. I've done this. I've got some value out of it, et cetera. What's some bad things that maybe we're not in love with

or like, darn it, where did that report go? Those kind of things. And then we have the ugly, not that we have a lot of stuff there, but we have a few things that are just ugly. What's been going on? So we'll try to pick from this list and kind of go through this and get things all sorted out. Do you want to go first? Do you want to start us off positively? What's some good things? What's one thing you like

about GA4? You know, I think this was this is what I thought was going to be the ugly from the start was events. And I know you were kind of on the same page here. But I thought it was just it was a vanity metric. Oh Oh no, we've got 10,000 events happening on your website. Okay, well, what good does that do? It was so broad and general. And if you haven't customized those, then you are still keeping things broad and general. But the ability to really go down to a deeper level and track those events that are contributing to that ultimate conversion.

Or, you know, just finding that pathway. I think that that's something that certainly we like to see it because we are, we can go down to a very granular detail on the owner side and understand what are these actual events that are leading to the ultimate conversion, because it is. It's not just the, not always going to be the point, book, select your dates and go. We've got to really study that and understand how these landing pages are working

and how we can get the most out of those. So events have definitely been one of those things that initially, because maybe I didn't focus as much on them on the Universal Analytics site as well, kind of being able to bring those into the forefront, I love it. But what are your, I mean, I know you're an events fan now, but how are you using those to get better performance

for your campaigns? Yeah, I agree. I was a little surprised. I didn't think that I would like the events as much, or I thought it would be a little bit confusing. And I've come to like the events, and I think learned quite a bit from that in a positive light. Some of the things that we've done, but doing recently and I think learned quite a bit from that in a positive light.

Some of the things we've done but doing recently, I think we talked about this on a previous episode not too long ago, but we're now starting to create events for more specific actions. So quote displayed has been a really valuable one for us. When does a quote actually show up on the page? That is an interesting kind of engagement metric when you're looking at traffic

coming from different sources. Obviously, like if someone's generating a quote, they put in dates, they're actually looking at a property detail page. That's helpful to understand exactly where the intent of that user is. And what we've learned in some cases is that traffic may send roughly equal number of people. 100 people come from, for example, a Facebook ad.

And then 100 people come from Google Ads. But Google Ads may generate 2, 3, 4, 5x number of quotes displayed. So when we don't have enough data to generate bookings, or a significant amount of bookings so we can measure the results of it, it's always like, what else can we look at? What else can we measure to understand how things are behaving, how the sites are actually, how people are using the websites and events have been actually pretty good for that. So that's one that I can kind of stick in there. We have some clients that have

taken it pretty far too, like people do a search, they'll fire an event for that. If they click on the photo gallery or if they click on like four photos on a photo gallery, we have one client that measures that in a custom event because they have a programmer that set that up. Interesting to know, you know, because it's measuring engagement. Before we really didn't have a good way of doing that. Of course, a lot of clients used to use terms like the bounce metric, you know, measure in the old universal system, which was just a one page view, which wasn't always an indication that that was a low quality visit. Sometimes a one page view is not a low quality visit. You and I are gonna go hang out somewhere and I text you a link to a condo.

Hey, what do you think about staying in this condo when you come down and visit here? You may look at that page, look at the property detail page, put in dates, get a quote on that page. You may do a lot of things on that page. Bounce, in the old UA system, that would have been a bounce

and it would have been like, oh no, that's a bad thing. But in reality, like you did a lot of things that indicated positive sort of intent towards booking the property. So anyways, we could do a rabbit hole on that. But long story short, the events has been fine. Like you're to your point of like, yes, once you track a lot of events, you'll see 100,000 events in a given month or something. But the filtering function, they've improved significantly on GA4. So you can just go to that event in the traffic

view and just click and say, okay, only show me purchases, or only show me quote display. It's based on the traffic source. And that's nice, that little drop down function where I can go click only show me that I like that's based on the traffic source. And that's nice. That little drop down function where I can go click, only show me that, I like that quite a bit. Particularly, of course, tracking bookings and tracking purchases is the most valuable tool there. But I think there's a lot to that. I'll go bad.

Maybe we'll do a little trade off. And I think we have roughly equal number of good and bad. So we'll do our things. So keeping on events. Out of the box events, however, back to my comment from the last few minutes, are not that useful. So by default, you do get this list of events that is the default N GA Google Analytics 4, like PageView. Let

me get a list so I make sure we get it all right. But needless to say, the list of GA4 events by default doesn't give you a ton of context or doesn't give you a lot of information. Yeah, go ahead. PageView, like first visit. Engagement is just it's just a general engagement event, which is tough. Um, let's see here. Now, there is I will say they're out of the box if you use the enhanced does give you a little more there. So at least you get like a form submit and do some of those items. So I'm

still still not good. But we'll put it in like the mediocre there. Well, good, bad, ugly. Well, we'll toss that just in between those. But no, I think what in what's your scroll scroll is probably one more on there as well. Yeah, I've not found a lot of use in that. I will say I don't mind it on blog posts understanding how people are scrolling on content, if they are not a little bit of a factor for me. But yeah, a lot of stuff here. You know, I just don't find super duper useful, or just kind of clutters the reporting app. So like,

you know, knowing, for example, like their location or like their language, like, I mean, I'm not saying I never want to know that. I mean, like, we have a client, for example, who's considering translating pages into Spanish and English, even though he's in an English speaking area in the US, like a lot of people who visit him are from Mexico, because he's in Texas. So we thought about adding Spanish language as a language option. So that's kind of the event that may be useful. But for the most part, I just think the default events aren't great. You know, you don't get a lot of information. You've got to tweak what's coming out of GA for I think a little bit to make those events really useful. So it's a bit of a bad thing. I don't love it.

So that would be my kind of one thing I don't like is that events are useful, but you've got to do some customization to get them to work, which may require some work with your web development team or whoever's built your site to kind of do some additional tag manager stuff. And it can take a little bit of extra time and be a little bit of extra expense. I think the backend is worth it. You get some better data,

but it takes some time to tweak and get that in good shape. But yeah, back to your way. What are some other things you like about it? Yeah, I mean, I think just kind of going off of that tag manager piece, I think the debug view, that's something that really understanding how we can, understanding which events are coming through and being able to see that on a very granular level. That's something that previously you really could only do in tag manager. So see all of those custom layer and data layer values that are coming through that you can customize

and get some of that more granular visual as to engagement in a given session or what's happening if you want to get on the technical side of things from the server side or from the DOM side or just understanding really how everything is rendering on the website. That's probably getting a little more technical, but there are certainly people who are going down to that level. So I think between the debug view being brought into Google Analytics and then I think the Tag Manager integration in just being able to do G4 event tracking has also been positive. I think they've made it a little more straightforward, a little more straightforward,

a little more intuitive of how to create these events. They're not walking you necessarily down the step-by-step of how you should be doing it, but Tag Manager overall, as you know, I can remember setting it up when it looked real blocky and real old and Google wasn't helping you to actually use it. I think there are small user experience items that are just helping to better utilize GTM, Google Tag Manager, to get more effective reporting in your G4 analytics. Yeah. No, I agree. I think it's all about, I guess, how granular you want

that data to get. And having debug view is a really useful way to get feedback quickly. It used to be that there would be like real time and then there would be, you know, this report that would show up a little bit later. Debug you a solid and it'll help your developers, I think, quite a bit. All right, I'll pick maybe a good one because it kind of ties into what you were just saying. Real-time view is, I think, a little bit better, although I'll steal a bad one here as well, which is that the data processing speeds have gotten slower. So real time is better. Like you can see where people are, what pages they're on, what events are firing, etc. Which is nice. But then the downside for that, for some reason, is that the processing data has gotten a little bit slower in the back end.

I don't know why. Like once a clicker session falls out of real time, I feel like it's quite slow to actually show back up into GA4. It used to be, I mean, I don't know if you remember this or did this in the past. You could use like an hour by hour report in analytics and see like how your traffic was going that day compared to like a previous day. And there'd be a little delay, but it wouldn't be severe. Now I find like it's not uncommon for there to be like a 24 or 48 hour delay actually in like all these reporting metrics, which is not ideal to be honest with you. The main issue that we're having, I know this sounds very like a woe is meantime stuff,

but we have these clients where we send a report on like the second business day of the month. And sometimes it will actually be missing conversions that like happened the last few days of the month because like there's so much of a delay. And we have one client where the ROAS is like, has to be a number, has to be a specific number. And if it's not there, like we have to pause the campaign

or alter the campaign. And we've had situations where if we look on the first, it'll say like last month's ROAS was X. And then we look on like the fifth day of the month. And then it says last month's ROAS was X plus like eight or 9%. So it like tracks a few more conversions if you look at it a few days later.

So, and I get that's part partially is like partial click attribution and data driven attribution and stuff like that. But it's, it's just seems slower overall to like process data. And so you can't get that same like granularity of like what's going on in your website. If you're looking at it a lot,

which for many people, they're only looking at it maybe once a month or once a week, maybe at best or something like that. They can just go back and look at a previous month. That's not the end of the world, but I just find that to be a little bit problematic at times that it's actually slower processing data. Maybe it's partially because we talked about a few minutes ago, there's so many events firing, it just takes more time, I guess, you know, ultimately to, you know, to figure it out. So I can't speculate why I just don't love that from a reporting point of view personally. I would agree with that.

I think that that's, the fact that it's noticeable is a little surprising, but maybe not surprising again, because we are dealing in larger scale data. I think that kind of ties into the fewer default reports behind the scenes. I think that that's something that I still do not have some of the reports that I previously had

in Universal Analytics that they're gone. It's not that the data is gone. It's, oh, let's, the list is gonna be a little too long. But it is, I think it's, they really hype up the integrations with BigQuery and using more of the API information. And I'm wondering if that isn't a little more real time, where people who are dealing with much, much larger data sets of hundreds of thousands of visitors a day or a week or something like that, maybe having a little more insight there.

But yeah, the default reporting back behind the scenes now is, it's not great. And I think it's just because it's not intuitive in how you customize it. It's columns over here and metrics and dimensions and this and that. And I think in Looker Studio, Google actually does a relatively good job about it. But for whatever reason, they have not been able to kind of two-way that integration back into Google Analytics. And I get that. It's not supposed to be that. It's not supposed to be a reporting tool per se.

Maybe that's another iteration down the road where Looker Studio just kind of comes into Google Analytics. I would love that. And then you're just generating those reports kind of through that interface right in the back end of the system, but That is that's kind of that like how do you functionally use that reporting area? Not that well if I'm gonna try to get a report. I'm probably gonna customize it elsewhere In some manner where I can make it look I

Can visualize the data in a way that that is actually going to be effective for what I'm trying to look at Yeah, it wasn't there out, but I think you're correct with respect to like, a lot of people just can't do that. Right? They just, a small business doesn't have expertise to understand how BigQuery works, how APIs work, how data storage works, et cetera, which is, I get it, right?

Like at some point, Google analytics probably is like, hey, this is a free product, right? Like if you want to customize it and make it something awesome, like you need to pay for it. Actually I had a client, so this was in the ugly section. So I'll go to this really quickly. I think it ties into what you're talking about a little bit. I had a client who was adamant, they wanted to keep their universal analytics data all good. But we

had to export it before this July 1 deadline. Again, as of our recording about two weeks ago, because the universal analytics data is now gone for the most part. And I will say I was expecting Google to extend their deadline as they have done in the past. And they did say I was expecting Google to extend their deadline as they have done in the past. And they did not extend that deadline in the accounts that I checked on July 2nd. That data was gone.

So I could not find it for most of the accounts that we had looked at. So I do wonder if maybe there were some significant storage costs. And what the client said to me is like, why is there not a button that I can click, click a button and then just like keep my universal data for like five bucks a month or something,

like just to have it, just to keep it in there. They didn't offer like a pre-selected script or anything like that where I could keep the data and I could explain that I'm like I don't know why that's not the case. You would think they'd make some money from that Maybe it's like the support of that or I don't know. I'm not a Google I can't pretend to understand their thinking that sort of thing. I thought it was it was frustrating That's the ugly piece of you know was frustrating They just deleted your universal analytics data because in some, that was like years or in some places a decade, a decade of universal data in there. And we could go back and look at traffic trends and you know, okay, this year, summer was a little bit stronger. This year, summer is a little bit weaker. Obviously, knowing the revenue and stuff like that isn't, you know,

it's like, almost feels like different dollars. We've talked about this before with respect to inflation and stuff like that. But it's good to know like visitors traffic trends, what was the most popular page, not just last July, but the last four July's. Like I was going back and looking at that data monthly, at least it wasn't like every day I was in there, but I would typically look at it for a few minutes, at least. So yeah, that was frustrating just for them to be, I guess like, hey, it's a tool, you weren't paying for it.

Therefore they can kind of do whatever they want and you don't really have any recourse, but it's like, hey, you guys are kind of the default analytics platform at this stage. So it was disappointing to see them kind of go out like that. And I think it ties into what you're talking about. They made it a little bit maybe more stronger from a technical perspective, but they made it harder than for the typical small business owner, typical vacation rental manager, obviously

in this context, go and access the reports and access the data they're after. And some people just throw up their hands. You know, I have clients who are just like, I used to like know kind of where things were. And they've just been like, I don't understand it anymore. And they just kind of get frustrated by it, which is a bummer. Like you don't want people to say that about a tool that you offer to people that it's so complicated

or so different that they just feel like they can't understand it. That's not a great feeling. I have been on a number of internal meetings and meetings with vendor partners and external partners and everything like that. And there's been more than a handful of times where I've been on a call in Google Analytics sharing my screen. And someone asks,

Well, where is the just just pull up this report. I'm like that. We don't have that anymore. That's, that's gone. That's so for people who have been in this space or in the marketing space, I have a case for internal space, the marketing space for a decade plus, you did. You had your set of, let's say a dozen touch points where you went every day, you knew exactly where they were,

your muscle memory probably found them more than anything else, directing your mouse to the clicks and the reports and everything like that. So I think it happens less frequently that I can't find it. It is the first, let's say six months were just, oh man, where do I find all this information? It's not as frequent that that is the case. But the actual reports that helped me run the day to day of specific campaigns or things like that, they're gone. So, there's still a few goods

that we can kind of bring this not belly up, but bring the boat back afloat, we'll say at this point. Yeah. So real quick, poor run out for multi-touch funnels. I love multi-touch funnels. That was like one of my favorite reports to illustrate to a client that many of our marketing activity is happens at the beginning and then the conversion happens later on. And there's no equivalent, there's no replacement for my understanding.

Even in the custom reporting function, there's no way that I can recreate that report where people could see, hey, in some cases it takes 10, 12, 15, 25 touch points to actually convert a customer or convert someone into a booking. Same case for owners, right? Like obviously you didn't have as long with that report as I did, but the same logic applies. People have to visit the website multiple times before they make that

conversion. Multi-touch funnels did a good job at that, and that's just poof, gone. Can't see it anymore. It's just not the same visual. That's what I miss. We talked about it yesterday. It's the same with the data-driven attribution modeling. It's not that it's not good. What data? It is. There's that hidden screen of, well, where exactly is this actually happening? Where is this occurring? Are we waiting more for the first touch? Are we waiting more for the last touch? Are we data-driven? Is touch? Are we data driven? Is Google's data and they're driving what that conversion looks like there? And that's where it's the

unknown. I think most of this stuff that we're, most of our bads or most of the uglies is that we just don't know where, when. It's not that it's not, it maybe is there. We maybe haven't just found it yet, or we haven't found a custom user story that dictates that we need to go and do and create this event with this reporting or this audience with X, Y, and Z there. But again, I think that's the unfamiliarity of a year on where we're still kind of piecing through some of the good, some of the bad, and certainly a little bit ugly here. So.

Yeah, it's a bummer. Well, all right, so let's skew a few of these good, because we had a list here for the listener, and we've been picking more at the bat. So we've got a few goods. All right, so future proof. So the whole reason for this change, the reason that we had to go through this pain

and this misery is from our understanding, our layman's understanding, I guess, or maybe we have like an eighth grade understanding, it's supposed to be future proof, right? This we shouldn't have to do this again. This was a one time thing due to all the browser changes, all the systems. Hey, guys, we had to start over, like basically, sorry, all your old data is gone. Sorry that we had to reinstall your tracking script. Sorry, that's an all new interface. But we should not do this again. So I guess so far, that's been the case. They've made additions to it. They made improvements to it. Certainly,

we hope there's no GA five on the horizon anytime soon. Hopefully, for as you know, like some movies, they should have stopped it. The sequel may be at best. Hopefully, GA4 will stop it for me won't have the need for another one down the road. So time will tell on that one. Right now, it feels like a good thing that they they had to rip off a bandaid. And it's been a pain to get the bandaid off without our arm hurting too bad. But hopefully, we won't have to do that again. So I don't know if you have any context for that one or adding into it, but it seems like they've held that promise of promise.

Yeah, I think the other item on the future proofing is I think on the privacy side of things, they appear to be a little more active in allowing you to control what you're sharing of the data privacy and all of that, which Google certainly is putting a large emphasis on. So having the ability to really take more control over that data and as a first party, third party, we'll get into that. That's

always a different discussion there. I think that's another future-proofing item that it's going to be important to have that type of... There is a case down the road that someone's going to pull up with their own data and it's going to unopen a Pandora's box. So that's certainly something that I think they're considering with the future proofing of analytics. Yeah, right on. All right, I'll take one more good one and then I'll kick it back your way. So yeah, channel groupings are I think a little bit more accurate. It hasn't been perfect. We've had to go in and do some modification to channel groupings for whatever reason. I don't know why GA can't get this one straight.

When they come from m.facebook.com, that's the same as facebook.com. That's not a referral versus a social. That's the same thing. I don't know why that one's, again, I'm not an expert. I don't work at Google. I don't have a PhD, that sort of thing. But m.facebook.com and facebook.com are the same thing.

Let's get that tied up. But anyways, other than that one, which we have to go and modify for every single account, it feels like that's one where I feel like the channel groupings are a little bit more accurate source medium reporting. Obviously, it's still there. If you want to flip between source medium and channel groupings, I tend to like channel groupings as just like a quick and, you know, I'm showing it to a client, honestly, I tend to use channel groupings just because I think it's a better way to break down the traffic and where it's coming from. Some clients get a lot of traffic from sort of like, you know,

chamber websites or things like that. Those often, you know, end up in their own just referrals. So we have to like break down like, okay, what exactly is that referral traffic? So we can make it a little more clear, but overall channel groupings seem a little bit more accurate. And I have a lot, seemingly have a lot less that goes into like undefined or whatever,

where as universal there was times in the past where that was pretty bad problem. Like there would be 10, 20% of traffic that was getting into undefined that should have been into one of the channels. I think they've gotten better. I hope they can continue to get better like Facebook being the most obvious example or Instagram. Any I don't know why they can't do like a wildcard like any sub domain plus facebook.com is Facebook. So I don't know why they struggle with that one. But I would agree, a lot less of the unassigned. We still get some, but maybe there's a better way to track that down. Now, if you just feel, I would agree. Overall, we're seeing less of it,

and I see it kind of on the same way there. I don't know the reason for it, because a lot of that should be just understanding of a UTM if you're doing it that way, or reading the sites that the traffic is coming through. So that's something, I don't know why Google would have any difficulty with that, especially when you take a look at some of the other data that they are able to pull in,

some of that custom product data. Definitely you see it on the booking side of things, being able to track down fees to the individual line item there. I see it might help out some on, with an e-commerce site as well. And that's something where it's being able to see down to the by-product level, all of those individual products coming through. In addition, you can see for some more of those e-commerce side of things for Google Analytics, you can start to see what's coming through Google Shopping and stuff like that. So I'm

interested to see as more people are getting bookings to come through and as Google continues to further refine Google vacation rentals, what does that look like? What can we actually see for people coming through more of a meta search approach as opposed to that shopping experience, as opposed to any of the other ways they're coming through. So I do love that custom product data there. You can probably speak more on that than I can just

with what you've seen and how it's been effective for you. Yeah, I'll wrap up kind of with those two things kind of combined together, which is that Google obviously has kind of made the product for more of that individual. They've made it more for like an e-commerce type of business. Obviously, no one in the Google Analytics product team is like, let's make sure this works well

for vacation rental managers or for hotels or for resorts. Like that was never a conversation. Although people do sell a lot of things online that are not like physical e commerce. But anyways, I guess that's kind of good and bad. The good news is you can customize all the product data fields, and you can get a lot more information than you could in universal. So for example, like, we have clients that trigger an event when people view a property detail page.

We call it product, which it kind of is in a way, but they're thinking like iPhone cases or t-shirts or whatever the case may be. So it's kind of like a little bit of like a square peg round hole type situation, but it's not the end of the world. But what I really like actually is now with the e-commerce reporting, it takes some extra work, again, extra configuration.

Stop me if you've heard that before, but you can now push into Google Analytics like taxes, fees. You can push in discounts so that you can see when promo codes are being redeemed, and if so, how much they're being redeemed for that sort of thing. Again, takes some extra time, but we've been working with a client closely on this

over the past few months, and I think we've got it within one or 2% of what they see in their PMS, which at times in the past is not the case. We've had problems in the past. The numbers in GA don't reflect cancellations and things like that. We've made some progress along those lines. Again, they use items sold.

We use nights booked. So it's kind of like, again, a little bit of a mislabeling type situation. But we tell the client, hey, you got 18 nights booked on this particular room type or this particular unit. That may have been across multiple reservations. Let's go to the monetization report and we can find out what that looks like.

So that's useful. And then I think I mentioned this a second ago, but taxes fees, seeing on the report, for example, like this month we did 57 bookings, therefore we have 57 cleaning fees. It's summed up to this amount of money, knowing that with different clients, that margin is different. So that can help, but I think with respect to tracking,

because you understand, all right, 57 bookings, but the average rent was X, and then the average cleaning value is Y, because depending on the size of the property, those may be very variable. So that's been good, I like that. The downside though, again, I kind of said this, but like the language in the UI

assumes that you sell like physical products. So for example, like, correct thing is one of the default fields in e-commerce, like you're not shipping a vacation rental, like that doesn't make any sense. So I mean, you could just not use these fields, but it makes some of the reports like blank, or it's just like some of the terminology

just doesn't make a lot of sense. So not a big deal, but it is something that I kind of wish was like customizable. Like I wish we could check a box or hit a button where it's like, I don't need that. I don't need that. Let me just remove that from the report. I don't want it to show zero. I just don't want it at all. And then on this report, I want to show, you know, again, a line item called fees, and then I want to break it down and, you know, illustrate that a little bit better. So again, take some additional tweaking customization, but there's more avenues, there's more paths to go down there with respect to tracking,

particularly when it comes to e-commerce. And if you're willing to do the work or your web development company is willing to do the work, I think there's some good data on the other side of that. So some good and some bad there, mostly good, but just a little frustrating at times when you're looking at the report and you're just like, wait, why does it say shipping? That doesn't make any sense, which is not the case, obviously, in our industry. Awesome. Well, yeah, my last one here, just to round us out here, I think that was all of our points that we talked about, limited historical data. So obviously, just now we're starting to get year over year data. If you

swapped in July of last year, you can probably start to get year over year data. Some of our clients were kind of a little bit ahead of the curve and they swapped earlier than they needed to, which has been nice because now we can show reports or we've been able to show reports over the past five or six months that we're showing year over year data. Some it just took us a while to kind of get through the process and get all the tracking tuned in. So that's been a bit of a learning curve on our side of things. But hopefully going forward, it won't be as much of an issue. You're going to have historical data from now until hopefully 10, 20 years from now. Hopefully by the time they go to GA5, I'm not doing this anymore. That'll be my hope.

Maybe it's the last analytic system I'll have to learn in my, you know, marketing career lifetime. So I thought this would be a fun way to wrap it up. Let's give it a grade. What's your grade of GA four one year later? You know, F maybe a through F. What's your thoughts of how Google has handled this and what your current reaction is when you have to open that GA? I think I'm gonna give it up. I'm gonna give it a friendly grade of a B minus. Okay, I think that's generous, you know, considering where I mean, I was like an F minus, I would have given it a Z if I could. Yeah, I think B minus there's still certainly some room

for improvement there. But I've come to at least be able to use it in a way that I don't feel in. I don't feel like I a kindergartner trying to learn it every time I hop in now. So I think yeah, we'll call that what is your grade right now? I was about to say, we were really close. I was gonna say C plus. So I think we're really close. I think some of these things are not tuned in. Certainly loss of some of these reports that I used all the time is a bit of a gut punch. So I'm

hard. It's hard for me to square those away. But yeah, let's go C plus. Let's let's wrap it up with that. So you gave hard for me to square those away. But yeah, let's go C plus. Let's wrap it up with that. So you gave UNB minus, I tend to be a positive person, but like C plus, I think that's fair. It's not horrible. A little bit more effort and I'll get it to a B. It's like a 79 right now, right?

It's not way off in my opinion. So, but yeah, I certainly couldn't say A and it's not a D product. I mean, there's some good stuff in there. We've learned a lot about how things work. So awesome, that's all the time that we have for today. So thank you for listening. If you made it all the way this way,

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