Heads In Beds Show - Part I: The Basic Settings You NEED For The Upcoming Google Analytics 4 Move

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad dive into the upcoming Google Analytics 4 "switchover" and cover the settings you want turned on and what's OK to leave OFF as you work on getting ready for a Google Analytics 4 world (weather you like it or not...).⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellIntro to Google AnalyticsGoogle removes several search ranking algorithm updates from its ranking systems pageTag AssistantMigration guide from GoogleDefault Google Analytics 4 events🔗 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 and Beds 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. Hey there, Paul. How's it going? Hey Conrad. How are you doing for our, let's say, second or third time today?

Yeah. For those listening to this version, hopefully. We've had some technical snafus today, but I think we're getting through it. And we shared a great story. We actually solved all the world's problems the last time we hit record. And then the audio file got corrupted. So what a bummer. Maybe we'll figure it out.

Someday. Dang it. I think you explained a multi-team trade where Gobert was going to OKC, and then somehow you're getting a first round pickback or something. And like I said, everyone won. It was a win-win scenario. Pretty much. And a little bit of that.

I think we were talking about some debt and deficit issues on the money side of things. I think we had purged about a couple billion away from that. Yeah, I think probably time to head on to our regularly scheduled business. So that certainly works here. scheduled business. So that certainly works here. Yeah. I don't want anyone to ever say this isn't hard work because we had to reset computers multiple times over the past hour today. No, I joke, but we dive into it. Who else is resetting their systems a little bit is Google. So we actually, you could use flag an article and send it my way. I thought it was interesting. Maybe it's worth covering in our marketing minute here. So the title of it, we'll put a link in the show

notes, a search engine land article, Google removes several search ranking algorithm updates from its ranking systems page. I thought it was an interesting read, but you flagged it over to me. What was your kind of reaction to this? What did they remove and why? Yeah, I think the most important thing is what they did remove. And things that I think we started talking about back in 15, 16, 17, seems like a lot of stuff like that. It tends to be that way, but they did. They took out mobile first, mobile friendly. They took out, and I'm just pulling up the article myself here as I was on the end of the technical side of things. So it's my issue there a little bit, but it is.

They took out the mobile friendly side of things, secure site. They also took a page speed specifically, and there was one more there. Let me just go on through there. But it is a lot of it, what as they did some releases last week regarding the helpful content update and gave some more information on that.

I think it is. It's really what, in my opinion, Google's really trying to focus more on the content side of SEO. That's really how I'm reading a lot of this. And something that we talk about a lot is that don't focus on the little small things, whether it's your first contentful paint, don't worry about the core web vitals. Don't worry about those items because they aren't going to

move the needle like having quality content is, like having great backlink or a link building strategy. So it is, I think it isn't often that Google does remove things. And this is one of those things, they just removed these factors from their retired systems. So also on that list is Hummingbird, Panda, some of their older, Penguin, some of their older algorithms going back to 2012, 2013, 2018, stuff like that. But then the last one is secured sites as well. So secured sites, page speed, mobile friendly, and those are going to be the big, I think the big three. It is. These are things that we already know. People know that you want to have a secure site. I think, especially on the e-commerce side of things, if you're taking any transactions, boy, I would have to think, and I haven't done any Microsoft clarity reporting or anything like that, or just even any anecdotal,

but to see anybody who doesn't have that unsecure site for if you're selling any products, I have to think your conversion rate or just your overall sales are much lower than the, if no other factors were in place, a competitor that had a secure site. if no other factors were in place, a competitor that had a secure site. It is. I think it's something that hopefully it, hopefully it stops ambulance chasers from coming around, running a Google lighthouse report on your website and saying, Oh, everything's running really slow. And this is doing having a major negative impact on your SEO.

It may, but there are probably other factors that are having a greater impact or maybe even the positive or the negative there. But what are your thoughts on some of these and why they would be taking off or does it affect anything that you're doing as you're building out websites there? It surprised me a little bit just because I feel like these are still things that do have some level of importance. Yes, your site should still be mobile friendly. Yes, I still think PHP does matter to some degree. I think you can, as we shared before, and as you outlined, you can take it too far, or you can over-index your focus on that and not lose the forest through the trees, if

you will. The page experience pieces, secure sites. Yeah, all the things I think, I didn't see anything here where I'm like, oh man, I wouldn't give that advice today. But I guess even though Google's removed it, I'm still going to give this advice. You should still have quick loading pages. You should still have mobile friendly sites. Obviously you should still have secure sites. In fact, now your browser gives you a warning. If you access anything insecure and you start

to fill out a form, it'll be like you're filling out a form on an insecure site. So forget SEO, that's like usability thing. I guess that's maybe how my brain thinks a little bit. And you touched on at the end there, which is that when we're giving advice on how to build out sites, certainly SEO is a component of what we're suggesting or what we're, Hey, this is the best practice for SEO, but a lot of good SEO best practices are just best practices like to just make your site usable and to make your site a good experience. And in our case, we're trying to build better direct booking experiences. I think that all these things still matter the same as they did yesterday as the day before as a year from now, I can't imagine that we're going to stop using mobile phones. We're going to stop wanting secure

connections. We're going to stop wanting pages to load quickly. So that's my takeaway. Take a peek at what Google's doing. And we try to keep you informed as to what Google's doing or what they're saying. But I don't know if this is a needle mover for me, but I'm still slightly surprised by it that they would actually take the effort.

Someone had to log in and do this. It wasn't just like an accidental thing from what we can tell right now. So they did that. And probably just, I wonder if they're just trying to work on streamlining their messaging and just give that content focus, which is what they always repeat for sure. Whenever there's an algorithm update, it's always just about content.

My frame on that, of course, is that sure, content matters and links matter usually a lot as well when it comes to getting a site to rank a little bit better. Yeah, we'll see how this progresses, but I think it was a good flag by you. So I'm glad we had a chance to break it down a little bit. Definitely. Well, let's, yeah, let's flip the page a little bit and head on over into the world of analytics. We have an interesting episode kind of theme that we've come up with here. So we're going to do multiple episodes of GA4. GA4, I think I remember first flagging this last year. I did a LinkedIn post that did well for me,

for many thousands of views. It's very, it's not, I typically get a lot of reach on content, obviously. We have a relatively niche audience, but anyways, I did a LinkedIn post last year, excuse me, and I was encouraging people, hey, go ahead and put GA4 on your website today. No, you have a year until it actually goes away. This was the summer of last year. But if you do it now, you'll have year over year data. So maybe you did that. Maybe you didn't. If you didn't, then you're not going to have year over year data. Sorry, the ship has long since sailed on that. But look, there's a deadline here coming up as the day of recording this. I did a little search of this. 67 days, 12 hours, 11 minutes, 33 seconds until Google shuts off Universal Analytics. So we're no longer going to have that data going forward.

So now forget the year over year. That's like I said, that ship has sailed, but you can at least work that over the next month or two to not only get GA4 installed, we'll talk some of the basics today, but get comfortable and get understanding of, hey, when I go to log in and try to run my August 1st report, or if I go to check in halfway through July 1st, or sorry, the middle of July to check in on my numbers, now they're

doing, you are going to be forced, at least at this time, to use the new GA4 system. So we thought we'd do a multi-episode, maybe step one is a getting started episode. Maybe we do two where we dig a little bit more into reporting, or we dig a little bit more into events. And then maybe three, we do more advanced, like, hey, did you know this? And we try to dig into really the granular nature of how the reports work and what's gone and what's there and stuff like that. We may touch on various topics as we go along. So I thought we'd do with a brief overview of GA4, why they're doing this. Maybe we don't fully understand, but we can try to explain

it. What is like the GA4 interface focused on? We'll maybe just talk about events specifically. And then again, we'll remind people of the deadline and maybe some initial steps that they might think about as we get ready for our kind of intermediate episodes. So you've been a little on the fence about GA4 and just being like, you've been like me, which is you want to hold onto that system that you're familiar with. And to be fair, these systems are very different. So what's your reaction today as you think about GA4? How would you grade it as like a marketing tool for you? And then also for the average person out there, rental manager, who's trying to just figure out how their website's working. What's your thoughts? I think the, for me, it is, it's what I'm noticing most as I've been, have been

noticing for the last year, since you did that post even before that, because we had some people who were, this used to be G4 used to be app plus web. I think that was the kind of the beta version when they were starting to roll that out and it looked cool. It looked a app plus web. I think that was the kind of the beta version when they were starting to roll that out. And it looked cool. It looked a little fancier. I think the first thing that caught me was the real-time reporting. So having more, giving you more that globe view of,

oh, you're really a national brand or a multinational brand where everything's happening. You're getting, you can see all the user profile. You can see all these cool things. It's awesome. Actually digging into what you're getting, you can see all the, the, the user profile. You can see all these cool things. It's awesome. Actually digging into what you're getting out of it. I have not been that impressed. I think we're losing, maybe not the reporting itself because I don't think Google would

completely ever remove it. I think they're just going to make it more difficult to find in some cases or make it so that you have to customize and create your own reporting to match what was in your way. But I think that was the first place that I started picking was, oh boy, I can't find X, Y, and Z. I can't find page engagement the way I page it. User sessions on individual pages the way I did previously, or I don't quite have the breakdown by source, by medium, by all these individual areas. And it did. It took some digging over time.

I was able to find some of those areas, but I think it is. It's the re-education point for us started quite early. So we have, this is not new to us for looking in and digging in and trying to find all this critical information. I also think Google does some stat inflation too. The event thing really kills me when you're tracking 67,000 events, but those 67,000 events happened on your website before. You just didn't give granular reporting to them. So that's a whole nother thing. But for the people who are going to be transitioning and trying to be finding

the reporting that they were looking for previously. And now we're trying to transition over to G4. I think it's going to be much more difficult for anybody who's not living in it day in and day out on the marketing side of things. I do. If you've got an in-house marketing team, I hope that you have put some time in. I hope that's been part of it. It's future-proofing a little bit, whether you're taking a course, I know you recommended a great course, just learning G4 and really getting that out there. But I hope that you have set up some of those steps and you're not on July 1st, just transitioning and hoping that, oh, I'm going to be able to find all that same data that I had previously in G4. So that is my concern is that even if hopefully you have done the groundwork,

hopefully you put the pieces in place, you install the G4 tag, you've got the year over year data in place. But if you don't, and you're just thinking about installing it on June 30th, that's not the only thing you're going to have to be worrying about. It's where is all your data and how can we regain some of that? And it is, it's, you can hear, I'm starting to spiral on it already because that's, that, that is where my first thought goes is, oh boy, everybody's going to lose everything. We're all going to be running around with like chickens with their heads cut off. Hopefully these episodes are designed to make sure that's not the case and put you in a little better standing there. What are your

overall thoughts on G4 right now, Conrad? How are you feeling about it? After I went through the measurement marketing course, I think my take on it was a little bit more nuanced because I think partially they're being forced. So like we feel like, oh, Google is making this change just to make a new product. It's not actually better, but it is fundamentally different. Like the way the actual scripted tracking works, it's no longer a cookie. As more and more people block those systems from being functioning, imagine if iOS and the next version of Apple's mobile operating system blocked all analytics cookies by default. They already blocked some. What if they blocked a lot more? Then your GA data would just be essentially useless and universal if it relied on cookies. So I think some of what they're doing,

they have to bring it to the next stage. And I won't pretend to understand all the mechanics behind the scenes of exactly how and where these systems work. I'm not at that level of a web developer or anything like that. But that's part of, I think, the nuance that's worth stating, which is that this isn't just a new product for the sake of a new product. It does fundamentally work differently according to all the documentation and stuff that I read and how it was explained in some of the courses and things that I've taken to kind of learn more about this process. Now, this doesn't really matter for 99.999% of our clients and the types of people that are going to listen here, but it does also show like web analytics and app analytics side by side. So if you did have a native app, which

was a thing for a minute in the vacational industry, there was, what was it? What was it glad to have you was the app-based solution, the solution that a lot of our clients are using. I don't know if that's still, I haven't seen that quite as much since. I don't know if that's still as focused. A lot of our clients seems like it moved on to products like touch day and those types of products, which seem a little bit easier to use on the guest side. But regardless, if you did have a mobile app by chance, and maybe there's, maybe that's going to be a little bit easier in the future. Who knows? You could, in theory, have website data and app data collected side by side. Again, it's now event-based data instead of session-based data. That I think is the change that we're going to spend the most time on in the

kind of episode two of this, but just the idea that you're measuring interactions more so than just sessions, I think is actually a pretty compelling, interesting idea. To your point, could it have been done in the old analytics? Maybe, but like one of those things where you Frankenstein a system and it just doesn't make sense when sometimes if you have to change anyways, you may as well just kind of do it from scratch. And yeah, they are introducing some of the modeling and things like that, where they're estimating based on, okay, this person has blocked this level of data, so we can't see

it. Now we have to model and we have to estimate based on what we see or what we can assume. And that's where we can get a little bit into hot water for sure. But again, I suspect they had no choice. They had to do this and this is their crack at it. And I do think it'll get better. Too many people use analytics, Google analytics. It's like the default analytics platform. It's actually kind of surprising. Everybody tries to compete with them. It's a paid product. And I feel like that's just a non-starter for 99% of small businesses. Like we have clients who have Fathom, which is actually a really well-made product, in my opinion, very simple, easy to understand dashboard, privacy first.

They don't have a lot of the same issues that we have with GA4 today, but it's not nearly as feature rich as Universal is today. And it's 50 to a hundred bucks a month, depending on how many page views and things like that that you're processing. And a lot of our clients would just go, no, why would I use that when it's not even like some perfect solution and I have to pay for it on top of it. Google's like, we always talk about the search monopoly with Google.

I almost wonder if Google has more of an analytics monopoly than a search monopoly in some respect. Like I feel like it's rare that I ever come across someone who's, oh no, we're not going to use Google analytics. We're going to use blah, blah, blah analytics system. Like it happens, but it's very uncommon. So yeah, that's, I guess some of my thoughts to it,

but yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. I would say the only one, the only other one that I can remember seeing out there in the wild consistently, and it was one in 50 was Adobe analytics. And again, I was super, super unimpressed with that. That's taking it down to no granularity. Very, I love, oh, funky and clunky and not very good reporting, like visually nuts. I don't know.

If anybody was going to compete with google i would have expected amazon to be one who could maybe shoulder that burden but not the case and maybe that's something down the road i think they've shifted their focus since that time but no that's the it is it's still a free product it's still an amazing product and i think you're spot on with, I don't think there are too many other entities out there that can hold a candle really to what, to number of installs and who's actually utilizing it. And then what you're getting out of it still, whether it's G4, whether it's universal, it's still an abundance of information there.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let's dive into the mechanics of it. So as you, all right, we've hopefully convinced you, look, you don't have a choice if you're going to use the system, which we still recommend you do, even with its limitations. Here's kind of the pieces that you should be focused on. I have a little checklist here of things that I've written down as pieces that make a lot of sense. The basic, the most obvious, you got to put the GA4 script on the website. Now this may depend on your approach and how you do things. For some of our clients, this was as simple as logging in the backend to a WordPress admin, for example, heading into a script section, pasting in the script and hitting save.

I guess technically, I'm sorry, I should go back up a little bit. Before you do that, you actually have to generate the analytics profile, right? So that may be the first thing to do is log into analytics. Now you can make a GA4 profile alongside your current universal one. You don't need to go make a brand new account or anything like that. In fact, now inside of the GA system, there's a huge banner on the top. If you haven't done this yet, where you can click a button and they basically go ahead and make a GA4 property for you.

They give you the code and you go through that process. So if you haven't done that before, you might want to check with your agency or check with kind of someone on your team who helped you set up your website on how to actually get the GA4 profile set up originally, a property. I should be specific with my language here. That is the first step you want to do. But once you've gone through that process, then installation is the next piece. Now, different ways to approach this. We are actually continuing our rollout of trying to do as many as we can through Tag Manager, just because I think Tag Manager is going to be a better system going forward to do all these

events. In the past, it was like with Universal, I wasn't too worried about it. I'm like, we put on the site, it's just firing a page, you got every page. No big deal. With GA4, I think it's better to do through Tag Manager if you can. If you can, it's not the end of the world. You can certainly just put it on your website. You're not going to have any issues measuring that way. But doing it through Tag Manager has some benefits because now you can start to make rules. Okay, on this, it's just a page view. But on this page, it's a X. On this, it's a Y. On this, it's a Z. And again, we'll talk about a little bit more of those kind of concepts more in episode two, but that sentiment, that idea, that approach of, Hey, here's the, what we need to track. And we're going to be able to set it up in tag manager

so much easier. Don't need a developer, et cetera. So that would be my first recommendation. Make the property, obviously put it on the website through your website directly is okay. Through tag manager might be slightly preferred. If you don't have that set up again, check with your web developer and or agency. And then some template sites in the VR space, I've noticed, are getting pretty savvy where they just have a GA4 field that you can paste into. OwnerRes, we did an OwnerRes onboarding last week with their template sites, and they actually do a really good job. All you have to do is paste in the GA4 code, and they handle all the events, all the other stuff for you, and they make it very simple to

do. So there may even be, depending on the way your website is configured, a different path for going down there. But if you're using Venturi, this would be another thing to know. If you have any subdomains, for example, if you have like a landing page that's on another system, but you want that data migrated, you want to have that in one place, I assume as well. And I'm assuming you've been going through some of those GA4 installations on your side too.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's something that we use Tag Manager on all ours. And the Tag Manager container has been incredibly helpful exactly for that event based. Our tag manager container setups with Universal were, like you said, pretty straightforward, pretty easy there. We're getting page views, we're getting maybe tracking a couple of form submissions, stuff like that. Not too many event based. We have to recreate kind of our event bases for the G4 side of things. So what used to be maybe a, let's say an eight to 10 tag

container is now turning into a 25 to 30 tag container, but it does help to understand, to have all the granularity that we want. It's exciting to see the potential there. So I'm going to stay on the positive train there a little bit, but yeah, tag manager is definitely the way to go if you can. Now I've seen some of the property management systems that had generated, did have not even just implementing the script, but they had a little quick little field of just popping your G4 property or your UA property. So my hope is that I think most of those were legacy UA properties. I'm hoping that everybody's just flopping over to G4 and that there's a quick transition for those people because that's those partners, those property managers who are using

those systems, because that's the last thing you'd want to have happen is they're still back on the legacy universal analytics because one, the property didn't get recreated or the new accounting created, whatever that is. And then two, that didn't get transitioned behind the scenes. So it is talk about the talk to the web company, talk to your, in some cases, the property management system, because in a lot of cases, those do go quite hand in hand there, just to make sure that, and the other side being, if you're going to manually install it, hard code it, do anything like that. If that G4 auto implementation is already in place, you might actually get some double counting and some issues there. So just something to keep in mind.

I hope that some of these web services companies have been working proactively, are working proactively, just to make sure that if it wasn't easy integration previously, just a quick switch or flipping the switch or just popping in a individual ID, that still is the case and that we're not doing any double tracking or anything like that moving forward. Yep. Yeah. There's a little Chrome extension I'll put in the show notes that we use all the time. I think they say it's deprecated, but it still works perfectly. I think it's called Google Tag Assistant. They want you to do this through a different system now. I don't know why, but it works perfectly fine. You don't have to use Tag Manager. You can just open this thing,

pop it open on the page, and you can see if you are, in fact, accidentally measuring things multiple times. Again, I'll pop that in the show notes if someone wants to do some debugging on their own or they need their verify other work that's been done from them by an agency or by another partner. Check that out for sure.

That tag assistant tool will help you quite a bit. So yeah, once you've got the base kind of installed on, so by base in this case, just page view, and I have a little help doc actually as well that I could send over. I can't put it in the show notes because it's a private document, but if someone wants this and they're unsure of what they need to be doing, I'm happy to send it to them. And it's all the default events that Google tracks without just by you putting the base on the page, just like the base installed tracking code on the page of GA4. And it's pretty

extensive. Like it's not just page views that they track. So they actually track some other pieces. They are able to see, for example, when someone has been to the website for the first time, you can see that that's something that's really not possible in the current UA system. You can see when people click on certain links. So that's again, something that you might've had to do a lot of customization for before. Now that's a default one that's inside of it. You can see when they start to scroll down the page, you can see when they start to watch a video on the page. If it's a, if it's a YouTube video or something like that, you can see file download. You can see when they start to fill out a form, you can see when they submit a form. Again, these are all default things. So if you just put the GA4 script on the page,

you're going to get all this event tracking today that you're not really getting in universal. So I think this is a legitimate and real benefit of using GA4 is that you can start to see like former events. Like for example, when people do a date search on a property detail page or not, you don't have to go and do a lot of extra configuration, which I've done on accounts before. And it's incredibly time consuming. Now it's just by default, if that's a form that's submitted and then it hits the API from Guesty or Onirez or whoever, and then it comes back, you can track. Definitely good to have just the base piece in there. Even if you don't do anything else, you're going to get some pretty useful data if you know how to report on it and manipulate it. But obviously a lot of the

magic happens when you start to do some of the more advanced stuff we'll cover in the next episode. I wanted to clean up some other things though. So if someone's in that backend right now, and they're going through and setting up their tracking script, and it's maybe on the website, by default, Google Signals is not on. You definitely want to consider turning that on. Google Signals, this is the exact documentation from Google that I'm reading off of right here. But Google Signals is session data from sites and apps that Google associates with users

who have signed into their Google accounts and who have turned on ads personalization. So it's not going to track everybody that's signed in to be clear. But if someone happens to be signed in their Google account on their phone and signed into their Google account on their desktop and they've turned on ads personalization, in theory, you should get one view

for that person in GA4. You're not going to see two different sessions occurring like you would today in Universal Analytics with this Google Signals feature turned on. However, for some reason by default, it's turned off. I don't know why exactly, but you want to go into setup assistance, click on actions, then click manage Google Signals. And then there's a data collection tab. When you go there, click Google Signals data collection. Again, I'll pop a link in the show notes so people can find that in their own account. We had to go do that across every

account that we installed last summer. I think there was 50 something that Sophia and my team did. Boy, she hated me after that, but we now have Google signals data for all of our GA4 accounts. So that's useful. It might give us some additional information there. So definitely want to get that set up. Ad users, you don't need this problem. So you need to actually work with someone else, but when you need it, it's pretty valuable. So go ahead and add everybody in your company that you want to have admin access to. Frequently, we come across clients where they've gone, especially you're in there right now. If you, oh, I don't use the Google account anymore, but it's the one that has my analytics. Go ahead and give your main Google account full admin access.

When you lose access to analytics, there's no recourse. There's no button. There's no form. There's no contact. There's no ticket you can submit. When you lose access to your analytics account, whether it's the old universal or it appears to be the case in the new GA4 system, you are toast. So make sure that everybody you need to have be able to access that data can

access it. And unless you think someone's going to do some nefarious things, just go ahead and give them admin access, then they can save the account. If for some reason that account were to get removed, or we had a situation with a client last year, an employee set it up, the employee, nothing bad, the employee just moved on to another opportunity, but we were completely screwed because we couldn't get back into that account, had to go and remake the whole Google account, do a form reset. We eventually got back in there, but it was massively painful when all this employee should have done from the jump is just add the CEO, the COO of the company in as full admins, along with the agency that they were working with at the time. Definitely a valid thing after you're in there,

you're in that page already for Google Signals, flip that on, go ahead and head over to the users tab and add everybody else there that needs to be set up. And then you've got at least a base install in place there. Between users, between the base GA4 system, you've got the universal. And to be clear, universal and GA4 can still run side by side for the next two months or so. Now, probably on July, we'll probably recommend that we go into clients accounts and remove universal because it's probably going to be firing and wasting page speed resources for no reason and slowing down the site a little bit.

So we'll probably go ahead and take that out. But to this point in time, I still plan on keeping that all the way through that deadline and then seeing how it goes. Now, once you've got that, maybe come back in a few days or so. You might want to come back the next day and just make sure the GA4 system is tracking. You're seeing page view data, things like that. One thing that's helped me quite a bit, we were doing some debugging on a client for revenue tracking and GA4 has a really well done, in my opinion, debugging system. So you add a little snippet to the tracking code.

It's like debug view equals on. You go into the debug view inside of the backend of GA4. And literally instantly, you could have one tab open over here and the other tab open over here. And as you're doing changes, as you're modifying the code or hitting things, it shows up instantly in analytics. So you can quickly debug revenue problems. That's the thing that we were trying to solve.

Hey, how did the fees come in? Things like that. So that's a massive improvement on universal, which you would, you'd have this little real-time view, but only show you events. I wouldn't show you any other data. And then you'd have to wait with like goal tracking. You'd have to wait like a day and then come back and check the next day. You really don't need to do that anymore with GA4. Flip on that debug mode, open up debug mode in the backend of GA4. And you can pretty much do live debugging. I did it on a Zoom call with a client, live debugging of GA tracking issues, which is a huge step up. So I think that's a really legit feature,

especially as you're getting going, you might want to leave that debug view on. I don't really see any harm in leaving it on. I don't think there's any harm in leaving it on for the long-term. Certainly when you're getting things set up, maybe you want to flip that on as you're working with your team,

your web developer, your agency to get things live and up and rolling. I don't know, have you used the debug view or what's been your- I have used the debug view. It just reminds me a lot of tag manager just really being able to dig in and figure out what is in firing because there were certainly some times when we were trying to set up the tag manager side of things and trying to figure out okay what part of this tag isn't firing is it the why how why are we not why are we why why is it working why isn't it working so that was the first thing when i saw a

debug view in play within g4 that was game changer because that does allow you to not sit on some of those oh here's a discrepancy here's a discrepancy because as we all know those are small things that make a big difference when it comes right down to the bottom. It is that reporting has to be as accurate as possible there. So to be able to really break that down right within the system, I think that's very helpful. It is. I think that in general, that's something that, and I think over time you could manipulate universal to, to make, to get close on that

goal tracking, but to not have to wait that 24 hour period or the 12 hour period, or even a three hour period for some of that real time data to refresh and see if it's actually coming to the system that I think it's not having to push a product out or project out an extra day or an extra two days. That gives me the peace of mind here that, and again, hopefully that we're not going to find any bugs in that system or anything like that as we're debugging. But there's the hopping back into Google Signals. I think that's another huge thing there to be able to really, as we look at the cross

device, as we look at the multiple interactions that can happen, having that sign in be the primary, if they have that personalization in place, being able to, I would say, generate a richer picture of that user and everything that is going on behind the scenes. I think that's going to be a huge, there's a lot of stuff to get excited about with G4. I think it is. It's a matter of, can we find it? That is going to be the key is, can you find it? Can you make it look, can you bring it into a dashboard that is going to look similar to what you have right now or what maybe even an improved dashboard and reporting. But with that, we'll dive into next month as we get into rounds two and three here. Yeah. Phenomenal. I have a few more things to button up here and then we'll leave a cliffhanger. I think that's what it's called in the industry

for episode two. All right. So the other notes I have here, once you've got through the signals, you've got your users in there, you've got your base page view data collecting. Go ahead. If you have Google ads linked to Google ads, I think there's benefit in doing that because you can start to collect some of those events inside of the Google ad system. Now you'll also have to migrate audiences, which if you're using a lot of retargeting audiences for now, again, no major hiccup, but if you're collecting data going forward, you want to make sure that you have, let's say you're remarketing audience. If you're retargeting everyone who visits your website, but does not make a booking, which is one of our most common audiences that we obviously

run ads to on our side of things. We want to make sure that audience is set up either as a new audience or migrate from your UA profile and get that lined in there. So definitely check that out, double check your audience tabs, make sure you've got the right data flowing in there so that you have it here in a few months. Then I think it gets into the next pieces, which is putting the conversion at the tracking in place for conversions and some other things that I think we're going to save for episode two, just so we don't make this a nine hour episode. So maybe we do again, leave a cliffhanger there. This is part one. If you've gone through this system, you've got the tracking set up, you've got PageView data collecting. Now you've got a little bit of time to figure out how

to do the events. And we'll dig into more of the specifics next week on how to approach it and go from there. But what else, Paul? Anything else that they should do in the base? Or does that give them the entry level, the Honda Civic of GA4 installs, and then they have more work to do? I think it is. I think that gives, hopefully that gives you straightforward steps. We might have made things a little more complex, but it is. Get it installed. Make sure it's installed.

Check to see, verify that it is installed. Check, but trust, but verify. Make sure that if, like I said, I assume that a lot of the major agencies in the space or all the agencies in the space have made that transition, but do that verification. Check to make sure you are ready to go.

If it means reaching out to your company and saying hey am i ready to go for g4 cool or do you know like i said conrad we've got the plug-in it's really helpful to be able to see what is tracking on your website what's not tracking on your website see those pixels behind the scenes but get some of those best practices in place get some of the just basics, make sure that you're installed, take a look through, start browsing through, see what kind of data you are getting if you, if it is active right now. And then hopefully we'll get some questions coming out. People who are starting to see people who are starting to have questions about what they're missing or where we can find X, Y, and Z. I'd love that feedback from some listeners who have those questions right off the

bat. It's going to help us make kind of parts two, parts three, and who knows, part five, six, seven, if we need to have those a little more effective in helping you find where the information you're looking for there. No doubt. I like that. Yeah. Like I said, we'll cover a little bit more on the next episode. We'll dig into like events and e-com tracking and all the stuff that I get excited about. And I think there really is some new compelling stuff inside of analytics on that. Also, Paul's a little bit, if you can't tell to the recording at this stage, Paul's a little bit of a skeptic. I'm trying to convert him a little bit. Cause like, this is one of those inevitable things. It's going to happen whether you like it or not. So you may as well have a smile on your

face is my philosophy. It's like, I hate going to the dentist, my guy. But once I get there, I try to be in a good mood. I try to look at the positives and that's what this feels like for Paul. He's going to the dentist and getting a crown, but we're going to try to make it fun along the way as we go through these episodes. Yeah, that's right. Awesome. And thanks to Paul for joining me as always. Appreciate it.

We will dive more in next week. If you've appreciated it, kind of some of the chat today about analytics and what you're looking to do. If you have questions, please do email us. I'm Conrad at buildupbookings.com. Paul is paul at bintory.com. B-I-N-T-O-R-Y.com. If you have questions or things that you want us to cover in the next episode,

please let us know. And we'll definitely record that and put that out there soon. And we'd love a review. If you have any feedback, please do leave us a review on any, pick your podcast player of choice. iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts. We'll take it anywhere. If you have the time and the consideration to do that.

Thank everybody for listening. We appreciate it. And we will catch you on the next episode.