Heads In Beds Show - Part II: Google Analytics 4 Is USELESS Without These Settings + Events...

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad dive into part 2 of the Google Analytics 4 mini-series and dive into specific events, tracking and methods on how to best prepare your vacation rental website for tracking useful events and data. Conrad works hard to share with Paul the benefits and upside of the new Google Analytics platform, and shares a review story at the end.⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellGoogle Analytics 4 Enhanced MeasurementGoogle Analytics 4 Ecommerce Tracking🔗 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 today? Great, Conrad. Just another beautiful Monday morning here.

Starting the week off. How about you? How are we doing this week yeah pretty good can't complain it's definitely my kids went to the pool yesterday at my mother-in-law's house so it's a little too cold for me I don't get in sub 80 they get in at 74 yeah I went golfing instead so not my thing but they had a great time Julian got sunburned my oldest so yeah we're. I was slathering aloe in his back this morning and sending him to school. So you can feel where he will actually get very tan. Good thing he has my wife's skin, not my skin,

which is pasty white. So I'll get it. There you go. We're not quite up to sunscreen weather, like necessary sunscreen weather. I think we've been hitting the 70s this week. We'll probably be getting there, but that's, I do, I envy the pool and the sunscreen.

Those are just the summer, the summer good feels of, even that smell of sunscreen, that's, I don't know, it sends me back a few years or sends me back to experiences of, yeah, that's the good stuff there. So for me, peak summer is the,

yeah, sorry, for me, peak summer is the sunscreen, like you said, and that is the, it's the watermelon for me, peak summer is the, yeah, sorry for me. Peak summer is the sunscreen, like you said, and that is the, it's the watermelon chopped in half and then just the watermelon, like you eat it and it drips down the, the chin and now it gets caught on my beard hairs. That's peak summer to me. I agree.

That's yep. Yep. Corn on the cob there as well. Same thing. Anything again, maybe we shouldn't be having beards during the summertime, but Oh, it's worth it.

I don't know. I'll have, I'll take a dirty beard and extra cleanup at the end of it. if I get watermelon and corn on the cob. Yeah. All right. I know people tune in to hear about watermelon and corn on the cob, particularly watermelon talk. But I think we're supposed to be doing GA4. So we'll skip marketing minute this week. We'll come back next week with some marketing minute stuff. I don't know if I saw anything backbreaking and we have a lot to get to today. So we will dive right in and we are covering part two. If you haven't yet heard part one, do head on down. Not the previous episode to this one, but the one before that we're taking

every other one here on the GA for train for a little while, the part one, we talked about the basics, getting the GA for script installed on your website, making sure you're collecting page view data, debugging a few settings, you want to flip on the back end signals, and so on. So if you haven't heard part one, go back and check that out. I think we did a decent job of getting people to get the basics done. But now I think we do a bit more of a fun, detailed conversation on part two, which is basically all about the event tracking. And very importantly, for most of our clients in the vacation rental space, e-commerce tracking, online booking, a lot of new functionality that is there now that wasn't there in Universal before. And this is part of my broader effort to open Paul's

eyes a little bit. He was a little grumpy this morning, a little curmudgeon-y about having to go through and talk about GA4, given that he doesn't like it. So we're trying to win him over a little bit because as we said last episode, he has no choice. So you may as well just get into it and then we'll figure out how to make it good from there. I was going to open here and talk a little bit about the events that we want to track. So anything you want to lay some groundwork with on or any thoughts based on the, I sent you over one of our internal help docs on the build up side. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Yeah, I continue to see the value potentially down the road of G4,

but it's still, I think my main complaint here is still, it's a lot of work. It's a lot of custom effort on the backend. And this is also why we're going through this in the detail that we are. There's a lot of configuration that has to go into this,

but ultimately we're getting the data that we want, the data that that has to go into this, but ultimately we're getting the data that we want, the data that we need to run our business to make data-driven decisions. So it is, I'm going to continue to drag my feet on this a little bit, but the more I've done, the more research I've done, it is probably given it a little too, I mean, considered it to be a little too crazy and extreme. And a lot of it is pretty straightforward with our nice little Google tag manager container and all that you can do with helping to implement through there. Yeah. It's, I think I, this is one area where I am happy. I'm on the homeowner side of things just because we have maybe a few more straightforward,

Hey, form submission or more easily event-based custom or recommended events that we're running through there. So it is for any of you who do rely on the booking side of things, which is probably a vast majority of you in the vacation rental space for the direct booking and being able to track that, this is going to be an important episode and making sure that as we are transitioning from G3 to G4, you're not losing any of that critical business information there. So there's my begrudging toss back over the fence to you here. It's like, we're chipping away.

We'll get there eventually. And I think actually you bring up an interesting point there. And it's part of the reason I think that the tension does exist. Then I feel it too. I've just maybe mentally moved on a little bit faster than you have. But it's that some things that you're used to are gone and they're probably not going to come back. That's the frustrating part for me. A hundred percent agree there. And that's not fun. There's pieces that are basically coming back or they're there, but they're in a different format, a different

flavor, a different language, whatever you want to call it. Right. It's, I used to do this way. I can still figure that information out, but now I have to do it that way. So that's, we'll talk about that a little bit specifically around like the e-commerce tracking. And then there's things that are pretty much the same. It's just maybe the name of the report changed a little bit, or maybe the, where you find that information changed a little bit, but it's pretty much the same exact thing that they carried over one for one or in an equivalent fashion. I have five really high level kind of pieces to go through. So I have the event and then I have a few examples under that. I have revenue. I have a few examples under that. And then I want to dive into some other settings and

more like advanced stuff that's worth digging into. So I'll go through pretty quickly here, the types of events, and then we'll dive into the reason for tracking these, what these actually mean. And ultimately like going forward on a monthly basis, looking at this data and understanding what you can actually do with that information. If the number's going up, going down, that's always the next question is, okay, what do we want to actually go from there? All right. So the first event tracking that we're now putting in typically through Tag Manager is actually just called a search event. So inside of GA4, there's a bunch of different events. We talked about the standard events last time, and we also linked the standard events in the show notes. So if you,

again, if you want to go back two episodes, you'll see the part one of GA4. There's a bunch of standard events that Google Analytics 4 tracks. So that means just by putting that code on the website and firing it, you get like page view data, scroll data, if they're clicking on links, etc. But the search event is not one of the standard ones, but it is one of the events that you can set up. So the search event, how I use it typically, or how I've been using it with this new kind of setup here is actually just tracking when people enter dates and put in dates, whether it's on the property detail page level, or whether it's on like the homepage, most of our clients, depending on how the website designed on the homepage, will have a check in date, check out date, some different criteria, and then they hit submit.

And then we can actually pass that in as a search event back to GA4. So I like this event, I like tracking this, because it's good to know, ultimately, metrics that we used to use before, like I was guilty in the past of using time on site. And I would generally say, generally speaking, time on site being higher usually tends to indicate that the guest is more engaged, they might be more likely to book and so on. But I've rethought that as we had to go through this process with GA4, because that doesn't necessarily, that doesn't always correlate just because someone spends a lot of time on the website doesn't mean that they're exactly ready to book right now. In fact, they may be spending a lot of time on the site, this kind of melted my brain a little bit when I dug out this insight on a client site where their time on site,

high time on site customers sometimes indicated that they couldn't find what they were looking at and they actually didn't ready to book. Yeah. So instead I'm thinking if they're putting in dates on a property detail page or a homepage, they're clicking through a photo gallery. They're starting the checkout process. We'll get there in a second. These are the things that indicate that they're ready to book, whether it's they're on the site for a minute or 10 minutes or an hour. Those are the actual acts, right? If you walked into a retail store, I could walk around Walmart for two hours and not buy anything. My wife can't walk in for two minutes and not buy anything. But so the time in the store would have no correlation. If you looked at myself and my wife as data points into

what we buy with her, she walks in with a cart and she's walking out with 200 bucks worth of stuff. That's just how it's going to go. So these events, the way that I'm thinking about these events going forward, starting with search, is what are the actions that people take on the website? What are they clicking, doing, filling out, submitting, engaging with, et cetera, that indicate a conversion is more likely to occur? And for me, search is the starting block there, if you will, to getting towards that booking process. So I guess your thoughts on search and maybe other insights that you have from that initial process there. So search is actually the one thing that i used to try to heart but try to scrape essentially from url data so that was something where it was in google tag manager for specific booking engines i we could

go in and after they had done their search versus based on the dates or whatever we could pull stay intent and i use the air quotes pretty we could pull stay intent. And I use the air quotes pretty heavily there with stay intent, because you don't know what's defaulting, how those dates are being filled in. But we had a pretty good idea of month by month, where that search intent was going to. So we had to put in on each individual month, I think there were four or five tags associated with that. So over the course of the year, you're putting like 50 tags in just to get some search intent. Now, it was limited in what we were actually able to pull. We're pulling like the page URL slugs and stuff like that to be

able to say, okay, April 1st to April 15th or something like that. Didn't give us a lot, but at least we could generate an audience based on that. So this is where the fact that looking at your tutorial and how you're setting things up, this is probably the biggest ease or pain point eased for me thinking about how I've previously done things in Google Analytics Universal Tag Manager and being able to set that up on the search side. This is incredibly important information because I would agree that is a much higher intent point of going in and looking for and maybe spending time on individual unit pages as opposed to deciding that two minutes on the page, they are ready to book or they are

looking for X, Y, and Z. So just as a high level item, this was one that I was excited about, just knowing that the transition to do something like this would be much easier. Now, would you now, I'm sorry, I'm going to hop in real quick. The search event, would that be one? Would that be a recommended event where Google's got it semi pre-populated? Or is it a true custom event where we have to do all the customization within that? Yeah. So to be clear, there's two different categories of events inside of GA4. So the search is not a custom event. That is a

default event inside of GA4. However, you have to tell Google when and how to fire it. So that's what we're doing inside Tag Manager. But you triggered a memory for me a second ago when you said that, which is that I always found that my position on goal tracking and things like that inside of analytics seemed to be very different than other people. And I used to think it was me. And now over time, I've realized that I was of course completely correct and these other people were wrong. But anyways, what other people would do, and I saw this from other agencies that we compete with is they would have an event or excuse me, a goal inside of GA and universal analytics. And it would say time on site, five minutes, fire a goal. Yeah. Like stuff like that. So these were, they were meant to be like

engagement goals, which I understood where they were coming from. But the problem that I have with that is that if I'm bringing a report to a client, a goal for in my mind needs to be something that they actioned. At least that's how I used to think about it in the universal context. So I'm like, what I always said is they had, you had to have passed personal information from the guest to you for me to call it a goal. So in that vein, it could be an email signup, a newsletter signup. It could be a contact form. It could be a live chat if they actually finished the live chat and they gave information. Obviously, the best one would be an online booking. And that's a different type of goal.

We'll talk about e-com in a second. But those were things where I'm like, hey, these are things that ultimately are going to move you forward because you have John Doe at gmail.com. Now you can reach back out to John Doe and try to get him to book your property. Now, I think with GA4, now I have a very different view of it because now I'm measuring, okay, yes, that goal idea still exists. but now we can just name it. Now we can just call it something like property detail page, ask a question form or something like that, which we could do before, but now it's okay, that's that bucket. There's the personal information

passed from the guest to the home, from the property manager bucket, put that over here. There's this engagement bucket, which previously I had fairly empty, to be honest with you. I didn't have a lot of the numbers that I could share with the client that other than just summary numbers where it's okay, yeah, this there was time on site here of three minutes, or hey, they average they looked at six pages on average on their website from this traffic source. And these were okay indicators. I was actually doing a report earlier last week for a client for their April numbers. And basically, I was saying like, hey, you're getting roughly equal traffic from this source and that source. But this source is just dominating this other source in terms of engagement, time on site.

And yes, they were also making bookings on a much higher clip. So it was easy to justify this traffic source was worth it. This traffic source was not. In fact, the traffic source that was performing poorly or more poorly, I should say, actually cost them more money to drive the clicks and drive the traffic in, et cetera. So that was an easy optimization that we found. But now this middle bucket of engagement, it could be a lot of things, by the way. We may come in and add more to this.

Maybe we do another episode like a year from now and we revisit some of our assumptions that we had today once we use GA4 for an extended period of time. And we say, what do we think? Because a search is an interaction that's useful. Again, we've said this in the past. I know people looking through a photo gallery is, in my mind, a pretty meaningful interaction. People using the share icons on the page is a pretty meaningful interaction. They tap that share button, they send it to their mother, brother, spouse, wife, husband, whatever the case may be. That's a pretty good indicator

that they're interested in booking as opposed to they came on the property page, they looked at a few images and they bounced like maybe not as strong. So yeah, starting with the search is I think I wanted to go back on that story around like goal tracking and ultimately what this means, because I think what we're going to be doing going forward, and this is a super overused term in marketing. I don't like it because it doesn't, this isn't actually how it works in the real world, but a funnel essentially of like people coming in the top, they're checking out what you have to offer. A search is one step in that funnel, a view of the property detail page. That's what we'll talk about here in a second is the next step, then start checkout, then complete checkout. So let's go over there to

the view property detail page. So once they do a search, they come in and they look at a property detail page. So we're tracking those under the event that's actually called something a little bit different. So obviously, Google didn't build GA4 in thinking of vacation rental companies as their primary use case. They mostly, yeah, we'll work on that with Google. I got a guy. No, I'm just kidding. Instead, they think of it mostly in the context of e-commerce. So this is, it's a bit of a strange event name. We use the event name that's part of the default GA4 event tracking set called view underscore item. So again, it makes more sense if you're selling like hats and t-shirts and Yeti cooler cups and microphones and things like that. So it doesn't

make perfect sense, I would argue, view item in the context of a vacation rental property, but whatever, close enough. The reason that we're doing that is that we're trying not to make a bunch of custom events that don't make a lot of sense. So we're going to have to do a lot of extra configuration for we're trying to stick to the defaults where and when it makes sense. I'm not opposed to doing custom, but I'm trying to stick to the defaults again, where and when it makes sense. So this view item one is having people actually looked at a property detail page. So yeah, I guess I'll throw it back to you then in that case. So what were you doing before on this? Maybe that's how we'll do this is I'll tell you how to do it. You tell me you did it before.

And that was one of those where I don't think we had good visibility into that that's i think part of other than just all pages and then a filter yeah exactly it is and you could if you wanted to do check out the specific the detailed page page analysis or stuff like that i'm now forgetting that specific section of universal analytics, but it is. You could judge by page just by going into the, I would say, session explorer there and see what the top performing pages. But seeing what the top performing pages are doesn't know if you looked at the average Google Analytics page performance, maybe a third of all of the page views are going to a property description page or something like that. I got the homepage, probably the high level rentals page is probably the second or directory pages, stuff like that. But then we're coming into those property description pages. So obviously it's that maybe second or third in the process, the sales funnel as we're looking at

there. So I think it's absolutely, there are not many websites that are set up where you can book without making it to that property description page. So I think it's a critical piece as far as making sure who's making it there, who's abandoning from there, where they're going from there. So I love it. And that's something that there's ways to find it better, but to have an event specifically categorized for it and to be able to categorize users and experiences and sessions by that, I think it is super helpful. Yeah, that's what I like. And think about the numbers too, right? So we're going to generate a lot more view PDPs, like view item events in GA4 than we are searches.

I would assume by a ratio of roughly five to one, we'll see once we actually look at a lot of them over an extended period of time. But that's been what I've learned in the past is like an engaged visitor tends to look at multiple properties. Usually that's a good sign for engagement. That's a good sign for conversion. If someone comes in, does a search on your vacation or website and looks at one property, it's very rare that they book that property.

In fact, I would argue that when that happens they'd already decided from another source but they like actually were on your website previously they were like i've looked at these seven but i've decided this one's the one i'm going to book let me go ahead and book it that's something that you know we do see sometimes or it's someone else does all the research and then grandma or grandpa with their credit card or mom and dad with the credit card actually makes the booking so like they come directly in off property detail page from direct source from a direct source in terms of traffic they put in their car to book right away and it was like a two-minute session they didn't decide to book your property in two minutes i don't care how amazing your properties are no

one goes from oh thinking about it to it's like buying a car right there's like an extended process that happens inside your head before you actually make the purchase even if the actual event of signing the paperwork or putting in the checkout the credit card on the checkout page might only take a minute or two. And so, yeah, go ahead. That's where the, I think the biggest loss and from Universal is going to be that multi-touch and then figuring out where it is. Because if you, the one nice thing about G4 is if you do have an app and more outside of our space, probably, you can try to connect those experiences together. But ultimately, yeah, the one that you're going to see there is that

they probably did a branded search because they have already been there or someone's already been there. It's dates and rates. They're at the bottom of the funnel. Just getting to that point where they're streamline that process. And it's almost you almost wish you could have that streamlined process for them so that it didn't. If they already know the dates and rates, give it to them. Give them the easiest, cleanest process. Put in that credit card and go. That's something that, yeah, I think just being able to consider some of those items, consider some of those data points that we didn't have before is huge there.

Yeah, right on. Okay, so far, just a quick recap. We've done an event trigger for searching for properties, putting in dates, and actually looking and putting in specific information, looking for a specific property. We've also done viewed what I call viewed PDP or viewed property detail pages. So they've actually gone in and looked at homes, condos, whatever you happen to market, cabins, chalets. We should do a little episode on all the synonyms of what a vacation rental property could be called, short-term rental, whatever the case may be, or keyword stuffing. what a vacation rental property could be called short-term rental whatever the case may be where keyword stuffing anywho so now we get to in my opinion where the rubber really meets the road where they've actually started the checkout process so everything they've done so far is dancing this is the actual moment of truth in the sense of okay they've they're on your website they've gone through the process they put in dates they've decided property abc is what they're looking for paul's awesome chalet conrad school cabin whatever the case may be. And they've now clicked the button that says checkout now or begin checkout or whatever copy

you use there. And that is something that I think is very critical to track. So inside of analytics, GA4, it's called begin underscore checkout. That's the event name. That one's actually pretty aptly named for this process, I think. So again, even in the context of e-commerce, I think that makes the most sense. So we're triggering and firing this when they get to that. Every website's a little bit different, right? But like on most of the sites that we're using, whether it's a template site or whether it's built by another industry agency, it's usually something like book now or something like that, or start to book now or whatever the case may be. Work with your agency, find out what they need to be actually doing to track that. But I love tracking this because this was always a bit challenging before

you could do with funnels, but it didn't seem to work very well in universal. Like I would have issues. The report was always very like opaque. Like I couldn't get there. I struggled with it. This is smooth sailing. Like we can now track very distinctly and put it up on a scoreboard to see what's going on every month.

How many people actually start that checkout process. And I think this is actually a better indicator in some sense of like how well your marketing is doing as opposed to looking at just conversion. So that's a weird phrase or weird thought, but let me think, let me explain that. The reason that I feel that way is that people starting the checkout process, they want a book. The reason they're starting the checkout process is they want to see all the fees. How much fees are you going to charge? How much is cleaning, damage deposit, admin fee, guest fee? We have a whole thing here. We'll go over fees in a second when it comes to e-com tracking, but people are now very hyper aware of fees.

So they start the checkout process because they want to see, all right, on the page that I have to put my card in on, what's the actual money that is going to hit my credit card? And when, if you do split payments or multiple payments with everything included. And that is in my mind, why they start the checkout process. A lot of people don't hit that book now, but to start the checkout process, meaning to actually book right now, what they're trying to do is say, okay, I've gone through, we've decided this property, we've decided these dates, it's going to be $2,774.82. That's what it's going to be. And then they go back to their, again, their mother, brother, cousin, uncle, husband, wife, whatever. And they say, okay, that's what it's going to cost. How do we want

to split this up? And then they're going to decide to come back later and hopefully book it or not book it based on how they go through that process typically. So that's, I think, a really interesting thing to chat, check on and track, because then you can ultimately figure out, hey, how many people are like, have that really high intent, they're actually ready to book, it's really at that point, just a question of cost and things like that. So this was stuff I tracked before, but I would imagine you have some thoughts as well. And let's begin check out of that for sure. It is that was something where card abandonment, and just that was the application, the managed service that was huge for us there.

But as far as being able to present a metric or a KPI based on the number of like abandonments, I would agree. That's always what we were searching for directly within Google Analytics. It just wasn't there. Or we struggled with the same, like wanting to go down into the detail that we wanted to do. Now, within the card abandonment software, obviously, there's more visibility there and how many abandonments are happening and stuff like that. But as far as bringing it without having to build a or buy a third party solution to give you that visibility, which why do it if Google Analytics is allowing you to do it and giving us better visibility into

how to track that now? Awesome. Take advantage of that because I'm not saying that you may want a cart abandonment solution to help you fire off some of those automated emails and recover more of that revenue, but just having the ability to see how many people are abandoning before you have that discussion or try to figure out what needs recovering, maybe you don't need a separate solution. Maybe it's something that you can build in-house or you can make the necessary updates to your website just by taking a look at the analytic information there. So another area where I think it's critical understanding how many people are abandoning that booking process. And you can put the story out there or the narrative out there that is it because they are, they're doing a

large group booking and they're trying to confirm with other travel parties? Or are they going to the brand website, comparing the OTAs, going to all those distribution channels to find the lowest, as you're saying, fees, rates, all that stuff. Another critical area and just understanding, I think it's an overall website hygiene metric of how many people are abandoning the website overall, but how many people are abandoning the checkout process or the booking process and how can you resurrect that there a little bit. Yeah. And ultimately, I think the way that I think about this is there's a ratio that you're going to be able to calculate here very quickly once you get to the e-com section

in just one second. And it's how many people begin the checkout and how many purchase. That's the ratio that you want to track over an extended period of time, one week or one day or whatever, right? That's not really that useful. Look at that data, unless your website's just absolutely massive. But looking at it and saying, so for example, I'm looking at a client where we do have all this tracking set up. They're our beta client here a little bit. So they've had data running for a bit. Last month, they had 115 people start the checkout process. So they fired that begin underscore checkout event. And they had 11 bookings. So roughly, that's roughly 10%.

That's actually a little bit less than that, isn't it? 9.6, if you want to be exact. 9.6% of people who actually started the checkout process completed the checkout process. Now, we don't know because this is a relatively new client, to be honest, as well. We don't really know how that compares. Is that way better than last year? Way worse? Is it pretty average?

We don't know. As time goes along here, we're going to get a better sense of it. Once we have a good chunk of data coming in on a monthly, quarterly, annual basis, we can say, hey, typically, our checkout converts at roughly 10%. That's our average, somewhere in that range. If you have a month where it's at 20, that's really strange. Why is it so much higher? Dig in, figure out why. If you have a month where it's at 5%, dig in and figure out what the heck is going on. Because that is a very low amount of people actually finishing the checkout process from there. So again, before that would have been a really hard report to pull or you would have had to, I actually remember doing this a while ago where I was summing up, I think I was like summing

up the actual, like pages and analytics that people started that process, no subtracting or something from there. It was just a mess like doing this before. Now it's just the event fires. I'm in the I'm in GA4 and I'm under the acquisition engagement events tab. So I'm just looking at events tab. And then I just see all the different events that fired last month, 40,374 to be specific in total. 114 of them were the vegan checkout process. And what's interesting too, so event count per user, that's actually only 81 people who started that process. So some people start that process multiple times. In fact, the average number of events per user of people that have hired that event is 1.4, which tells me that about half

of the people who actually begin the checkout do so across multiple listings. And it's very possible if I were to really dig in, I would find maybe one person did it like 10 times and then everyone else just did it a few times before they actually completed the process. So that's also useful data, useful information to have as well, for sure. Yeah. And I think you've hit on another one of my points of 46,000 events over the last month. I think there's some vanity events in there. I think there's things that Google Analytics puts in, but there you go. That's why we're talking about these events, the critical events, the events that are actually going to move the needle and give you the data that's actually going to be helpful and

applicable as you're making those decisions there. So I see what you're saying. I guess the way that I think about it is like those 40,000 events were occurring previously. And they were, we just weren't tracking them or it's very difficult if not impossible to track them. I'm with you. So, so for example, like scroll events, like I've never been super bullish on scroll events. I've had clients that have tried to track them.

We do have one content client and for them it matters because they get revenue. So that's a bit of a different one. But it is interesting that 1500 people came to the website who fired a scroll event, and it only led to 2300 actual scrolls. So that tells me that like a lot of people never even scrolled the website at all. But it's always like clients, we have clients, everyone's well who had people that are obsessed with bounce rate, there's people that are obsessed with bounce rate on their team, how do we lower the bounce rate and this and that. And I find that a lot of the time, unless there's just some glaring huge problem on the website, it's kind of the wrong metric to focus on. There's

some people coming to the website that just aren't serious. They're not ready to book. You don't know what, in what context they came to the website in many cases, especially if it's like direct traffic or it's, you know, unassigned, we don't actually know where they came from. So trying to figure out what they want and stuff like that seems like chasing your own tail a little bit to me. Like I've never been super, again, like bullish or thinking like, oh, we can figure out and figure out how to lower the bounce rate. I think that's the wrong, usually the wrong metric to focus on. Now, if they're having true usability problems, they're bouncing because of that. That's a valid thing to discuss. But usually you don't find that

in analytics. You find that on your own website, going to your website, looking at it, using it, maybe doing a bit of cross testing across different browsers, things like that. Those are valid, I think, discussions to have. But having this number, this begin checkout number, going back to our events that we're tracking, I'd rather be more focused on that. How do you get more people to begin the checkout? That may be more of a design change on the property detail page. That may be more of a getting people through the process by making things load a little bit quicker and then seeing that improvement. Because if, in this case, 10% of people who come to the checkout actually convert, if we just get 20 more people in the

checkout next month, we should get two or three more bookings like that based on the averages that should hold. So I think people tend to hyperfix it in the wrong metrics. So focusing on these, I think is important. Agreed. Okay, so they've searched, they've looked at a property page, they've begun the checkout process. Now is where the fun begins, right?

This is how we get paid and everybody gets paid. You gotta get paid, right? You gotta make that actual booking. You gotta get that booking complete. So the last event is a unique one because this event, instead of analytics, of the ones that we've discussed so far today, is the only one that I would personally tie revenue to. So all the other ones are actions, they're intent, they're considering, they're engaging, they're thinking, blah, blah, blah, all great. Show me the money, right? As the famous

movie line goes. So on the actual final page, this is after they put in their credit card, they've actually hit the button, they've confirmed, they've agreed to all your terms and conditions, they're paying all your fees, you want to fire a purchase event inside of analytics, that's what the GA4 event is called purchase. And you want to carry in, I believe, three main categories of amounts. So number one, you want the value field inside of GA4 to include the gross booking value and a sum of all of the fees and taxes that you charge. That is the value field. You then want the tax field to, if this is appropriate for you, I know some people don't, if you have to pay tax, you want to put the taxes in the tax field separately because that's not really revenue, right? It's not revenue that we should be metric,

like building our GA or our Google ads tracking models off of because you're just taking that hundred bucks of revenue, revenue, tax revenue, and just giving it to the government, local city, state, whatever the case may be. So I like splitting that out. Then again, this is where the terminology gets a little bit sideways because this makes more sense for e-comm than it does for vacation rentals. But I believe the best thing to use is the markup called items. There's an items markup where then you could put in an item ID, an item name, price, quantity,

and then you can repeat those. So let me break down what that all means here in a second, because I think we spent a lot of time thinking about this. So item ID, in my mind, should be either the property ID or the property name of the specific rental that they're booking. So item ID, colon, and then you put in quotes, Conrad's Cool Cabin, if that was the name of the cabin that they booked. And this would all be done at the developer level. So if you're a property manager listening, and you're like, I don't understand what you're doing, you shouldn't have to configure this. I'm just, this is the type of data

that you would bring to your website developer that would actually implement this code on your website itself. So they would actually have to get into the backend, modify the checkout code and fire this on that page. Okay, so item ID would be the actual property ID there. The item name, you could actually just put the name in that field.

So I misspoke a little bit there, sorry. Item ID could be like the name of the actual ID in your system. So a lot of our clients, depending on which PMS they use, sure, it has a name. It's Conrad School Cabin, but really I'm ID 727 or whatever in their database. Sorry. And then item name would be the actual name of the property. So that would be where it says the property name there. Sorry about that. Now price is where the total rent amount would go. So the item here is the property, and then the price is the rent that was charged. So if it was six nights at 190 bucks a night, it would be $1,140 in rent that was charged. And for most of our clients, that's their commissionable amount, 25, 30% of that number,

not of all the fees and stuff like that. Then finally, underneath that, you would have quantity. And then quantity is what we've been using, again, more in the e-commerce context, it would be like, I bought three shorts. But in this case, we're using quantity to describe the number of nights that were actually booked in the property. So I booked Conrad's cool cabin for three nights, I would put in the quantity field three for three nights. Now, underneath that, this is where we get into a bit more of the detail on all the fees that you're charging. So in this case, for most of the ones that we've been thinking of, and the ones we've been setting up, we just simply have an item name, and then a price of that particular fee. So item name, cleaning fee. Okay. A hundred dollar cleaning fee. Item name, damage

to waiver fee. Okay. $200 damage waiver fee or whatever. Item name. We have a client that charges a facilities fee. We have a client that charges a hot tub fee. We have a client that charges a processing fee. We have a client that charges an admin fee on and on lots of fees, different topic for a different day on the show, perhaps of how to actually maybe like massage those fees. But if you're charging them, and they're on the checkout page, I think you should track them inside of GA4 accurately. Because at the end of the day, through all that, what you need to be able to do is go into Google Analytics, or your agency needs to be able to go into Google Analytics. And this is something that we sometimes struggle with, and we don't get this data. So we have to make assumptions or it works this way in one account, it works this way in

another account, it's a little frustrating, is what was the actual revenue that you put in your pocket from that booking? So if it's $1,000 booking, that doesn't really tell the whole story, right? Because it may be a $500 booking with $500 in fees. And yes, I have seen that. And you keep roughly 600 of that, maybe your revenue, the other 400 goes to the homeowner. It may be $1,000 booking where you only got $200 in fees. The reason that you want to track all this out is that you need to be able to have your agency or have your marketing team go into your account frequently and say, okay, they changed the cleaning fees. That's fine. That's not really under my control, but really that's not revenue. It's just kind of pass through. Like we're taking

a hundred bucks, we're giving the cleaner 85, 90 bucks. And then we're just really covering our costs on that little tiny margin that we have. Same with taxes, right? Whereas we have a client who charges an admin fee. That's basically all profit. Like he's, yeah, I charge $150 admin fee. That's not commissionable. You know, it really covers some of the card processing costs, things like that a little bit. But really, that's my, that's what I actually make my money on. Without that, I really wouldn't be profitable. So that's good for us to know, because over time, we can track and say, okay, we drove $10,000 in rent this month off our Google ads, good info to have. But we also couple that with another $1,000 of admin fees, which are basically all profit. So he's going to make about 2K from the

commissions on the rent, and he's going to make another $1,000 on the admin fees. Seeing that outside of GA4 is awesome, because all you need to do is you need to go over to GA4, you click over on the monetization tab, then there's an e-commerce purchases tab over there in GA4, and it'll actually list every single item that we're talking about a minute ago. So the name of the property, it'll show you that the rent, it'll show you the cleaning fees, it'll show you how many cleaning fees you charged last month, or how many people got those, it'll show you the hot tub fees, or whatever was charged, you can look at all that data in one simple table view, you can sum it all up. And then you can see the actual mechanics of how really how things are working behind the scenes. So I actually love

this. I think they've improved this drastically from how it was before and being able to track these purchases and track the amount of revenue coming in and most importantly, understanding where it's coming from. And then when we have those more detailed discussions for our clients, okay, we made this much, but how much of it really helped me understand your finances a little bit better. So I can actually optimize my campaigns towards the things that generate more of the fees that you need maybe, and less or more of the bookings that you need and less of what you don't need. I threw this at you before we hit record. I'm sure you skimmed it. But any thoughts on this approach when it comes to GA4 revenue tracking, which I think is actually pretty useful? Yeah, I think it's really next level. It's the type of stuff where I would have loved to have

me. I like more data than I ever need because I think it does. It helps just make data-driven business decisions. I say that often, but I truly believe it. If you don't have the data, if you can't measure it, then how can you make the decisions based on that? How can you make better decisions to make more money, to not just make more money, but to let your business run more effectively there? So to see it broken down in this granularity, I remember going back and forth with web services teams and web developers trying to figure out e-commerce tracking for a variety of different websites. It is.

I am still interested in seeing if you set this template in front of the average web company, web services company in our space right now, would they be able to pull this easily and nicely and be able to generate the code necessary to do that. That's my hope. It is. I hope that when someone has developed that universal script or whatever that looks like there, the universal tagging system to be able to really give this granularity, I think that's something that we should be quick to share with the rest of the industry there. And just because it is, it's going to be something where it truly does allow us all to understand in an age where fees are just as important as the rent itself. How am I really going to make that money? And where is that breakdown coming from? And do I need to adjust those numbers? Am I taking enough?

Am I taking too much of a cleaning fee? Or again, taking that to the next level of, okay, now that they've gotten to this point of we've seen where they got into the property description page and the booking page and all these items, we can really follow them through and start to make those maybe assessments of, okay, is it the cleaning fee? Is it the experience on the website? What really is it? And having that data to inform those decisions and having just more comprehensive information. I don't know, Conrad, you might be turning me into a believer at some point here. We're two episodes into this, and I think that there may be some value in this. Nice. Okay. We're getting there for sure. So I like that. We're making some progress. Yeah, I'm really bullish on this. And I think that you're right. I've sent this to one particular web service company who shall remain unnamed.

And they've tripped over it a little bit. But I'm like, look, I get it. It's brand new. They've never done this before. I'm not going to sit here and name them and name and shame them. It took me hours to figure out how to get the script working the way I wanted to. If someone's never looked at it before, I'm not going to be critical of them figuring it out. Now, I think it's worth the headache, if you will, or time or development resources to figure this out. Because hopefully, too, once this is in, this should stay

the same for a decade, hopefully, that would be the goal is that we don't have to sit here and fiddle with this code over and over again. Now, I'm sure they'll make some enhancement and change it. That's Google for you. They're going to figure out ways to measure things a little bit better and track events differently. We have to change it, we have to change it. This is ultimately data, as Brooke would say, on the Vittori side, data is gold, right? So if we don't have this data flowing in back to our system, so our team, our agency, our marketing team can actually tell what's going on, then we're basically asking them to fly the plane and we're putting blinders on them. We're not letting them see at the windshield.

Maybe you could do it, but it's not really smart. I think it's better if you can see where you're going and see what's going on. Yeah, just to recap where we are so far. I know we're at time here. We got to put a bow on this one pretty soon. But we've gone into detail on search events, property detail page events, checkout events, and then most importantly, that checkout complete process. So I believe that if you listen to episode one, episode two, you have the GA4 code on the website, you're tracking all the basics, you've listened to this episode, you've got your agency or your marketing team to

actually go in and add all these events going in. I believe that you could look at a report, let's say in July or August of this year coming up, review all this data once you're once you have no choice and universal analytics data is gone and you can't look at it as the binky and the blanket behind like you want to. You have no choice. You look at this. I think you're actually gonna be pretty happy with what you're seeing at a high level. I share your concern and your frustration with some of the more advanced reports aren't there. We'll talk next week about some of the we just kind of have a grab bag like other things that we didn't get to in the first two episodes. But I think that you're in a pretty solid position if you go through and do these things. And believe me, we did not cover

anything remotely, everything by far as all the events that you could track. For example, we didn't touch at all on discounts. We didn't touch at all doing refunds. We didn't touch at all at doing exceptions. We didn't touch at all doing IP blocking. So there's a million things that we didn't touch. But I think if you did this, you would be confident and your marketing team would be confident in opening that report every month and seeing what's going on and having a really good understanding of here's what's coming in. Here's how people are behaving on the website. Here's what they're looking at, whether it's property detail pages, whether it's them starting the checkout process, or most importantly, whether it's them finishing the checkout process. And I think you'd have a pretty intelligent discussion with your agency or with your marketing team to be able to see your performance and then ultimately report on that performance and see what's going on. And then I did want to end with this thought because you said it a minute ago, but I'm always surprised by how often clients don't know their numbers. I won't say any names or call anybody out, but we'll get on sales calls sometimes and we'll be like, we'll ask questions like this and they don't even sometimes know what their margins are on things or they don't really understand like

what their actual cost is or what should we count as revenue or what is a good row as I'll say stuff like six, seven X is floor for a lot of our clients. A lot of our clients really want 10 X return on ad spend. So they spend a thousand dollars in Google ads. They want 10 K back in bookings. Those are the conversations that we'll have, but people just nod their head and go, okay, but some people could probably pay less and be profitable. Some people need to pay more, but they don't know.

Like, like a lot of those conversations, it's, I'll be honest, frustrating a little bit when you don't actually know your numbers. So I think knowing your own numbers before you get into all the tracking inside of analytics, you should know what matters here so that you can communicate and inform people who you're hiring or people on your team or whatever, what you actually need to optimize for. And I don't think you should make it overly simple or excuse me. I don't think you should make it overly complicated. I think you should make it pretty simple. Hey, this is where we get the most benefit from. This is what we're working on. Having two, three, four goals, I don't think you should make it overly complicated. I think you should make it pretty simple. Hey, this is where we get the most benefit from. This is what we're working on. Having two, three, four goals,

I think is pretty sufficient on a scorecard basis or a rock basis every quarter. And then have people put their attention towards improving those numbers. And then obviously you want to be able to have people on the backend track and see what's going on so you can continually improve those and get better. So what else, anything else?

I know we're going to do one more on this. We'll have a episode between now and then, but any other thoughts, sir? Should we put a bow on the, not like advanced, but like moderately advanced tracking for GA4? Yeah, it is. There's going to be 150, 200, probably 1,000 different data points behind the scenes in Google Analytics at any given time. And I think it is.

It's measuring what matters to you. You don't, you summed it up perfectly. There's, you don't need to measure and track 50 different data points every day, every week, every month. It could be three or four KPIs that truly are the best indicators of how you're running your business. And if you can get better visibility to that in G4, take every step you can do to do that, whether it is, whether it takes a little longer here over the next month and a half as we're getting ready to sunset everything out. But it is, make sure that you can see that you have the metrics so that when someone does try to sell you on marketing services, you actually have

those key performance indicators of what runs your business. Don't be left out there and have Conrad and I just scratching our heads on how are you still in business, sir or ma'am. That'd be great. Some people flying by the seat of their pants, which I can relate to. I've had moments where I've flown by the seat of my pants when someone's seven years in and they don't really know their margins at all. It does make me worry a little bit about what we're heading into. Yeah, know your numbers, know how they work.

And ultimately, you can get better results. And you can log into a report like this, a dashboard like this and understand it, make it simple. Few metrics, how people are checking out what I have to offer, how many people said they might consider it, and how many people actually gave me money. I think those are like, if you focused on those things every month

and you measured it at 30 over 30, and then year over year, I think you'd be able to improve it if you put your energy and time and effort on improving those metrics. So that is all for this episode. A little bit of a deeper one, but we appreciate you for sticking it out.

If we've done a good job of giving you some information and you wanna give us happy and look at give us numbers that make us smile leaving us a review would be fantastic so head into your favorite podcast player app of choice leave a review it's completely free cost you nothing puts a smile on my face gets paul really excited i tell my wife about it actually i put my head on the pillow at night i lean over to her and i go hey babe i got another review today on the podcast and she's i don't all right we tell bad jokes at the end but for seriously thank you we will catch you on the next episode thanks so much bye