Heads In Beds Show - Part III: Settings That'll Make Or BREAK Your Google Analytics 4 Reports

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad hit Part III of the Google Analytics 4 mini-series with a "grab bag" of Google Analytics settings to explore and flip on. They also touch on the record Meta fine, why Google kills so many projects and the perilous status of Conrad's beloved Celtics in the ECF. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellMeta ordered to suspend Facebook EU data flows as it’s hit with record €1.2BN privacy fine under GDPRNew button in the Explore Funnel reports in GA47 GA4 Features That Will (Hopefully) Make You Hate It LessKilled By Google🔗 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. All right. Hey, Paul. How's it going today? Fantastic.

Conrad, that's it going today? Fantastic. That's another beautiful weekend. We're heading closer into the summer here. Talking more about Google and Google Analytics, which is always my favorite part of the day here, favorite part of the week. Yeah, how are you doing? I've had better weekends, I'm not going to lie,

just from a personal interest perspective. And then it rained, I had to cancel tea times. You know what? They can't all be winners, I guess, is the literal expression. And then also, I guess i guess the figurative expression these come out a little bit later as the time of recording the celtics are down oh three and it's not good if this if i can clip this later on and then be like oh i called it i'll be like celtics and seven but my god there is no chance at all they're toast which it's fascinating to to be a sports fan actually i think i said this before personally when we to you and we haven't been recording which is that it's

much more painful in in my opinion, to watch a team that has the chance to win and has the chance to be great fail versus a team that's just bad the whole year. Now, granted, that's rare that I've experienced that for an extended period of time, but the Red Sox are no good this year. I know they're not going to win anything, but when they win, it's actually exciting because it's, ah, they weren't really

supposed to be that good. So when they win, it's more of I don't expect anything, you know what I mean? Whereas when you expect a lot and they let you down it hurts it hurts being from minnesota mediocrity at its finest in sports of all kind yeah it's i will say the burn doesn't hurt quite as bad when we go out in the first round against them or whatever it is or the twins haven't beaten the yankees and the 90s. It's all good. Like, this is something that we just, we deal with. So yeah, welcome.

Welcome to mediocrity. It's not a lot of fun. No, it's not a lot of fun. I'm worried for both our teams this year on the NFL side. We'll cover that in the fall here. I'm afraid mediocrity is on the horizon for both of them. Seven to nine wins probably for both of them. Let's see who is not winning today, unfortunately, is Meta. So they got

smacked down pretty badly. You flagged this for me. I didn't catch this. What happened over there? So it is. It's Meta being hit by a $1.3 billion EU privacy fine. Given everything that's happened around GDPR for the long, I mean, for forever. This is not a surprise now we've been dealing with gdpr for the last six five six years now so this is something that i don't think meta is going to be the last company that we see but really what they're talking about right now is the data transfer because a lot i assume a lot of meta servers are on u.s soil that data is going from europe to US. And that's with a data transfer. It's a data transfer ban that the EU has in place, in addition to as a subset of GDPR, whatever it is. But I do, I think that's a big number, first of all. And it's something that we really haven't seen.

Meta, I can't remember, there might have been another suit at some point on the meta side of things. But we're talking some pretty, pretty big numbers here, given everything else that's going on with meta, the instability there a little bit. I think people are really still underselling meta as an AI kind of pusher and driver here. I think we're all sucked into Bard and ChatGPT. But you forget that meta has been working on some stuff behind the scenes. Does this hamstring that at all? I don't know. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, I was actually curious. I Googled it while you were looking it up there. So last year, last 12 months, we have data for the 12 months ending March 31st, 2023. So a few months ago,

but they did $117 billion in top line revenue over those previous 12 months. So one 117th of their revenue was the fine, which was like me getting like a thousand dollar parking ticket or something, which wouldn't feel good, but it wouldn't probably break my back. That's the question is that, is this enough for Google or sorry, Google for audience lip? Is this enough for her meta to actually care enough about the loss potentially here of the fine to actually do anything different? Or as these things tend to do, are they going to accelerate the fines if they don't actually change what they're doing?

Yeah, I'm not sure. I wouldn't call myself a GDPRpr expert i find the whole thing very confusing i think it is a law that is like a fishing net where you go cast a fishing net and you have when i go fishing with my father-in-law it's like a bunch of bycatch caught in the net that you didn't intend to you snag a baby dolphin or something and you feel bad so before you check back in the water so i think that's the unfortunate bad part of this and the vacation rental world is you have to experience these like cookie banners and things like that. We work on sites in the UK, which we have before.

And it's, is that small business doing anything bad with your data? No, it's Facebook slash Instagram meta. Probably they're probably doing things you don't want them to do. So I don't know. I don't really have much of a take on what the AI product would be for meta. They've obviously made these huge missteps and mistakes in the past 12 months with the whole metaverse nonsense that really went nowhere that we've panned on the show before. So if you want to clip us a clip, we've talked about it before. I'm really not that bullish on it. Yeah, look, this is an advertising

platform to me, right? People, the reason that we can, the reason we buy Facebook ads, meta ads, Instagram ads, whatever you want to call them, is that people click on them and we get traffic and we get traffic that can give us eyeballs and a meaningful level of impressions. And if that, if those eyeballs were to go somewhere else, I'd learn that platform. So there's no love lost for me on this side of things for these platforms. I don't have any sort of emotional affinity towards them.

This one sucks for them. No doubt about it. This reminds me a little bit now of, and maybe you've seen this on the web services side of things, but I'm going to call them ambulance chasers. It's the people who are looking for the handicap accessible websites and there was actually a supreme court that actually went all the way up to the supreme court because there was a woman who had a thousand lawsuits out for sites that weren't i think it's ada compliance i was gonna say i'm gonna mess it up so fine yes

but the ada compliance there but they were questioning whether she had the standing she wasn't actually going to book the hotels or book the, and it was going after those hospitality properties there. I'm actually not sure where that one kind of came out. I'm not sure if it's been decided or anything, but it feels a lot like that where if this may be the straw that breaks the camel's back of one big suit like this turns into a lot of big suits like this or something like that. But yeah, that's, I don't, I think it's speculative right now, but anytime Meta is being associated with anything like this or something like that. But yeah, I think it's speculative right now, but anytime

meta is being associated with anything like this, I think we have to raise our eyebrows and just take a look and see, is it going to affect us at some point down the road? Yeah, I guess I think there's some logical pieces of GDPR. Maybe that's a different episode we do down the road is one of the good parts about it. I think the idea that someone can reach out to you cold from questionable data sources and there's no consequences for that seems a little bit gray at times. I think the idea that someone can reach out to you cold from questionable data sources and there's no consequences for that seems a little bit gray at times. I think the idea that, hey, there's a button that I can click where you delete me from your records. I think that's a valid thing for people to be leveraging and having that tool accessible to them. I would be fine with people having that tool inside of our database and saying, hey, I don't want to hear from you

anymore. I don't want you to store any data about me. I think that's a very reasonable thing, even though it does hurt our marketing performance slightly. So yeah, we'll see. Maybe we circle back to that. I know we're doing more of a measurement thing today on GA4. We'll do a grab bag, but I think you had one other thing you wanted to flag for people. Either we'll do a recap on it or just your thoughts on marketing live coming up or something. Yeah, we've got Google marketing live coming up. It's going to be, let's see here, May 23rd, 2023. This is usually the time where Google starts to announce the big releases, the big updates, the newest thing in search ads, YouTube, all this. I have to think there's going to be some

barred AI discussion and how that's being integrated into those products right now. I hope there's a little more generative search that we're getting. We got a little bit during Google I.O., so really hoping we take that a little further here. but it is, this is, I nerd out. This is my time. I watch all the sessions. I rewatch them. I look for the notes. I usually have a pen and paper and I take pages and pages. It's, I do this for the elections and I do this for Google marketing live. There you go. You all know my nerdiness now. That's how it is. Yeah. It's last year. This is when they started talking about having everybody verified now Now, about a year removed, where maybe I don't know, 30, 40, 50% of the way through those accounts. So it is I'm always

interested to see what the newest kind of features are, or the newest things to try out. Hopefully, there's some enhancements to help things perform better. But you can expect I'm sure we'll go into a lot greater detail on that if there's things that are that we can pull out and really make valuable for our audience here. Yeah, for sure. This episode will drop after that. sure we'll go into a lot greater detail on that if there's things that we can pull out and really make valuable for our audience here. Yeah, for sure. This episode will drop after that. So we'll probably do a recap either the front end of a feature episode and or go to google marketing live.com. It's not on a subdomain or anything like that.

.com slash digital and it'll show up there. We'll do a recap on that though. But yeah, yeah, that will be good to hear. So keep an eye out for that on a future episode. Let's turn the page maybe a little bit over to GA4. This is the third episode here on GA4. I think I'm calling it, internally I called it grab bag in our notes.

I don't know what you want to call it. So come back and listen to our previous GA4 episodes. Give those a whirl. I think you'll get some benefit from them, hopefully. Episode one was really like the basics, like getting the tracking code installed. Here's why GA4 is why you need to do this. The universal GA4 is expiring, or the universal, sorry, the tracking code installed. Here's why GA4 is why you need to do this.

It's the universal GA4 is expiring or the universal, sorry, GA code is expiring. Go back and listen to that one if you want that. Episode two, I think was our, I think probably one of our better ones that we've done as far as detail into a lot of information on event tracking that we're suggesting to people and also revenue tracking and how important it is and all the new features inside of GA4 as far as revenue tracking. So if you take direct bookings on your website, which if you're listening, you probably do, you want to be tracking this information and data and pushing it into there, if at all possible. So now we're going to just do, like I said, grab back episode, a bunch of different things that I've written down,

saved, archived. So it's not all my ideas. Mostly it's things that I've read, explored, et cetera, from other people. But yeah, let's dive into it. So my first one, actually, we talked about, we've touched on this very briefly inside of episode one, I believe, of this little mini series. But I thought I would bring it up one more time because you just may not have listened to that and recalled it. Google Signals data collection. So by activating Google Signals, this is not on by default. You have to go into your settings, then click data settings, then click data collection. And I'll try to see if I can do a little doc and put it in the show notes. If not, then just email me and I can send you a screenshot if you're confused about where this is.

But if you Google it, you should be able to find it. So by activating Google Signals, it's off by default by turning it on, you enable Google Analytics to collect data about your traffic in addition to the data collected through standard analytics implementation. When enabled, Google Analytics will collect information and associate it with the Google information

from accounts of signed in users who have consented to this association for the purpose of ads personalization. What this ultimately means, a lot of marketing gobbledygook there. You can track who were signed in users who have consented to this association for the purpose of ads personalization. What this ultimately means, a lot of marketing gobbledygook there, you can track who were signed in and they're opted in to be tracked across devices, which is fantastic because previously, of course, this was basically impossible, or it took a login, forced login, or it was very challenging for anyone to have it. Now you can go into a setting, flip a switch, and at least people using Gmail signed in who

have opted in will come up there automatically. If you're a fan of that, turn it on. Literally no downside, only upside. But have you played with this or what's your thoughts? That is, that's something that the cross device, cross device tracking of any kind is just always so difficult to put together and really being able to tie those user experiences together. And I think naturally that had to be when it was web plus app, they were already trying to different session things together. It makes perfect sense that they were able to put that, I would say, unify that experience within the reporting so that we can see it.

It is, you're spot on. There's, that I've seen right now, there are no downsides to it. I think the one downside just generally is that it does have to be something that's opted in on the user side. It's a double opt-in so but for most people i think that there there is there's some google is definitely pushing more people they're doing it just the ads in general pushing more people into recommendations and all this stuff on the you on the use general user side of things i can remember seeing get more personalized ads i can remember seeing those push emails as well, those push

notifications. So I think they're trying to opt more people into it on the user side so that advertisers are actually seeing some value there. So I do think it's a Google's making the push on both sides. But when we get the unification on both sides, I would say, yeah, you need to have that on because it is we know that especially in our space, so many people are going from device to device. And then a lot of people during the workday are inspirational planning, doing those trip searches and starting to put some dates together. And to be able to then connect that back into, if it's an Android device, yeah, you're

automatically logged in there. So you're going back over to your Chrome browser and going right back over there. Boom. Unify that experience. Awesome. Love it. Thank you, G4. I'm not going to say that a lot, but on this one note, we're going to say, okay, thank you, G4. I'm happy with you, right? Let's take a win. Let's take turns then. So I'll flip it back your way. I took signals. What's your next grab bag? So we'll talk a little bit about the conversion side of things. I think the conversions and the events, the ability to track as many events as we hopefully would need to do. With G4, we're able to track up to 300 events, custom events, any of those very specific actions that people are taking on the site.

Now, if you've got a five, 10 page site and very few calls to action and all these things, you're probably not going to need all that. But for those enterprise partners, those enterprise customers, those large property managers that have hundreds of units, this is something you're going to need. You're going to need to go down to the granularity to be able to track all those different items. Same thing with conversions, being able to go up to 30 conversions up from 20. That's something that, again, if you have specific actions on the website that are driving people further down the funnel or doing things like that, you want to be able to track those. You want to be able to give them the proper credit. And I do. I think that the attribution is certainly, that's something that we can talk a little bit in greater detail moving forward. But just the ability to name, to recognize all those individual events, I think is important because that was admittedly one of the weaknesses in Universal is some things got double.

You got a lot of double counting in there every once in a while. You couldn't always go down to the specific granular nature that you wanted to. So I hope that there's not too much configuration that needs to take place to get to those 300 events. And again, that's going to depend on the complexity of your website. But what do you think about just being able to go with higher numbers of events, the ability to track multiple conversions or lots of conversions, depending on what you're looking at there?

What do you think about all that? Yeah, I think it's fantastic. I shared on episode two of this little series that I was careful. I wanted to be careful about doing too many custom events because we could run out, but I actually didn't know the number. So I'm glad we put this number out there so that I could be aware of it. Because I think there is a time and a place to use custom events at some point, just the standard default events just literally don't make sense. But I think this goes to show you that you can't overdo it. I'm thinking of a client who would be like, make an event for every property, and then we're going to fire like all this event and push it back into you can't do that if you have a lot of properties. So that may

not be the most scalable strategy. So I like this number. It's great. 3300 events is going to leave plenty of headroom for further customization. All for it. Good job, GA4. So we're trying to compliment some of the things that are in here. It's good stuff. All right, I'll take my turn. So by default, I don't know why this is the case. The user and event data retention policy only stores two months of data for some reason by default. So I think that this is the exact area that you can find that. The data retention tab under data settings and then data collection.

There's a little data retention tab there. And it says this in GA4 currently, you can change the retention period for data you send that is associated with cookies, user IDs, or advertising identifiers. They do not control most standard reporting, which is based on aggregated data, but little conversion reports and things like that may not potentially work past this window. So I don't know why this is the case, but you can keep that data retention a little bit longer by just going into that section and then flipping it from two months to 14 months. Again, this doesn't affect like standard like page view data or reports or things like that. It appears to only impact like multi-touch attribution or some of these more advanced

reports that you might look at a little bit less frequently. But still, why only have two months of data when you can have 14 other than just saving a few pennies on Google side for storage costs? So yeah, go ahead and flip that on. We went did this for all of our accounts. Small thing, but one thing that hopefully may help if you're doing like year over year comparisons or something like that down the road. So yeah, go ahead and flip that on. We went and did this for all of our accounts. Small thing, but one thing that hopefully may help if you're doing like year-over-year comparisons or something like that down the road.

Yeah, absolutely. That is, again, more data is better. It is being able to measure against a longer period of time. Those longitudinal reviews and stuff, that's what you're looking for. And I think, especially with the, given the nature of the industry over the past three, four years, where there has been a tremendous amount of fluctuation, to be able to

only be able to go back a smaller time period or subset of time to it is I think that there's that's missing out on an opportunity. Now,, we've got historical data and we've got all that there. But anytime you're shrinking that window down, I feel like you're missing part of the picture, part of the story. It's always good to be able to get that data retention in place and keeping that in place as long as it can be there. Yeah, seems like no downside. What else has you excited? Seems like no downside. What else has you excited? While I'm still, I don't know. I have questions about the reporting. I have started to build, tried to build some custom reports and I've tried to do, take a look through the user exploration and I do like parts of the customization in the reporting.

It's still taking a little bit of time to really go into that. And it is, the old dashboards, I can see the improvements from the old dashboards to the new reports like that. That all makes sense. It's you're actually able to go in, diagnose and use those to solve problems. Now again, I think it's ultimately it's about setting up and creating the reports that are right for you. So not all of the, their standard template reports are going to be a great fit. And it is. And I think you need to, even the ones that do fit a user exploration report, I think you need to really refine that. So I think people are going to get a lot of value out of the reports over time. But there is, there's that transition of what am I looking at?

How am I finding, how am I aligning and getting the columns right? Or how am I getting the data points that I want to see? But it is, I would say once, once you begin to customize those, bring in some more of the custom features, the custom events, anything like that, there is a lot of value, a lot more value there than I would say the old templated dashboard. So I don't know if you've played much with the, or has tried to create any new reports right now, or have done anything with, I'm thinking maybe more on the e-commerce side of things is where you can drive some more granularity there. But what does that look like on the reporting side for you right now? What I'm trying to do right now, it's there, it's in that checkout report where you can see how many people go to a property detail page, how many start the checkout and how

many finish. But I have now a custom one that I've done for a client that's been running this the longest because I can do year over year. And that's more so what i'm looking for there so i need to keep playing with this a little bit more the functionally what we do we send all of our reports through agency analytics so we send them through third-party software so i'm always hesitant to put a lot of like client facing stuff inside of ga because then it would be like no go here log in etc whereas typically i can just send them a link when we do our reporting system sure so i'm trying to figure out the best way of doing that for ultimately what i'll probably do to be transparent. And there may be clients listening. So if you want this, let me know is if they want it, I'll make it for them. You know what I mean? If they're not going to look at it,

I'm probably not going to take a lot of time to put that together for a client that's probably not going to review that custom report. But if they want it, then we're happy to tinker and play and put a custom report together for them that would show them, let's say they want to know, of all of our oceanfront properties, which one gets the most page views on a monthly basis, we could create some kind of filter or something there. So I need to come back to this one a little bit. I don't have a great answer for you at this moment in time. So I need to keep working on it for sure. And the one thing with this is I still think that the best place to output the data, if you're going to use Google, it's still Looker Studio, like you still want to leverage Looker Studio to actually if you want it to look pretty if you want it to be reporting i think that's something where

the and i haven't done as much with the google g4 looker studio connection there so that's something i still have to explore and really see how you can take the reports that you're putting in there that the newly created reports or the standard reports whatever you're doing and moving those into looker studio because that, I think that's right now my biggest pain point is that it is, it's the visualization of knowing where I want to see it, how I want to see it. And I think being able to bring that G4, all those G4 analytics, similar to what we do right now in universal analytics, into Looker Studio or another analytics platform. It is, That may be what you need to do to actually display the data. So that's the one caveat I will say is that you may not like the visualization of the

data, but you can still manipulate that, putting that into Looker Studio and leverage that over there to use the Google partnership there of applications to make sure everything looks pretty. Yeah, for sure. Phenomenal. Let me dive in then to my next one that I have here, which is observed versus blended. So another one in the report, or it's similar to the data tab, excuse me, it's actually a little bit lower down the page here in the settings. So go to settings, go to your property level, then click on the reporting identity tab. And you will find by default that GA4 measures what they call blended data, which

includes user ID, Google signals, and then this keyword, modeled data. So modeled data is basically Google saying we are estimating, we are guessing, we don't exactly know in some cases, for various reasons why someone isn't showing in your report. So we can model, we can guess, and then backfill data and show data inside a report that didn't actually happen. I think on a big site, this is probably useful. I think on most smaller sites that we work on, I'm not as bullish on putting in data because I feel like that may potentially cause some issues where we can't validate the exact number of people that arrived on a site or the exact number of conversions or whatever the case may be. So for now, we're flipping off blended and turning on observed,

which is identical to what I just described. It measures a user ID, Google signals, device ID. However, it removes any model data. So if you're a huge site, you probably want to leave blended on. If you're a small site that needs accuracy in your reporting, you probably want to turn observed on under the reporting identity tab inside of GA4. So that's my recommendation there. Yeah, no, that's, I think that's, and I'll piggyback up anytime you're going into a lot of the predictive, any of the predictive analytics that G4 is doing here, whether that's predictive audiences, I think that's got some,

the signals are right, the events are right, you're tracking everything the way you should be. That is exciting to think about. Again, I want to see the data run through. I want to make sure that what's actually showing up is anytime you're using machine learning and AI, obviously it's the world we live in right now. But trust but verify, you got to make sure that the data coming through is there's a good prediction because for as many powerful items that we've seen on the AI side of things and machine learning side of things,

I think we've 100% seen recommendations and insights and things like that where you raise an eyebrow at the very least, whether that's in analytics, whether that's in Google Ads, really in any of the Google products when they have tried to integrate some of those items or some enhancements or optimizations. I think Google Ads side of things, certainly we always keep that healthy amount of skepticism. But even with some of the predictive insights that they had on the old universal analytics side of things, and as they've transitioned that into G4 too, it's, it is, it's where the signal's coming from. Why are they, why is Google seeing this as a valuable data point that they're trying to provide insights on versus what type of device people are using? They're going for the location. Okay. I think that's fantastic. Awesome to know where the people are coming from, but really what's moving the dial. And again, it's, they're going for the location okay i think that's fantastic awesome to know where the people are coming from but really what's moving the dial and again it's you're going to get as

much out of g4 with all this stuff as you want to put into it as you want to find and define and do all that i think that's anything we're saying here on any of these three episodes is you have i think g4 is giving us more opportunity to customize it, but you have to do it. If you really want it to get the most out of it, that's what you're going to have to do. You're going to have to dive in deep and make sure that you are setting up 5, 10, 15 conversions. Or maybe it's going to take 25 or 30 events, custom events, or whatever those are. Or use the events that they're already identifying for you, but it's going to take a little bit of work. Yeah.

I think it's like a, I forget exactly what the maximum is, maximum is, but it's something like make this as simple as it can be, but no simpler. And I think that's ultimately how you should do measurement. Make it as simple as you can be. If you can use all the default events and keep fake model data out of your

reports, do it. And then sometimes you can't do that. It's literally not possible. So make it as simple as it can be, but no simpler. Yeah. Take a swing at it. What you got, what else you like or don't like, you can say what you can't do that. It's literally not possible. So make it as simple as it can be, but no simpler. Yeah. Take a swing at it.

What you got? What else you like or don't like? You can say what you don't like. I think what I still don't, what I don't like still is it's, I don't know. I still don't like the fact that we're transit. We are transitioning and losing data. Like anytime you're losing data, period, we're losing something. It is now we're losing bounce rate as a metric. In the grand scheme, is bounce rate a metric that we should be making decisions on? No. There's so much context and so

much story that needs to go behind the scenes to tell the story. And you and I have been on numerous meetings where admittedly, I point to bounce rate as the be-all and end-all of all metrics just because that's the way my mind operates. Now, from there, I dig, obviously. But that is, there's a few of those metrics where, make sure you are taking a look in G3, Universal Analytics, and G4. Take a look at the places you're looking in Universal and make sure that you if it is if you're losing that metric find something to replace it for bounce rate there is an engagement rate which is the inverse there that's what google's trying to provide for us so there are some it is and you may it's helpful to go through google analytics the help articles and try to find because there are some articles that

say bounce rate is going away this is what you should be looking at instead. This is going away. This is what we should be looking at instead. So I'll find that article because there's a half a dozen of them there that Google is giving us their idea of where we should be looking for those data points moving forward or the similar insights as to what would be delivered there. So I think it is.

I think make sure if there are critical KPIs or critical data points that you're using to run the business right now, or you feel like you're using to run the business, make sure those are carried over or you have a replacement metric of some kind that's going to be able to kind of help lead you to data-driven decisions. Because obviously, if we don't have those, we're going to be in trouble there. Are there other areas where you feel like you're missing something or you're concerned that the data is just not going to be there as we make this transition? Maybe that dovetails in my next one. So the next one is changing the attribution settings model, which you could do previously in the universal analytics. You could flip a,

run a report and you could say, what's the difference between last click and first click or whatever the case may be. The one that I'm using here inside the attribution settings. So if you go into settings again, you head on over to the properties tab. There's a tab called specifically attribution settings. Two things in here worth noting, in my opinion, number one, the default that I'm using is cross channel last click model, which should in theory track when people are visiting between different marketing channels, they visit between search and social and email or whatever the case may be. And then it tends to give credit to the last non-direct click that they can attribute their visitor source to. So I think that's a pretty fair way of doing it. How do people come to my site?

How did they find me? How do they convert? That's ultimately what you care about when it comes to tracking the results of things. One other window or one other, excuse me, piece that I wanted to bring up here is the look back window. By default 30 days I would your options are seven days and 30 days. I can't imagine that you'd ever want to make it shorter than that. But there's also a all other site conversion events window that you can change between 3060 and I believe 90 days as well. So definitely take a peek at those. Those are settings that I believe we did not have in the old GA that are now in the new GA4. So check that one out for sure. Yeah, this is the attribution model. I loved the beta that they had run with the attribution model

because it was that first opportunity to really look at it. I think at a deeper level, you could do it in the multi-channel or multi-touch conversions and stuff like that and try to do it that way. But that beta, it looks a lot like what they're trying to push through here. I do. I like the comparison between the different models. It is in, I don't think we see as much, and this might be a good question for you too. Do you see as much difference when you're looking at the different attribution models as far as like where conversions are given credit or stuff like that? It never seemed like that was the case when I was on the booking side and certainly not as much on the owner side because a lot of them are straightforward. But if you do data-driven versus last touch versus a complete even or what is the...

We're going to look at it right now. The linear, excuse me. The linear or the position-based, is that something where you've gained a lot of value in any of the looking at them through different models? Sometimes you see slightly different numbers. I think the one thing that it always flags for me is it tends to give a lot less credit to branded paid search whenever you flip these models off and you focus less on last click because that's often as last click. So I have some extreme examples where I flip that to a different model and I see a 30 to 50% change in overall conversion volume attributed from one source to another. And like I've seen, for example, email be a winner in the past when we turn that off. And email gets a lot of credit because they clicked on an email, then

later did a branded search. And then that's how they actually converted was off the branded search. But the email is what kind of got them back to the site initially. So that's one thing I can point out for sure, which email tends to get low amount of credit in our experience on the GA side of things, because people don't typically click on an email, even a fantastically well done email, we have clients that have million plus email lists of guests and potential guests on there, they send it, they get 10s of 1000s of clicks coming to the website. But people don't book in that same session. That's always the trouble with email. And that's why we always have to put some context around it when we send it in a report, because it'll show no one actually clicked to book off that off that one session, probably not. But instead, they came back in

through another way, or they had to, what I always say, they had to go talk to their mother, brother, cousin, husband, wife, whatever the case may be. And then they came back and booked later. So yeah, that's the one that I would come back to there for sure is that are you over-indexing on these last click, like things like branded paid search, which works very well, by the way,

and helps you play fantastic defense against the OTAs. So I never want to not do branded paid search, but I always knew when it's performing well, it's not that people just woke up that day. This is always what I tell people. It's not like someone woke up that day and decided to search Conrad's cool cabin out of the blue. There were some other marketing event that occurred previous to that. So branded paid search sops up all the credit in GA, but it didn't do a lot of the work. That's generally been my experience. It was 99% of the way there. And then that 1% got toppled over and you got the booking. Granted, you don't want to blow that 1't want to blow that 1%. That book can go

somewhere else. But maybe that's a different discussion for a different day. People want to hate on my branded VC takes, but we'll save it for another thing. The end of this, that is something that I am in agreement with you there. That's what all the other brand awareness causes you're doing. All the other channels that you're pushing brand awareness for, it's to get to that point so that people know once they're actually thinking about it is, I've always thought of branded searches as dates and rates. If you've already done the work of building up your brand so that people know you and people have that understanding of, yeah, whether we can see it in the multi-touch conversion report or not, it's the fact that

they knew your brand somehow. And in our space, it's not like they drove by your sign or drove by your... They might have driven by your office. That's possible. But the likelihood of those things happening are pretty low. So it is more about that. What are you doing to promote that brand? What are you doing to get your brand in front of people? Because that's the only reason that people... It is, people aren't just, the likelihood that someone's going to do a Google search for, even if it's for just yours, on the first interaction, Aunt Bugs, it is, you're not just going to guess. That's not happening. So they have to have some type of education or some type of marketing that has hit them to a point where

they know. Even if it's word of mouth, that's earned media, but you'll take that just the same way. Yeah, that's maybe a different discussion for a different day, the branded search. But I think that it is so important to be able to understand any of those branded searches and being able to see them within the constructs of the attribution models there. 100%. Maybe that brings me to my final one that I had my notes here. Sorry, we're not taking turns at this point. No, we're just going. Yeah, we're just we're vibing on it, as the kids would say. All right. So the last one I have,

I think we talked about this before, but go ahead and link up Google Search Console and Google Ads. Speaking of that little discussion, I could have done a better bridge there. There's a product links tab, click on products links, click Google Ads links, make sure you're linking Google Ads, if you are running in fact, Google Ads, which you probably should be, and then link up search console to see that data in one view helpful. And then things can go back and forth between the two. Also, this is a total sidebar, I've been playing with Google search console data exported through BigQuery, and then running queries against it. And the amount of data that gets stripped out of search console is insane when you look at it on the API level. So Google can figure out that and

figure out a better way to put that in the GA4 numbers. It'd be fantastic. So if you do a report in BigQuery, you do a query, how many are removed for privacy? That's like what they, instead of showing the query, it says removed for privacy. I saw, I ran a site the other day where it was like 25% of the traffic

was removed for privacy. A low traffic site to be fair, but it was like, I don't know if it was, they were searching a name or something like that, but Google was taking it out there. So yeah, definitely interesting stuff there there link this stuff up so you can see it and but then you'll see a disparity because the trouble is google search console measures clicks ga4 measures sessions users these are not the same things because people can click

on a site multiple times again different discussion perhaps for a different day but link them up you want the data in as many places as possible and then you're not having to go back later and try to import stuff and i don't even really think google does that even if you have certain gse set up so link those that's my final little grab bag note on my side with my notes here yeah that's it is and if you're using the only other product off the top of my head one that someone would use is like google optimize so if you're doing any ab testing on the website that's an option what they did they did? What? They did. They did. I don't know if people are still,

if you've still got out, they, I think it was supposed to go down in July or August. So if you've still got some, maybe it's around the same time. That's the only other thing I can think of. Yes, they did. They did sunset that.

I'm not sure if they're going to. Again, that's maybe, and again, another topic for sunset Google products that were actually of value. But that was always one that I did see a lot of value in because you can A-B test without doing it through a WordPress or through a WYSIWYG or a CMS or some type of web builder that sometimes Google made it a little easier to break the site without truly breaking the site to be able to do some design testing and stuff like that. But yes, you are right. I think they have sunset that product. So I haven't heard of anything like an optimized 2.0 where there's something else that's going to come in and replace it. Yeah,

if you're still running any experiments, make sure that's linked up for the two months that you have it. And you can see those insights and how G4 presents those. But otherwise, good catch, Conrad. That's my tool that's no longer there that I wish was still there there's a site maybe I could put in the show notes I think it's called killed by Google and they show all the products that have been yeah it's killed by google.com I'll put this in the show notes and sadly that is their most recent entry uh September 2023 is when Google Optimize will go the way of the dodo bird a lot of stuff in there crazy how much stuff they have started and killed it's wow this page is unbelievably long they first killed much stuff they have started and killed. It's wow, this page is unbelievably long. They first killed a product.

They have stuff dating back to 2006 in here. And they've killed so many things. None for me more painful than when they killed Google Reader. I was a Google Reader fan. Also love Google Inbox. Google Inbox was vastly superior to Gmail in probably a dozen ways. And they killed both those products, which I liked and relied on and used up until the last day that they pulled the plug on them this dovetails perfectly into the wrapping this one up perhaps because basically the reason that we're doing this episode is you're having to use ga4

the reason that you're having to use ga4 is they're killing universal analytics so what a lovely bow to place on the top of this one i don't know is there anything else that we should dive into paul or did we just take the win right there and i think we take i think we take the win and as people are getting frustrated in august and september we can do a refresher of hey this is where you should be looking to find all these things that you lost in universal that we talked about in april and may there's yes this was fun this was our first little mini series that i think we did over a multi-episode arc so if you like that kind of thing do let us know you can email email us, text us, tweet us, hit us up in whatever methodology is best for you. Email is probably best. Conrad, C-O-N-R-I-D at buildupbookings.com. Paul is paul, P-A-U-L at ventori.com, B-I-N-T-O-R-Y.com. So you can reach

us that way. Nice and easy. We reply to emails eventually for all of our lovely listeners. So we appreciate it. Thank you so much for checking out this little mini series on GA4. We'll put a bow on this one, but we will leave it open so that we can circle back to it here in the fall and see how the migration is going and see if we get all the reports that we're missing and some of the data that we're missing. That'd be interesting. We really appreciate a review. If you have any extra time today to leave a review, head on over to your favorite podcast app of choice, iTunes, Spotify, whatever, leave us a review, click five stars, write a short note there. We really appreciate that. And we will definitely catch you on the

next episode.