Category - #AnalyticsTips

This post came about accidentally, but I hope it’ll be useful to many marketers during these pre-holiday days. Today, Dima Osiuk and I were discussing the landing page for the SERVER-SIDE GTM BASICS course and thought it would be great if the promo code could be prefilled in the form automatically whenever possible.

People tend not to trust new things. And when switching from Google Analytics Universal to Google Analytics 4, they start comparing the data in both systems. As a result, they notice that the same metrics have different values. This applies to almost all metrics in both platforms — be it the number of users, sessions, key events, or even the key event rate. The values will differ between the two systems, and the first thing you need to understand is — IT’S NORMAL FOR THEM TO BE DIFFERENT.

Many of my readers have already worked with GA4 and noticed one not-so-pleasant nuance of this system: sometimes data that should appear in reports or explorations is missing. These situations vary — sometimes you see the data in Real Time reports, but then it’s gone from the standard reports. Or you might see conversions for a weekly view, but when you try to break it down by day, some conversions disappear. If you’ve experienced these or similar situations, chances are you're facing thresholding .

Lately, more and more people have been actively switching to GA4, and I keep seeing the same issue come up in various groups and chats: “I set up an event for GA4, everything looked fine at first — but after marking it as a conversion, GA4 started sending duplicate events.” If you’re facing a similar issue, this article is for you.

Let’s walk through a simple but important configuration step in Google Analytics 4: how to set a timer for engaged sessions. Why is this important? As you may know, Google Analytics 4 does not have a bounce rate. Instead, it uses a similar metric called the Engagement rate — the ratio of engaged sessions to total sessions.

Today’s tip is quick and simple: when you're configuring filters at the account or view level, don’t forget that fields in advanced mode use regular expression format.

One of the main problems for marketers and web analysts is the large number of tabs users have open in their browsers. These tabs prevent visitors from focusing solely on our content. That’s why marketers come up with different “tricks” to keep users’ attention. This is an even bigger problem for analysts: with so many tabs open, you can’t be sure that the user spent the entire time — from page load to a certain moment — actually on the page.

One of the most common questions I hear from businesses is how to calculate the time between a user’s first visit to the site and their final conversion or purchase.

If you’ve ever analyzed Facebook traffic in Google Analytics, you’re likely familiar with the situation where you see numerous referrals from different Facebook subdomains to your website.