Tags: Google Analytics 4

Mobile app analytics lives its own separate life, while website analytics lives its own. And no one seems to care that in the modern world a user might visit a website and then, just 15 minutes later, continue interacting with the brand in the app. Today’s tip is about how to avoid this situation and set everything up correctly.

When a business has multiple websites — for example, a main website or brand blog and a separate e-commerce store on different domains — analysts face a challenge. How can you understand that a user who came from an ad to the blog and then made a purchase in the store is the same person? This is exactly the problem that cross-domain tracking solves.

After reading the title of this piece, you might ask: “Why even do this in the first place?” Why not just send data directly to GA4 via Measurement Protocol? Why involve Server-Side GTM at all? The short answer: as always, using Google Tag Manager — whether client-side or server-side — helps reduce the workload for developers. The full answer will become clear as you read on.

This article, like many others on this blog, appeared by chance — thanks to a question in the chat. Last week, in our private PRO ANALYTICS course chat, Lena Kolisnyk asked: “Is it possible to export annotation data from GA4 into Google Sheets so that it can later be used in custom reports?” Neither I nor the students recalled a ready-made solution. However, about a month ago on LinkedIn — and later in our internal ProAnalytics.Team chat — I came across a solution by Tamás Geiger that allows you to automatically create annotations in GA4 when publishing versions in GTM using Google Apps Script.

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 key event (earlier - 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.

There are many reasons to love Google Analytics 4: a new approach to data collection, new metrics, the ability to combine website and app data — and more . Among all these features, I want to highlight two in particular: Explorе and BigQuery Export. Each of them deserves its own series of articles. I’ve decided to begin with Explorations, since this functionality is more accessible.

When reading the title of this article, some of you might think: “Oh, it’s just another guy telling me to flip the switch and the event becomes a key one.” If that’s the case, I recommend reading this article to the end — I’m sure you’ll discover some unexpected ways to mark an event as a key event in Google Analytics 4.