Insight
From Data to Decisions: How Code uses GA4 to transform performance and CRO
July 29, 2024
Claire Feeney
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a useful digital analytical tool to compare traffic across multiple platforms, provide an overview of website performance and measure the customer experience.
Combined with its complimentary tool, Google Tag Manager (GTM), GA4 can accurately compare the performance of various marketing channels.
At a top level, this insight enables managers and c-suite executives in marketing, brand, digital and ecommerce to make meaningful comparisons between return on investment across multiple platforms, engagement, and overall impact of the customer experience.
For those implementing experiments and measurement strategies, GA4 can enable and inform A/B testing by showing the interaction of different components on site and the impact this has on conversion rate. This is critical to improve the conversion rates of websites, often referred to as Conversion Rate Optimisation or CRO.
Importantly, CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) relies on correct and detailed data, not only to identify areas of a site that need improving but to analyse the results of any tests. This ensures changes made on a site have a positive impact on the customer experience and most importantly, increase the conversion rate and the total number of leads or sales.
The following overview of GA4 aims to help businesses and brands understand just how much untapped insight they have at their disposal, providing their GA4 is set up correctly.
At Code, our CRO Analysts can help you at a strategic and tactical level to get the most out of your data. Our work can also provide a basis for a digital transformation strategy that can drive an uplift in leads and significantly improve a return on investment.
Modern websites have various levels of complexity and tracking requirements. Digital analysts and CRO analyst expertise mean they can now track anything and everything on a website. This means they can prepare for any A/B test or customer experience mapping required and provide a full picture of user behaviour across a site.
However, there is an art to planning a GA4 tracking set up in a way that covers all the interaction components on a site, considering and including additional data in an easy-to-access format is essential for getting the most out of GA4 and a better understanding of your website.
Full and detailed tracking puts a website in a good place to understand how different components impact conversion rates, whilst providing signals of intent that help to identify any blockers which might be preventing a user from converting. Understanding what conversions and intent signals are most valued is essential before being able to understand the current state of a website and the brand experience for the end user. At Code, we can collaborate with you to both identify and implement tracking for these metrics with a full measurement plan.
One of the key benefits of GA4 is the ability to send up to 25 additional pieces of information with each event, allowing you to analyse site performance on an extremely granular level. This can involve bespoke tracking code to access data, which if poorly thought out could overload the site or reduce site speed.
Testing tracking using a staging environment and directing testing traffic into a separate GA4 Property protects the site from the potential impacts of poor tracking. Environments allow you to publish tracking, removing any chance of tags/triggers behaving differently when published live vs in preview mode. This is particularly important when using custom code to add tracking to your site, or for any complicated tracking set up that uses JavaScript to get additional information from your site.
Bugs can occur in tracking once published live to your site which are unidentifiable when testing in preview mode. When things like this slip through the net, this costs you time and money to identify and fixing a problem which could have been discovered during the initial set-up. This can negatively impact the performance of your site as well as delay A/B testing due to a lack of data. Using environments for all new tracking ensures tags fire correctly the first time they are deployed.
By separating testing traffic from your main reporting platform, you give developers a playground to check updates are coming through correctly whilst preventing in-house traffic from muddying reporting and creating a false picture of user behaviour on site. It also means you don’t have to remember to filter out any staging site or testing data when using your reports, giving you more confidence in your day-to-day reporting.
With the introduction of the Digital Marketing Act 2024, tracking users without consent is no longer the standard (or lawful) way of doing things, so finding a way to work with consent is now essential.
Consent configuration is a technical topic, and simply adding a cookie banner to your site doesn’t ensure you're consent-compliant. Tags need updating to respond to user consent choices, which can impact reporting when consent is denied. By using advanced consent mode, you allow Google to model data that might be missed due to lack of consent, giving you a clearer picture of site performance after setting up consent mode and reducing gaps in your data from un-consenting users.
Our team has experience working with various consent platforms including OneTrust, CookieBot and Civic Cookie. We can also provide recommendations on which consent provider to use. We can collaborate with you to ensure your tracking is consent-compliant, giving you confidence in your data and your ability to continue measuring customer experience.
“Since its launch, Consent Mode has helped advertisers gain more accurate, privacy-safe insights through conversion modelling.”
Shirin Eghtesadi, Senior Product Manager, Privacy Centric Measurement.
Full tracking provides an essential basis for conversion rate optimisation (CRO), allowing you to deep dive into the impact of each individual component on your site and discover areas for digital transformation and improved customer experience. Continual optimisation of your site ensures you have a competitive edge over your competition, maximising your brand strategy and putting you in the best place to increase leads and revenue.
Audit and update your GA4 and GTM set up, to ensure you get the most out of each platform in a streamlined way. Over the years legacy tags and defunct code can built up in your GTM account and contribute to a reduction in site speed. Poor naming conventions and a lack of consistency in tracking can make you unsure your tracking is correct or complete.
Our Audits and updates cover the full set up and tagging process, improving tracking to give you the best possible set up and allowing you to take advantage of GA4 – giving you the data you need to support your customer experience strategy.
Custom Reports and Explorations in GA4 provide easy access to all the data you need. This can include general reporting as well as drilled down and focused analysis. Detailed reporting such as cohort exploration can inform brand development, highlighting the optimal time to remarket to users to encourage them to convert after their initial interaction with your brand. Funnel tracking gives you a quick overview of how successfully users are completing your conversion funnels and gives insight into the main drop off points. This data can be sectioned by different parameters, such as device category, to provide more details about how your website performs across different technologies.
Specific event-focused reports can give you easy access to the most important data about your site, reducing the time it takes creating or searching for the data you need.
Enhanced ecommerce tracking is arguably the most important tracking for any ecommerce site. Enhanced Ecommerce gives you detailed insights into how each product performs, the popularity of product categories, seasonality and which products convert the best. Going beyond purchase reporting, tracking product impressions, promotions, view-to-click rate, and basket interactions can give you a fuller picture of the user journey.
Tracking and reporting on the user checkout journey gives you a reliable way of discovering barriers to purchase and provides the basis for data driven CRO. Detailed reporting can provide further information such as products frequently bought together and inform potential on-sight upselling or streamlining of the user purchase journey.
GA4 is a big learning curve compared to UA, with data often not as easily accessible as it was before. Our training courses range from teaching you the basics to advanced reporting with Explore reports, including path exploration, segmentation, and cohort exploration. This gives your team the confidence to create reports and gain useful insights from your data.
We offer full training courses over 2 days, and shorter focused training on specific areas of GA4. This training will give you and your team the knowledge to utilise all GA4 features and enhance your reporting capabilities.
Focused training is a key step to getting your team comfortable with accessing and using data. Our training includes a take-away PowerPoint dec, summarising all the important information, and contains tasks throughout to put into practice what you’ve learnt and embed that knowledge for future use.
Commenting on the GA4 training delivered by Code, Emma Slater, Head of Digital Experience from Hillarys said:
“We spoke to Code and arranged for Claire to come to our offices for a training course. She presented clearly and concisely to a large team of people, each with varying degrees of existing GA knowledge and answered all our questions and concerns. I’d definitely recommend Claire, her knowledge is fantastic, and she has been a great help to us.”
If you’re struggling to get to grips with GA4, need more confidence with your current set up or are ready to start optimising your site then contact us today to see how we can work together to improve your website and tracking setup. We can work with you to develop an extensive measurement plan, provide in-depth customer journey mapping, and identify areas for improvement on your site, with a data focus to ensure any changes are serving your website goals. In an increasingly competitive online world, conversion rate optimisation will help you get ahead of the competition and good data will help you stay there.
In summary, the role of GA4 will support businesses in gaining greater insight into the successes of their digital marketing activities and enable deep insights into website performance and customer experience. Through powerful performance insights, businesses can make data-driven decisions that enhance their Return on Investment (ROI) and evaluate the success of their marketing and digital activities. At Code, our CRO Analysts are ready to help you strategically implement GA4 and GTM, providing bespoke tracking setups, environment testing, consent mode, and comprehensive audits. By partnering with Code, we can help you take full advantage of GA4's robust features and ensure your measurement strategy supports A/B testing and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) activities. Contact us today to elevate your data strategy and stay ahead in the competitive digital landscape.
Code is a customer experience, digital innovation and AI agency.
We’re a strategic digital partner that delivers breakthrough growth throughout the customer experience (CX).
We achieve this through our industry-renowned services in digital transformation, web development, brand strategy, conversion rate optimisation (CRO) and UX (user experience).
Our human centric approach underpins every aspect of our work.
A collective of experts in multiple disciplines, we collaborate to distil the complex needs of organisations and end users to engineer solutions that make an impact.
From fast scaling start ups to global brands, we can help you to transform your organisation.
Code is a part of EssenceMediacom North.
