google analytics 4

Google has released a new feature, First-Party Mode (FPM), into public beta. Image source First-Party Mode seeks to make it easier to wrap Google’s measurement and advertising technologies in a first-party, same-origin context. This means that the user’s browser, when visiting a website running FPM, would no longer communicate directly with Google’s domains when fetching measurement libraries such as Google Tag or Google Tag Manager. Instead, the requests would be sent to a subfolder of the website itself. Read More…

This will be a quick tip, but it’s here to correct my previous statements in the comments section of different articles on this blog. When using Advanced Consent Mode, Google Analytics 4 collects hits when consent is in "denied" state. These hits have a lot of parameters stripped off them, including identifiers like the Client ID and the Session ID. The hits will not surface in reports directly, but they will instead go through a modeling process to enrich the reports once modeled. Read More…

I am fortunate to share another guest post by Arben Kqiku, Digital Analyst at Assura. Last time, Arben graced this blog with a comprehensive love letter to R as an example of the power of this programming language. This time, he’ll add even more fancy tools to the toolkit to help you build a data pipeline in the Google Cloud Platform to join your Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 data together. Read More…

Google is going all-in with Google Tag. We’ve already seen the consolidation effort through products like Google Analytics 4, and now Google is extending the merging of the tagging stack into Google Tag Manager, too. I’m referring to the new Google Tag that has replaced Google Analytics 4 configuration tags in your Google Tag Manager containers. With this release, all your old GA4 configuration tags have been auto-migrated to the new Google Tag. Read More…

One of the big pain points in configuring Google Analytics 4 through Google Tag Manager has been the difficulty of setting up event parameters, user properties, and settings across a range of tags. Well, we can finally get rid of our clumsy Config tag sequencing hacks because Google has released two new settings variables that mimic how the Google Analytics Settings Variable used to work in Universal Analytics. The new variables are: Read More…

I owe my career to Google Analytics. Whatever success I have achieved over the past 15 years or so can be directly attributed to my work with GA and, by extension, other tools in the Google stack. Now, Universal Analytics is about to be turned down. It fills me with a sense of nostalgia and pining for past, simpler times. When I cast my mind back, a scattering of memories emerges in my mind: Read More…

Server-side tagging is all about control. Being able to intercept, modify, and even block requests as they come in before they are dispatched to their actual endpoints is extremely valuable. The built-in Google Analytics 4 tag template has options for modifying event parameters and user properties in the Google Analytics 4 request, but did you know you can use these options to modify some of the fields as well, such as Client ID, User ID, and event Engagement Time? Read More…

While Measurement Protocol for GA4 is still rather, well, rough, it can be used to augment existing collection quite nicely. Recently, I wrote an article that discussed the nuances of session attribution with Measurement Protocol. One of the pain points of any data ingestion setup is how to debug it. Measurement Protocol hits are not automatically surfaced in GA4’s DebugView. In this article, I’ll show you how to make those hits pop up in the debug stream. Read More…

In this article, I’ll try to clarify the understandably murky Measurement Protocol functionality in Google Analytics 4. Measurement Protocol is a way to send events to Google Analytics 4 directly from a machine capable of sending HTTP requests (such as a web server). It’s an alternative collection method to the client-side libraries of Google Tag and the Firebase SDK. Measurement Protocol in GA4 is very different from its predecessor in Universal Analytics. Read More…

This is a guest post by Sebastian Pospischil, Evangelist Digital Analytics at TRKKN. All credit for the solution goes to him. The Summary section is the only one authored by Simo Ahava. You know the deal. Each and every day, clients reach out to you asking for custom click tracking for this call-to-action on that slider, or that button in this section of a page. They reach out to you because such things cannot be answered out of the box in Google Analytics 4. Read More…