GA4: The 5 things you missed this week

We inaugurate a new articles series dedicated to the main news released by GA4 and in the world of Analytics during this week / 10 days.

This type of post does not have a fixed deadline, it obviously depends on what news is released by Big G for its web analytics product.

During the last few days, several innovations have been released both in terms of interface and in terms of hints generated by other data analysts which can be useful in the data analysis phase.

Stop talking, let’s go!

1. New Audience Report

Finally, a report dedicated to the audiences created in GA4 has been released (being rolled out in the properties). Before this report, the only way to view them was to access the Admin > Audiences section.

Now, in standard reports, just access the Users > Users Attributes > Audiences section and you land in this report:

Fantastic, however.. there is a bug: the data of new users, views per sessions and average session duration are the sum of all the lines present in the report.. instead the average should be reported.

Looking forward to the fix 🙂

2. Data Redaction

A new item “Redact Data: Prevent specific data from being sent to Google Analytics” has appeared within the web stream of the Google Merchandise Store Demo account.

For example, if a form inserts the user’s email within the query string, using this new function it will be possible to eliminate this data from GA4 before it is processed and consolidated.

There are two types of redactions:

• eMail: most e-mail addresses are eliminated from the event data
• URL Query Parameters: remove parameters in URL queries  characterized by specific elements

These functions can be activated via toggle and there is a tester to evaluate the goodness of data elimination.

3. New Landing Page Dimension & Stop Blank Row

The landing page report has a new “Landing Page” dimension that no longer contains the query parameters, and the bug that reported a completely empty row within the report in question has also been fixed.

Obviously, the fixing of the blank row is not retroactive.

4. Setting Source / Medium / Campaign per GA4 via Measurement Protocol and GTM

Below is the code for sending source, medium and campaign data to GA4 directly via the Measurement Protocol:

const measurementId = `G-XXXXXXXXXX`; const apiSecret = “; fetch(`https://www.google-analytics.com/mp/collect?measurement_id=${measurementId}&api_secret=${apiSecret}`, { method: “POST”, body: JSON.stringify({ “client_id”: “client_id”, “events”: [{ “name”: “campaign_details”, “params”: { “campaign_id”: “google_1234”, “campaign”: “Summer_fun”, “source”: “google”, “medium”: “cpc”, “term”: “summer+travel”, “content”: “logolink” } }] }) });

Below is an example of how to send source, medium and campaign information via GTM. For example, it is possible to “parameterize” the landing page of interest (e.g. www.mysite.com/landing-a) by sending this event. Warning: this applies especially to the measurement protocol: campaign, source and medium data are at event level!

5. How many users from Google have visited the site?

A question that seems very simple to answer, perhaps through the Default Channel Groups of GA4, but in reality it presents many more obstacles than it seems.

At this link you will find an excellent analysis made by Charles Farina which I strongly suggest you read: https://www.charlesfarina.com/the-traffic-source-challenge-in-ga4/

Sources of information:

Thanks to:

Charles Farina

Brais Calvo