0:02
How are you doing? It’s Paula Pollock from the Pollock Marketing Group. I’m here today to share some knowledge that you may not have about Google Analytics and GA4.
I’ve mentioned to plenty of you that it’s important to make your switch to GA4 before January 2022, even though they say that they’re going to stop processing your old data on July 1st.
Now, why do I say that? Well, I like to have a full clean year of data when I’m looking to do strategy. I like my quarters kind of in a neat little bucket.
And if you wait to switch, you’re going to be looking in two locations because of the way Google is handling this. They are not updating what you currently have. They are adding a GA4 property. They’re just going to stop servicing the data into the main account.
1:06
Here I am in a dummy account that I have to will show you a little bit of what to do.
There are probably going to be some different things that you will run across. Don’t be surprised. Go down here to your admin button. That’s how you get to this screen.
Make sure you’re on the correct account. And then I’m going to click GA4 setup. Now it’s showing that I have a connected property. If this was a clean screen without a setup, you would see Setup a New Property, and it’s going to just give you some basic information.
2:06
I’m going to show you what you’re going to see once they set it up. So data collection, blah, blah, blah. All right, Open Connected Property, Collect Website and App Data.
Of course, that’s what we want. So here I’m going to go to the little Learn More. That’ll tell you a little bit here.
But the key is making sure you get the data and the tracking code onto your website. I’m not seeing any data receipts, so I’m going to click through. Data isn’t active for your website. View tag instructions. So you can read the instructions here, or if you’re like me, I kind of like to drop the code in myself because it’s not that hard.
3:18
As I’ve mentioned before, Tag Manager is great. If you have someone managing lots of ads and lots of tracking, then you probably don’t need this video anyway.
This is for the regular folk that don’t usually do that. So here we go. We’re going to view Tagging Instructions down at the very bottom, and it says Install with a Web Builder.
Now if you use any of these, you can click through and get walked through. I go to install manually and it gives me a tracking code to install.
So I just copied that. And then what I’m going to do is go over here to my website that’s already open. I already have my code in here, but if I didn’t, I could say Add New. This is in Elementor, by the way, and you can find it in the Elementor tab under Code.
4:13
And I just name it something and then literally just drop that code in here and publish it. Now I go back. I’ve already done this for another account, the main account. So what you’ll need to do is you’ll have to wait a little bit and come back within 48 hours so that it populates.
Make sure it’s actually pulling data. If it’s not pulling data, something’s wrong, and you definitely need to contact Google because I’ve had different accounts for different clients that have had errors in their code.
An example here, this is my code that I just put in here. Check this out. There’s a problem with this code. Funny, I actually plugged in code the other day to an account that had this same data layer as not being defined error and it worked perfectly.
So I don’t quite know what Google’s up to with this, but you know, we’re doing our best to keep up with all of Google’s constant changes.
5:24
Hopefully, this helped you out. And if you have any questions, we work on websites, data tracking, and strategy. We also offer some very affordable consulting. If you need some help, I can screen-share with you and kind of walk you through it as we go.
And it’s probably going to be a lot faster and a lot more educational than what you’ll get trying to track down somebody at Google.
So good luck and reach out to the Pollock Marketing Group if you need help.