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don't waste any more of your time trying to figure out how to use Google analytics 4 or figure out even what from all the tons and tons and tons of stuff you can do in there actually matters to you as a blogger I'm going to walk through exactly how I use Google analytics 4 to help me in my business without wasting any [Music] time this is my Google analytics 4 account for one of our websites cook for folks.com um I have this selected to 30 days cuz the 30 days is kind of what I got used to we have a lot of metrics that we use that are kind of based on like page views per month um and earnings are always per month and all of that and so 30 days makes a lot more sense to me but I have this selected at 30 Days A lot of times by default on the homepage of Google analytics it'll just be at 7 Days especially on my mobile device it's really easy to change the time frame here on the homepage just change this to 30 days or whatever you want 28 days custom or they have all these preset ranges so I just select 30 let's take a little quick tour of the homepage this has a lot of the stuff that I actually want right here it's just not as obvious as it was on the old Google analytics so first of all we have kind of four different dropdowns of things that we can see the first one for that's showing for me right now is users so these are individual people that came to the website in that time frame sessions is how many times people came to the website so not how many people but how many times they entered the website from not being on it event count this counts all events there a lot of events in Google analytics 4 and this is the biggest change before it was tracking every time like a page loaded and that was kind of the only event or people coming to the website that was a new session but if they went from one page on the site to another page on the site that was just another page view now we're tracking all sorts of events they can track if a page scrolled Beyond a certain point uh they can better track time on page and that kind of stuff and then here I had it was actually by default it was just events twice event count to me events isn't very helpful I want to see specific events and there's a lot of different events and different things that we can choose from these are suggested ones so users we already have set up on here conversions we'll talk about in a little bit engage sessions that's when people showed up on the page but also scrolled and did some other things that could be an interesting one to look at but one of the ones I like to see is views this is just page views it's the same page view number we were used to seeing in the old Google analytics and this is one of those metrics that to me is the most important because the number of of page views is the biggest driver of earnings the more times people view a page on my website the more money I'm going to make from ads from that page and for specific Pages especially those ones that are more monetized it's how I'm going to make more affiliate revenue and everything page views that is the interaction that to me is fundamental so just this report right here and just clicking on the views one is showing me sort of the overall how my site's doing over the last 30 days now here's the other thing there's also this comparison line behind it that it's comparing it to a a different time period so right now what it's looking at is the previous 30 days so I can see on a day-by-day basis how am I doing compared to that same day 30 days before now there's one thing I want to point out I have noticed on a few websites as I was looking through this that I wasn't getting the views option and if that's happening to you if you're like I don't have that event it's not working for me there's probably a reason for that let me show you what that is I'm going to go here into the admin originally when we were kind of forced over Google analytics 4 Google created a ga4 property for every time that we already had a UA the the old Google analytics property so if you had a UA property you didn't create a ga4 property they created one for you now obviously Google can't go in to your website and add the tracking code for Google analytics 4 to your website so what did they do they linked the old tracking code the UA tracking ID you had to your new Google Analytics 4 account they also gave us that option too if you created your own Google Analytics for property instead of going and putting the new tracking ID on there you could just use the existing tracking ID and Link them together and that way you could continue to get the data in both accounts without having to make any changes on your website but now if that's the case you're not getting all of the data so if you haven't yet it's time to make this change so what I'm going to do is go here into data streams and here I'm going to click on the data stream that I have that was already set up for me there should be one already by default and I want to go grab this measurement ID or depending on if you're using a Plugin or what theme you're using if they'll just accept the measurement ID great uh if not you're probably just going to need to go grab the script itself I'll show you that in just a second now I'm here using aabot our WordPress theme and built into that is Google analytics so this is what it looks like if you're still using the old tracking ID if you're using your UA tracking ID that's what you're going to see I'm going to replace that with a new tracking ID and it's the one that starts with a g and we'll hit update so now it's going to use the ga4 tracking code this script that's associated with the new Google tracking as well as the new Google tracking ID associated with your Google analytics property now if you're not using a Plugin or your WordPress theme for Google analytics and you need to actually enter in uh the code itself that you're going to find here on this same page in Google analytics we're going to go back down here to view tag instructions and I'm going to go to install manually and here they're going to give you this whole script we're going to copy the whole thing or you can just click that little icon there in the corner now it's copied if you have a plug or something that you're using or your WordPress theme has a place for it to add code to the Head section of your website we're just going to paste it there here in aab we also have that so I would just paste that literally right in here I'm not actually going to do that though because then I would have the tracking code on my website twice if you go through those steps it'll help ensure that you're Now using the right Google analytics tracking ID and the right code and you should be able to get all of the right data so now back to the reports one thing I like right here on the Google analytics homepage is it shows me my recently accessed reports so if there's reports that I regularly look at they're going to show up here a lot now I just looked at those the data streams and all the admin stuff and so that's what's showing here which isn't quite as helpful for me but also on the homepage I do have access to also some of the other top information that I like to look at in Google analytics the first one here is views by Page title and Screen this one is really important to me to see how specific pages on my website are doing I can click this little link right here and it'll take me right to that report it also breaks down my traffic by organic search direct and all of that now notice I changed up here down to 30 days but these down here since they're all individual reports I've got to change each one so if I wanted to look at page views per page over the last 30 days I would need to select that right here that's just here on this homepage if I go to a reports page so let's go here to reports the first thing it's going to take me to is this reports snapshot this is a page I don't actually like as much because on this page I there's nowhere where I can actually just look at page views over time I can see sort of users over time this is each day is the last 30 days so I can just sort of see the trend of people coming to site I can look at event count I can say well over this time period which is defaulting you can see up here on the right to 28 days I can see how many page views but I just can't see it sort of trending day by day or week by week but the one good thing on this page is I can customize it I can remove some of these that I don't like and I can add new ones so let me show you that I just click this little uh pencil icon right up there and these are just in order 1 2 3 overview real time and insights so you know 1 2 3 4 5 six this is new users sessions and users by country so they're just in order right here and I can add more cards there just isn't a card in here anywhere for page views or views over time there's several scorecard ones see I could go here I could look at users by app version by all sorts of things I can go here to other cards and I can look at user stickiness lifetime value and all these things over time but on these kind of run charts or as Google calls them scorecards there's not a single one where I can just select page view or view if I could I would put that in and I would have that showing up right here on my report snapshot but the cool thing here though is I can change the time frame and say oh give me 30 days or 90 days or 12 months even and it's going to change all the reports on the page to look at that same time frame so that's kind of nice it just doesn't have kind of the main report that I want I mean I can see users I can see new users I can see engagement time over time but I can't change this to just show me the dang page views let's try searching up here that's the other thing that this is kind of improved upon is the search is more intelligent which makes sense with kind of the direction that Google and all these companies are going so if I just do views per day index let's just see what we get there reports life cycle engagement overview so this is diving in and it's telling me how to find that so if reports on the left hand side I could click on under life cycle engagement here on the left then there's the overview or I can just click it right here and it'll take me right there so let's go see that engagement overview there we go I get at least views uh on kind of a daily basis so I do get that that's kind of nice and again on any of these reports pages I can just select the time frame I want and it's still holding to my 30 days which is kind of nice there's also all of these different ones there's events and here this is probably my favorite way to look at the page views per day again I can't get this over on the report snapshot but at least Le I can get it here and that's just by going here to the events report under engagement then it's giving me all these different events that exist and I just click page view and it's going to filter out only page views which is really nice so now I'm looking at all of this other information here everywhere where it says event it's just referring to page views so I can see page views by country um how many page views I'm getting per session 1.3 page views per session now one report we see on here is looking at specific pages on the website and you would think because I feel filtered it down to event count only being page view that it's giving me like this is the percentage of page views on my website that were uh on this particular page it's not what this report is saying this one if you actually look at it closely it's measuring user engagement which is like the scrolling and stuff or clicking through to other things so it's saying 9.4% of users on this page engaged with the page in some way which is helpful to know as long as we know what it is again that's the biggest change that came to Google analytics 4 is actually measuring more of those engagement metrics if we go then to one of my other favorite reports here which is the pages and screens report that's where it's going to give me the actual breakdown of the amount of traffic to each of these different pages on my website something I really don't like about this report is that it doesn't give it to me in percentages though it's only giving it to me on for each of these as an actual number and I've looked at this a bit and I haven't found a quick easy way to change that to a percentage or to add percentage to it if somebody knows how to do that let me know in the comments below cuz I really do like to see very clearly the breakdown from a percentage basis I want to know what percentage of the traffic on my website in this time frame was to that page we had that in the old Google analytics it's I don't just don't see it here so that does make this report less useful than before but as we could before we can always download this data go ahead and click the share and then just download it like as a spreadsheet and we could calculate that if we ever want to do kind of an in-depth analysis of the content on our website I just don't feel like I should have to do that the old Google analytics had that number okay the next thing that I like to track is conversions I don't do this all the time you can pick an action that people take on your website and every time that action is made you create a conversion so that it's easily tracked and then you can just see how often that's happening and dive into that further it's pretty cool so let's go into that just really really fast here what I'm going to do is I'm going to click admin the little gear down in the bottom and I'm going to go to events actually and I'm going to create an event uh so so I'm going to go ahead and create one I'll just call it ga4 demo and then we start usually with some sort of event in fact by default event name is here and the event name should equal something so if it's if it's a page view meaning somebody came to a specific page on your website or the value could be something else for example if they clicked on a specific thing like a purchase on your website if every time somebody makes a purchase it takes him to a purchase confirmation page then just loading that perfect that purchase confirmation page could be how you track how many people make that purchase but I'm going to say the event name is a page view so I can do something like page location equals and then this is just a URL so it could be again like a purchase confirmation page so you have to actually do the full URL so the HTTP or htps as well let just pick a page on the website I'll go ahead and do this one so this would be anytime somebody goes to this page where we have like a sign up for their email list so I'm going to grab that URL and just put it in here the form that I have on this page this is actually an embedded form from outside of this website so I'm not actually totally sure that Google could track when people actually click this button but if clicking this button does lead them to a different page on this website then that's what I could track and it would tell me how many people signed up for the email list over a certain period of time likewise I could include clicks to buttons that are on the website so for example if I'm sending people to a third party site to actually make the purchase but the buy now button that could be the conversion and then I could at least track how many people are click and how often now once I've added in all the conditions that I want then I just click save and then I go back out to the events here now I'm not actually going to be able to do anything with it until that event happens at least once but once it does I could go ahead and I just click this little toggle Mark as conversion see now a page view is going to be treated as a conversion so it's really that simple just create an event that has all of the different criteria for what you want to track and then call it a conversion and now it's going to be tracked in your conversions report now there's another cool one that I want to show you there's a ton of other stuff we can do in Google analytics that's related to advertising if you're running ads I'm not running Google ads I rely on organic traffic like I would say entirely with like very little exception I've done a little bit with ads but today like we rely on organic traffic so I'm not really worried about all of the capabilities with advertising although if I were doing ads that would be extremely important and I will be doing some ads for another cool project I'm working on that's all what this video is about so we'll get back to that in the future but this explores tab is super cool I love the path exploration this is the one I've played with the most and I think it's pretty cool so I'm going to click on path exploration and here it's fun to just like play with this from the very beginning so session start this is the event name that we're starting with and I could pick something else but this makes a lot of sense meaning somebody came to my website right so this happened over this time period that we're tracking it happened 11,916 times of those times I got oh there's two more starting points um some Scrolls and some clicks so anyway of those there were several events that took place that were page views some people clicked some people it was their first visit and then three more if I click on those I can get the details right so a session started and then these events happened some of the events were just a page view others were a page view with a scroll and other things but here I can go to page title and screen name and it's going to tell me that these page views happened but it's going to break it down now by which Pages they were on so now I can see that these are the pages that started these sessions during this time frame and you know I can break it down further and further and further but here's the cool thing I can then click into this one and I can see what happened from there so of the people that came to the homepage some of them clicked on this article others clicked here to the about us and on and on and I can basically track the flow of what happened if I click on one of these from food safety here's what happened from there and this is kind of just the beginning of the path exploration we can play around with this going up and down the path you could probably spend hours on it that's not what I want you to do but sometimes it's really handy to see over this time frame which we can change over here in the upper left so right now let's look at 30 days let's say I did some work on the internal linking on this how many green beans article and I just want to know how well is that working I say okay well of the 159 people that came there 66 of them went back to the homepage others went to about Anna others went to about the website and then a few others went to some of these other pages and I could use that to calculate sort of a percentage x% of people who came to this page clicked on the link that I put in that page to another page on the website this is what I have used in the past actually to do that very thing where I did some internal linking and then wanted to track how well that internal linking improved over time and how many page views it really added to my website just through that linking out to some of these other posts on my site this isn't something that was nearly as easy to track back in the previous Google analytics at least not without some previous setup so now let me bring that back when I use Google analytics what do I use it for primarily I want to see how my website is doing overall what's the trajectory especially if there's like an algorithm update or something and people start saying whoa whoa my site dropped I'll go take a look real quick okay on a high level how are we doing and that's all that I do kind of on a week-by-week basis don't do it on a day-by-day basis it will drive you czy easy beyond that I primarily look at the views by Page title here it's by Page title in screen but it's this report here I click into it to get the more detail and I will sometimes export this entire report and then I'll use that in a battleship audit because that's what really gives me an indication of what traffic on my website is doing really well if I want to dive into that a lot further that's when I go to Google Search console and start looking at what search queries are working the best and identify opportunities to either add to or improve the cont content that I have or to write new articles entirely based upon search queries that I'm not winning but that I know have a large amount of potential beyond that I sometimes use it for conversions and sometimes I like to to track the traffic flow but usually only when there's a specific reason like I've done a bunch of interlinking and just want to see how it's working and if I want to make any tweaks to it so there it is I hope I helped you find the reports that you need in Google analytics for if there are other reports that you like to use or that you liked to use back with the old Google analytics that you're having a hard time finding or using let me know in the comments below and maybe I'll be able to make a follow-up that answers some of your additional questions but mostly don't overthink the Google analytics Focus primarily on the big picture and then only dive into the details when you have a specific reason to that's my advice and with that I'd say just get back to work make some awesome content and we'll see you in the next video
