The GA4 Metrics Every Publisher Should Know

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest iteration of Google's web analytics platform. This powerful tool gives publishers a deeper understanding of user behavior across their websites and apps. GA4 replaces Universal Analytics, which stopped processing new hits on July 1, 2023. This transition marks a significant shift in how website data is collected and analyzed, focusing on user engagement and cross-platform tracking in a privacy-centric world. Google Analytics 4 offers enhanced tracking capabilities, allowing publishers to follow the complete customer journey across multiple devices and platforms. With its advanced machine learning features, GA4 also provides predictive insights that help publishers optimize their content and marketing strategies for better results.

In this blog, we'll discuss why analytics matter for publishers, compare Universal Analytics with GA4, highlight key metrics to watch, and explain how to make the most of GA4. We'll also guide you through setting up your GA4 account.

The Importance of Analytics For Publishers

In the digital landscape, relying on gut feelings to make decisions has never been an option for publishers. Analytics tools are essential to doing business, allowing you to understand your audience, optimize your content, and ultimately, improve revenue.

Here's how GA4 can help:

• Identify your most valuable content: By analyzing page views, engagement metrics, and user behavior, you can pinpoint your top-performing content and understand what resonates with your audience.
• Optimize for different devices: GA4 allows you to track user behavior across various devices, helping you tailor your content and ad placements for optimal click-through rates.
• Improve ad revenue: GA4 provides detailed insights into ad performance, enabling you to experiment with different ad formats, placements, and strategies to maximize your revenue.
• Understand user behavior: GA4's event-based tracking provides a detailed view of how users interact with your site, allowing you to identify any pain points and optimize the user experience.

With GA4's powerful metrics, you can turn insights into effective strategies to boost success and grow your publishing efforts.

GA4 vs Universal Analytics

While Universal Analytics was primarily session-based, using sessions to track interactions, GA4 adopts an event-based data model, providing a much more comprehensive view of user interactions. Here's a quick comparison of the two tools:

GA4's focus on user engagement, cross-platform tracking, and privacy makes it a more robust and future-proof solution for publishers.

The GA4 Metrics You Should Be Looking At

GA4 offers a wealth of metrics in its dashboard, but here are the key ones you should focus on as a publisher:

Engaged Sessions

This metric measures the number of sessions that lasted 10 seconds or longer, had a conversion event, or had two or more page views. It provides a better indication of user interest than simple pageviews.

Where to find it: Reports > Engagement > Overview

Engagement Rate

This metric shows the percentage of engaged sessions out of total sessions. A higher engagement rate indicates that your content is resonating with your audience.

Where to find it: Reports > Engagement > Overview

Average Engagement Time

This metric measures the average time users spend actively engaged with your content during their sessions, contributing to the overall engagement rate. It helps you understand how captivating your content is.

Where to find it: Reports > Engagement > Overview

Event Count

GA4 allows you to track specific events, such as ad clicks, video plays, and scroll depth, across multiple dimensions. This data helps you understand how users interact with different elements on your site.

Where to find it: Reports > Engagement > Events

Publisher Ads

This report provides detailed information about ad impressions, clicks, and revenue. It helps you optimize your ad strategy for maximum performance.

Where to find it: Reports > Monetization > Publisher Ads

Tips For Getting The Most Out of GA4

Understanding Your Audience

• Track user engagement metrics: Go beyond just pageviews and bounce rate. Look at metrics like engaged sessions, engagement rate, and average engagement time to better understand how users are truly interacting with your content.
• Analyze user behavior with events: Set up some custom events to track specific actions that are important to your business, this can be things like newsletter signups, video plays, file downloads, or ad interactions.
• Segment your audience: Use GA4's segmentation tools to divide your audience into meaningful groups based on demographics, behavior, or other characteristics. These powerful tools allow you to tailor your content and marketing efforts more effectively.
• Leverage user-centric metrics: Focus on user-based metrics like "Total Users" and "Active Users" to give you a clearer picture of your audience size and how users engage over time.

Optimizing Your Website and Content

• Identify top-performing content: Analyze page and screen reports to see which content is resonating the most with your audience and driving the most engagement.
• Discover opportunities for improvement: Use GA4 to identify any pages with a high bounce rate or low engagement time, then prioritize optimizing them to improve user experience.
• Utilize Exploration reports: These reports let you create custom analyses and visualizations, allowing you to gain a deeper understanding of your data and answer specific questions about user behavior.

Improving Ad Performance

• Enable Enhanced Measurement: This feature automatically tracks different user interactions, such as scrolls, outbound clicks, on-site search, and video engagement, giving you highly valuable data without manual tagging.
• Connect GA4 with Google Ad Manager: This integration provides a comprehensive view of ad performance by combining both website data with ad revenue data, allowing for better optimization and increased ROI.
• Track conversions and attribute value: To get the most out of ads, set up conversion tracking to see how well they encourage important actions like purchases or sign-ups. Using attribution modeling can help you understand how different channels and touchpoints work together to lead to conversions.

Leveraging Advanced Capabilities

• Explore predictive metrics: GA4 lets you take advantage of predictive metrics like purchase and churn probability. These tools help you understand user behavior better, so you can fine-tune your strategies.
• Use BigQuery export: For advanced analysis, you can export your GA4 data to tools like BigQuery to combine it with other data sources and perform complex queries.

By focusing on these key areas and utilizing GA4's advanced features, you can gain a deeper understanding of your audience, optimize your website and content, improve your ad performance, and ultimately achieve your business objectives.

GA4 Migration And Set-Up Guide

With Universal Analytics (UA) being sunsetted on July 1, 2023, ad publishers needed to migrate to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to ensure continued access to essential data and insights. If you haven’t already done this, or simply need to set up your GA4 account, this guide provides a step-by-step approach for setting it up effectively.

Phase 1: Familiarize Yourself with GA4

• Account Structure: Understand the differences between UA and GA4 account structures. GA4 provides better integration for web and app data, allowing management of both under a single property.
• Events and Parameters: In GA4, events are the primary way to track user interactions. It’s important to learn how to define these events and parameters to best capture relevant ad-related actions.
• Reports and Metrics: Explore the new reports, metrics, and dimensions available in GA4, with a focus on understanding how to effectively use the dashboard, and pay special attention to those relevant to ad publishers, such as Publisher Ads report and user engagement metrics.

Phase 2: Set Up Your GA4 Property

1. Create a GA4 Property: If you haven't already, create a new GA4 property alongside any existing UA property.
2. Enable Enhanced Measurement: GA4's Enhanced Measurement automatically tracks various events like page views, scrolls, and outbound clicks, so make sure this is enabled.
3. Configure Ad-Related Events: Set up custom events to track specific ad interactions, such as ad impressions, clicks, and viewability.
4. Link AdSense Account: Link your AdSense account to your GA4 property so you can import ad revenue data directly into your reports.

Phase 3: Migrate Key Data and Settings

• Goals to Conversions: Migrate your UA goals over to GA4 conversions in order to track desired actions.
• Audiences: Recreate your UA audiences in GA4 to maintain continuity in your targeting and analysis.
• Filters and Views: While GA4 doesn't have views like UA, you can use different filters to segment your data and create custom reports.

Phase 4: Link GA4 to Other Tools

• Google Ads: Link your GA4 property to your Google Ads account so you can track ad performance and optimize campaigns.
• BigQuery: Connect GA4 to a tool like BigQuery so you can export your data for advanced analysis and custom reporting.
• Ad Manager: Integrate GA4 with Ad Manager so you can send data to Ad Manager reports and import ad revenue data.

Phase 5: Continuous Optimization

• Regularly Review Reports: Monitor your GA4 reports to allow you to track ad performance, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions using GA4 metrics.
• Refine Event Tracking: It’s important to continuously refine your event tracking to capture the most relevant ad-related interactions.
• Explore New Features: Stay up to date with new GA4 features and updates to leverage its full potential.

Additional Tips for Ad Publishers

• Focus on User Engagement: GA4 focuses on user engagement metrics. Track metrics like scroll depth, time on page, and video engagement to understand how users interact with your ads.
• Leverage Content Grouping: Use content grouping to analyze ad performance across different sections or categories of your website.
• Utilize DebugView: Use DebugView to troubleshoot event tracking and ensure you always have data accuracy.

Using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a great way to maintain accurate data collection and analysis. By following this guide and continuously optimizing your setup, you can leverage GA4's immense capabilities to gain valuable insights into your ad performance and improve your overall ad revenue.