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Chris Mercer - aka “Mercer,” is the man when it comes to measurement and analytics. He’s the guy the pros like Justin Brooke, Mike Rhodes, and OMG turn to when we need help.
If you haven’t heard (and I’d be shocked if you haven’t), Google Analytics 4 or GA4 is coming, and Universal Analytics (the current version) will go away in July of 2023.
GA4 isn’t just an upgrade. It’s an entirely different animal. It has to be! Given how technology, user preferences, and policies around privacy have changed over recent years - Google is forced to abandon UA and build something completely new.
In this episode, we talk about what’s new, what’s different, what we’re excited about, and what you can do to prepare.
Here’s a glimpse of what we cover:
- A simple way to understand events and how Google measures them in GA4.
- Data storage and how to hold onto your data - If nothing is done, your data will be gone in 2-14 months.
- What’s going away vs. what’s here to stay?
- How to use GA4 to make better decisions.
Mentioned In This Episode:
Transcript:
Brett:
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today is going to be full of nerdy goodness but also practical wisdom and good insights for all business owners. We're talking about GA4, otherwise known as Google Analytics 4. It's coming fast and furious, so you gotta get ready. So we're going to talk about what do you need to know how to get ready, how do we leverage and maximize this? And I have the foremost expert on the subject, A man who knows all about measurement and attribution and analytics and all that good stuff online. And this is actually podcast number two for Mercer but we were just talking, it's been forever. It's like 2018 the last time he was on. So I waited too long to get Mercer back on the podcast. And for those that are Mercer, what kind of name is that? His name is Chris Mercer, but I don't know anybody that call. I don't know anybody that calls you Chris. Does anyone call you Chris other than your mom? Maybe.
Chris:
Probably was just the family. And that's it. It still feels weird. Yeah, it's
Brett:
So true. Yeah, I don't know how or when that happened and maybe you can enlighten us on that, but everybody calls him Mercer, so that that's his name. But he's the co-founder of measurement marketing.io. We send our team through his training and Mercer and I go way back. We actually spoke, you and I were some pretty early speakers at TNC. Yeah. And we had a long run, man. We were speaking every year running into each other. It was kind of our annual thing when we would hang out. So first of all, why Mercer? And then I've got another history question for you because
Chris:
Growing up there's always been another Chris in the room. And when I went into sort of professional world, it became things like, oh, big Chris, little Chris, fat, Chris, skinny Chris, that it's like, okay, <laugh>, at a certain point everyone just goes down to last names. And that's what they started using. So I just kept it. I was like, okay, just Mercer, it's easier. And Mercer. And if I'm walking down an airport and somebody screams Mercer, I know they're talking about me. So
Brett:
Exactly. Chris made it so much easier.
Chris:
Exactly.
Brett:
Even so this is interesting. So there's this concept in psychology and the way the brain works called a reticular activator where our brain's always scanning for things that are Oh, yeah. Familiar or things that are way outta place. Your brain's always scanning. That's why in a noisy, crowded airport or whatever, you can hear your name. Oh, someone said Chris, someone said Brett. Is Chris still? Does that still trigger you or is it just Mercer?
Chris:
It's mostly Mercer. I'll, I'll hear Chris, but I'm like, that's not me. Cuz people that know me wouldn't have said that. So I'll let it until somebody says it again and I'm like, oh wait, that's me. Hang on. But yeah, typically Mercer.
Brett:
That's hilarious. Okay, cool. And then the other thing I wanna dive into. So I've would consider you and I both OGs, right? And that's not an old comment, we've just been in the game a long time doing this for
Chris:
A while.
Brett:
Yeah. Been doing, been doing it a while. And so I've just seen you all the time at TNC and we'd always talk, but in prepping I was like, Hey, how did you get connected to Ryan Dice and Digital Marker and that whole crew? So tell that story if you would. Cause I think that's interesting. How'd you get connected with Dice and Crew? Yeah,
Chris:
Well when we first started getting into this, it was back when I had as I hit the mic it was back when I had a WordPress agency to do WordPress sites. And we were kind of doing like, Hey, we'll deliver the site and we'll do cro, we'll optimize the sites for you. Cause we wanted to differentiate ourselves. And in order to do that, you gotta measure stuff. So we were giving people complete setups with Google Analytics, et cetera, et cetera. When we started doing that, almost immediately the referrals stopped from being, Hey, we need a WordPress site to, we already have a site, but sudden and such is at a mastermind. And they were showing me what you did with their Google Analytics, how do we get you to do that? Or can you show us how to do that? So we started doing that for a few people and one of those people actually was Justin Brook back in the day. So big
Brett:
Guy, Justin Brookman, friend, friend absolutely personal friend, friend of the show. Dude's a legend. Absolutely.
Chris:
So we were talking to him about different stuff and things that we were doing and he actually recommended us to Digital Marketer way back in the day of Russ Henneberry and Molly Pittman and everybody being out there with
Brett:
Ryan and team also friends, love Russ and Molly, shout out Russ and Molly for listening.
Chris:
Exactly right. I guess Hello again. And it was those guys, it was Russ and Molly that brought us in and was like, Hey, how do we use this analytics thing? And then we brought in tag manager and started showing them some things and the rest is history.
Brett:
That's awesome. And what's so cool about this, and I'm really excited to dive in the GA 4, but it's one of those scenarios where basically everybody's using Google Analytics, everybody throws the code on the site, it's there, but not that many people are actually using it, leveraging it, customizing it, making it useful. They've, they've got the code there and they've got some data but they're not doing much with it.
Chris:
And on that note, and this is something that we're really hitting hard and happen for a little while, but this idea of tool versus trade. So what happens is, let's say I want to be a really good chef. So I go to the food network, I'm watching all these chef shows and I see their kitchens and I'm like, I need to be a good chef. I need that $45,000 kitchen they have cuz it's the oven, it's the stove, it's all the fancy tools they have. So I buy all that fancy stuff, I put it out, remodel everything in the house and I boil an egg on it because I didn't actually learn how to be a chef. I just got the tools that the chefs were using. And my confusion was thinking the tool's going to make me the chef. And that's what's happened with measurement. It's so easy to get started with any of the tools, Google Analytics, tag manager, Looker Studio, wicked Reports, highs, it doesn't matter anything that's a measurement related tool to think that, oh, because I'm doing this, I am now doing measurement and I'm doing
Brett:
Analytics, I'm doing attribution, I bought tools.
Chris:
Right. That's exactly right. But they haven't learned the skill of measurement and understanding why you should measure and how you measure. And when you understand that that's what allows you to unlock the tools like Google Analytics 4.
Brett:
Yeah. Awesome. So any little tidbits. So I love that. I want to dig just a little deeper into that before we go into to GA 4. But what are some of the things that you believe business owners miss when it comes to measurements? So this tool versus trade thing, and I know there's a lot and there's a lot we can unpack, probably make the whole show about the question I'm about to ask you. But what are some of the bigger mistakes or the bigger misses when it comes to, Hey, I'm just using a tool versus I'm really understanding what I'm measuring? Yeah,
Chris:
I think a lot. There's a couple of them. One would be this concept that measurement now is a department. It is not a project. And I think a lot of people think, oh, measurement means I set up a dashboard, I get a report, things have been measured, so I'm just going to use that. And that's not at all what a measurement strategy does. That's just a report. And a lot of times, and this is how that measurement's gone wrong, is if you have a lot of data and a lot of information and no actions, everyone's like, I don't know what this means. And all that stuff happens. And you're marketing by guessing, which is what happens all the time with random maxim marketing, which I think is a Dan Kennedy term. But this concept of like, well we should change the headline, we should change the product images, we should change, we should add reviews, we should change the offer, we should change the price. And everyone's just guessing no one really knows. Or they professionally guess, which is when you buy a hundred thousand dollars mastermind and you're sitting next to somebody else who did a hundred thousand dollars mastermind and they all just guessing at a hundred thousand dollars mastermind level, but they're just guessing, you don't really know what to do. So that's a problem of not having a proper measurement strategy. So that's the one mindset is like measurement is now a department and organizations are quickly realizing I love
Brett:
That, love that.
Chris:
The second thing and why it is so important to be a department is because the whole point of measurement, and this is you and I, right? We're having a conversation, I'm going to say certain things. You're going to adjust what you say based upon what I say and vice versa. This is normal, this is how humans work. Nobody thinks that's weird or different. And yet digitally we lose our minds. We're like, well how can I measure the, I can't hear the conversation. It's a website. Well, yeah, but they're still having a conversation. It's just that you're not there. The website is, so how do you listen to the user's side of the conversation? That's what measurement does. So measurement is how we listen to their side of the conversation. And then marketing is how we respond to the conversation. What mostly happens is marketing, marketing, marketing and marketing and marketing. So imagine if I just never listened to you and I just kept talking and talking and you were like, Hey, how's the weather? And I'm like, and another thing and blah blah blah. At a certain point you're going to be like, this doesn't
Brett:
Work. Sorry. Yeah, sorry me, this is no good. You're not even to listen to me.
Chris:
And people are confused why conversions aren't there because you're not listening to the conversation, you're ignoring them. They're like, well this doesn't work, I don't like this. And you can tell things. Is it the above the fold that's an issue. Is it the ad coming in the way the setup? Was that the issue? Was it, is it a process? That's a technical issue. You can see all sorts of things in measurement when it's properly set up, but it does take skill and strategy and that's why it's so important. It's almost like a turbocharger that gets added to your marketing department engine. It's like those, they're, they're not se they're separate, but they are made to work together. So when you snap on measurement, especially now that we're in 2023, you gotta be efficient in probably what's going to be a downturn year for a lot of companies. You gotta get efficient with your spend. So how do you do that? Turn on the flashlight, turn on visibility, add measurement to your marketing and then it's easier to figure out what to do because the users are telling you because you can hear their conversation. That's the whole point of it.
Brett:
And that's so brilliant. And it does come down to data does not matter. It is not valuable. It's useless if you're not doing something with it. If you're not first understanding what is the data telling us? And then two, doing something with it. And I love that view of the data is really just showing you the conversation, showing you the prospect side of it. How are they interacting, how are they engaging? You're listening by looking at the data. I think that's brilliant. And yeah, what's so interesting about this year, and we'll see, nobody really knows what's going to happen with the economy right up, down, sideways, Armageddon, blip, who knows? But what I'm confident in is there will be opportunities for growth. There'll be opportu opportunities to gain market share, to do good things. I think we should enter this year with lots of confidence. However just always, and maybe even more so if there is a recession or a bigger downturn, you gotta make every dollar count. So don't pull back, don't spend less, go hard, but make sure you're not wasting anything. That's
Chris:
Exactly right. Be efficient. Exactly right.
Brett:
Be efficient. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Love it. Okay. That was a brilliant setup. I appreciate that. That was super fun. So let's talk GA 4, Google Analytics 4. So many changes. So many changes coming our way. Come on man. We got iOS 14, which now seems like ancient history but
Chris:
Still really I remember that. Still
Brett:
Impact. Yeah, yeah. But still feeling the impact. Google's got all kinds of change with audiences. We got performance max and smart shopping's gone and Facebook is changing things like everything is changing. So now our dearly beloved, our beloved universal analytics, the analytics that we all know and love and have had forever, it's going away too. Say it, but why? First of all, before we talk about what and what we need to do and stuff why the change to GA 4?
Chris:
Yeah, good question. I mean the short answer is cuz they had being Google in this case. So there's really three main things that are occurring that are kind of the superstorms of our world that will be here. They're not going to go away. They're going to be here for at least the decade. So the first is tech, right? Tech is changing rapidly. You mentioned the iOS thing when Apple and Facebook got in their tiff. So it's like that's going to happen. But keep in mind that's just the one everyone talks about. It's been happening for a long, long, long time. Apple's been changing stuff in Safari forever where they're limiting cookies and everything else. Chrome is dumping third party cookies. Eventually they say 20, 24.
Brett:
Now we'll find out say 2023 or
Chris:
Seven maybe,
But eventually they're going away, right? You've got browsers like Brave and Vivaldi out there that just disconnect measurement from the start. Can't measure. You have to go in and turn that stuff on, which of course no users are doing. So you see this stuff, ad blockers, extensions, all this stuff is out there all the time. Tech is rapidly changing. So that's essentially causing less people to be measured on your site. That doesn't mean they're not on your site. It means you can't tell they're on your site. How do you deal with that? So that's one problem. Then there's another storm, which of course is that gets all the headlines, which is privacy, just the actual laws that are happening, right? GDPR being the famous one, but Utah has got theirs, California's got theirs here in the states. States will certainly have one, probably not in the next couple of years, but it will definitely have a privacy some sort of legislation for that.
So it's coming down. The big shift on that is that the data has to be in the control of the users. So it used to be that I would click on, let's say I go to your site, I click on the little button on Facebook. Facebook back in the day, it'd be like that's my right, I own that. I can do whatever I want. Now it's not the true. Now I should be able to go back to Facebook and say, you know what? I'm leasing that like to you, but I want you to get rid of all my stuff. And they have to be able to do it right? And that's happening. Power of the data is not the platform anymore that collected it. It's still the user's data and that's an important shift. So that's starting to happen worldwide, mostly in Europe right now for sure.
But it will certainly happen in the us. Then the third thing that's happening is the thing that's kicked off the other two, which is the users themselves are just really getting tired of what I think in a lot of cases was lazy marketing, not putting in proper kills pixels and following you around with the shoe store stuff for eight months. And it's like putting in and publishers who put in a billion different ads and it just makes it a horrible user experience. So that people go, well I need to block these and that's caused it. So the users themselves don't want their privacy out there. They want to be in control of their data. They want to not be measured all the time or followed around cuz it's a little creepy what's been happening. So you've got those three storms, the tech laws and then the users and they're all colliding at the same time.
And all of these are essentially causing challenges because if you're using laws and they don't give you consent, well now you don't see them on the site. So they're there, but you can't measure their behaviors if they're a user using an ad blocker. Cause they don't wanna be measured. You lose it. If they're using Brow Brave or Vivaldi or something else, it's not going to work. Right? So less and less still the users are on your site when I emphasize that they're on your site, they're doing stuff, they're buying stuff, but you have no clue that's happening until the sale shows up. That's a weird thing for a market to be like, now you have to make things work. How do you do that? Yeah. So enter a
Brett:
Platform, this is how Google makes their livelihood. Gotta be able to measure this and show you this stuff. So you spend more, you spend more time
Chris:
Because you wanna spend more money on Google ads, right? Gotta gotta have that Performance Max campaign. Yeah. Yeah. So what's been happening is Universal analytics was a tool, and I kind of think about the Model T Ford. It was this car that was built for a very different time. It was built for, I don't even know, they went, let's say it's a max of 35 miles an hour or something. It wasn't built for. In Texas, our speed limits are 80 miles an hour. It would never survive on a Texas road. This is not built for that future. Well what if there is no road right? Model T's not going to do anything, right? It's not going to make it through. What if I wanted airbags in it? Well I might be able to replace the tires, but I can't put airbags in it. Just the structure isn't ready for the new world.
So it had to be rebuilt and they've been trying to snap on new things and they, they've evolved it over the years, but it's the same model T Ford at the end of the day. And it can only go so far. But that's what a model T does without structure. So instead it's like, okay, let's rebuild this thing from scratch. What does it look like knowing what we know about the internet? If you think about a platform like the original Google Analytics, it was built when there was like, no, we had mobile phones, but they weren't connected to the internet. People weren't thinking that. They were barely thinking about laptops back then, right? Right. Yeah. Let alone the Nest thermostat. That's internet of things. That also has an IP address that can be measured. So it's like, yeah, yeah, okay, now what do we do? So we rebuild it and that's what Google essentially did. They rebuilt it from scratch saying, now that we know what the world is, and I trust Google just because they have of anybody in the world, Google has the best view of what the future's going to look like when it comes to impact because they're literally making it right. They
Brett:
Always have even from the early days. But now they're shaping, they got the power to shape it more than anybody. And yeah, now they know that the web is 80% mobile and they understand and
Chris:
You're going to have internet of things coming in. That's another people aren't even thinking about yet. But that's going to be a thing. It's a really good point. So it's like, okay, we need to make something that can do all of that. Think about apps on a phone didn't exist, wasn't a thing 10, 15 years ago. Now it's like why do you not have an app? Of course you have an app, right? Everybody's got apps. So this platform was redeveloped with the world of what it is now today and where it's going to go tomorrow. And that's why GA 4 exists. So it takes care of tech challenges, it takes care of tech challenges primarily through modeling. There's a lot of modeling that it does. So it will kind of say to you, well we see, we know there's a hundred people on a site, but we think it's more like 150 and that's what it'll tell you.
And they're working this stuff out. This is in progress. But that's what's going to start happening. So you're going to have these modeled information where the tool's saying, here's what we think is actually a useful truth of what's been happening all the way through attribution being modeled conversions, behaviors happening on the sites, being modeled, all that stuff. The laws, GD GA 4 gives you control of the data. So you can come to me and say, listen, I want you to get rid of my data in goo all the data you have as a company. I want you to delete everything cause you're, we're all going to have to be able to do that stuff. So universal analytics, I can't do it. It's impossible. Yeah, it can't get it out cause it was never built for that. But GA 4 is, so GA 4 doesn't hold data very long, which is a key point.
It holds data up to two months in the beginning when it first starts out it's two months or you can flip it to 14 months, but that's it. No more going back in time and seeing what happened five years ago that user certain user data's not going to be there anymore. You'll see generic data, but you won't see user behavior data as much. So it's like, okay, well I can now control the data going in and I can do things with it. So it makes it a little more flexible for this world of laws that we're in with GDPR and other privacy concerns. And then it's like, okay, what are the users wanting? Well again, privacy and consent and everything else that goes in there. And that modeling helps to say, okay, we only measured X amount on your site actual in terms of the cookies and everything else that's fired, but here's what we actually think is happening and there's going to be some
Brett:
And what is that going to be based on? Cuz really Google's still probably going to be able to see some of that, right? They'll be able to see the actual
Chris:
That's exactly the point. Google knows they were on Chrome, right? So let's say they say, and a little bit is how you set it up, but let's just say Google generally knows because they're using Chrome, they use Gmail, Google Calendar on your phone, all the stuff that's a Google infrastructure. They know that you visited this site, they might not know the intricacies of what you did on this site, but they know you were probably on that site. And then they can measure because some people will have privacy stuff not worried about it and be measured. So they can take that sort of sample of what the audience is doing and then extrapolate and say, well we know these a hundred people did this. So probably if that pattern holds true, this other thousand people probably did this stuff too. And that's how they come up with a modeling. But who knows better than Google AI and machine learning. I get open ai, it's got a ton of stuff going on, but Google's got tensor and everything else they're doing and they're staying eerily quiet on that stuff. Yeah, it's not like they don't have it. They're in a lot of cases they think it's better than what open AI's done, but they're just not giving it out pushing. They're
Brett:
Not giving it out Performance
Chris:
Max and they're, they've got all these diagnostic tools that are feeding that algorithm. Again, I have no insider knowledge total guess, but if I'm Google, that's what I'm doing. That makes sense. Yep.
Brett:
Yep. Feed. Yeah, I think it's a really good guess mean, think about the presentations Mike Rhodes gave about Google's AI and how advanced it was. And they bought that company out of England that had the built the, what's the game? That's like chess, but it's way more advanced. I forgot to go, oh it was go, yeah, yes, go this machine that became better than all the top go players in the world. Anyway, that was like 2015. So all those sizes, it
Chris:
Is not sitting on a shelf. I promise you
Brett:
AI is all that. AI has been getting better and better and learning. And so yeah, nobody's better at AI and machine learning than Google. I think we can safely say that. So awesome. Okay, that's really, really good. They kind of explains the why. And I also think when it comes to privacy stuff too talked about this on a chat I have with Molly Pittman on her podcast, but I think companies get to a size Google, Facebook, others, Amazon would be in this category too, where I think they wanna do right by users or I think the users are driving some of this, but there's also this case of we don't wanna get sued, we gotta grow and we gotta do these things and the price gotta be good, but we could gotta mitigate lawsuits. And I think that that's driving a lot of what they do as well from the absolutely the privacy standpoint.
Chris:
Google doesn't want this data. And that brings us to an important point about universal analytics. Not only is it the Model T, but they're literally going, you know what? We're going to repo this car coming up. They keep doing it, they're going to shut it down, they're going to disconnect it and one day it's not going to turn on. Yep.
Brett:
Yep, yep, yep. Totally Cool. So what do we need to know about 4 that you haven't already talked about? So how else is it going to be different that we didn't already mention?
Chris:
There's a huge difference. So besides the fact of the strategy, it's going to be a more useful tool in for today and in the future. So for sure if for no other reason of using it, do it for that. That said, it is completely different. So this is in particular to those of you who are like, I've heard of this thing and I keep pushing it off. Stop doing that. Yes. And this is Google's fault. I firmly blame Google on the rollout for this in universal analytics and even in the regular, what they used to call classic analytics. And this is how Google, they bought this company called Urchin Analytics. Then it turned into classic analytics, then it's Universal Analytics,
Brett:
Which that's where UTM comes from. A little bit of internet history. UTM is urchin tag
Chris:
Tracking module
Brett:
Tracking module. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a fun little
Chris:
Trivia for you. But the whole point of that was they were literally just snapping stuff onto that same model T thing. So they made better tires or whatever else, but at a certain point they just had to rebuild it. So when they did that, they didn't just say, oh well here's Universal that we have, we're going to iterate from there. They threw that out and they said, okay, we're going to build from scratch. So the entire thing is different. Do not think it's going to be like every other time you have upgraded Google Analytics. And this is why I blame Google, nothing against them love 'em to death. But they messed up this rollout because they kept telling people this is an upgrade, which is what they told people with Universal Analytics when I'm from classic Universal. And it was like, oh, just change the script on your pages and now you got all these new features, it's the same thing but better.
And back then that was very true. Now when you get into it, people that are doing that, they go, what is this? It's a completely different platform. So it's going to have a learning curve. It is not hard, but it is very different. And there's a lot of it just like Universal Analytics has. So people that have experienced universal analytics have gone through it a few hundred times. You get used to it, right? It's the same at the end of the day. It's the same old thing. I tell people it's kinda like this, back in the previous life as when I was a waiter at the Olive Garden og, so
Brett:
Olive Garden on yes,
Chris:
Breadsticks and Salad, baby
Brett:
Red sticks.
Chris:
I remember getting this menu and going through everything and being in training thinking there's no way I'm going to remember this. All these details of what gets what and sides and what's possible, blah. Then I realized after a few days of this, I'm like, oh, I'm saying the same thing a hundred times a day. It's going to get pretty easy. And that's how you memorize a menu. It just do the same thing over and over again. That is kind of universal analytics. It's the same stuff and you just do it. You only, it's a landing page report. Once you get used to that, you kind of, you know it right? Once you learn your source media report, you kind of just know it. And that is there in GA 4, they just came out with the landing page report just recently and they have the source media reports, what they call the acquisition reports now. So those are all back there, but they look different and they're in different places. There's a different layout. So everybody who is not yet, if you've listened to this, you're watching this and you're like, I haven't made that movie yet, do it now. Get in there and get started with it. Cuz you're going to have probably, I'd give yourself at least 90 days to start getting used to this platform to get something from it, but it's going to take some time to learn.
Brett:
Well, not only that, and if you're listening to this in January, which we we're publishing it you've only got what about six months until GF 4? Exactly.
Chris:
Going back to Universal being shut down
Brett:
And you want a little bit of data, a little bit of historical data ideally. And we were telling all of our clients last year trying to get them to upgrade or to in install GA 4 along with Universal Analytics for a while at least by July. So you get some of those year over year comparisons if you get the data for 14
Chris:
Hours. Exactly. I guess, and this goes back to that rollout too. They kept telling people it's ready, it's ready, it's ready. Switch, switch, switch. And people would switch and they're like, it's not ready. And it was like the boy who cried wolf story where it's like, okay, at a certain point you just don't believe anymore. So I don't think you should believe Google. However, it is ready enough to start using. So to your point, you're going to have your universal that you've got for the next maybe six months, six, seven, whatever it's going to be. And then you've got the GA 4 stuff. And what'll happen is you'll get more and more used to GA 4 and then Universal, you won't miss when it's gone and it'll stop the way they're currently most current truth of it's rolling out would be they're going to stop collecting information July 1st, 2023.
So you can still access Universal Analytics, but it won't be collecting new information no more, no more new data goes in there as of July 1st. So that means you're going to have to have everything set up and worked out and figured out with GA 4, hence the 90 days, give yourself 90 days to figure it out, maybe another 90 days after that to perfect it and then you'll be off to the races. It's not going to be that big a deal, but it's going to be a deal, right? It's not huge deal, but it's a deal. So focus on it and put your efforts into it. One of the things, this goes back to the benefits of it is, is be what makes it a harder platform to learn is that it can do anything. I was talking to somebody about this today actually, where we were talking about things like Infusionsoft, right slash keep slash max classic, whatever they're going to call it in three months.
So you get this platform that right? So sure, so much stuff. It does a ton of stuff versus active campaign, which just does emails. So active campaigns a little easier when it comes to working with emails because it just does that one thing. Infusionsoft does emails, does campaigns, has APIs, has the cart system, has the affiliate programs in it. So it's a little more and because there's so much more back there to do, it's a little more complicated to do it, but powerful. So with GA 4, it's kind of like that compared to Universal. Universal would say, I know what a page U is and I can say E-commerce information and there's really few things it does and that's really it. GA 4, the way that they think about it is everything's an event. And the way that I think about this in my head is just, it's a behavior.
Everything's a behavior. What behavior you wanna record, I would like to record a behavior of a page view. When they view a page, I will record that behavior. What else would you like to record? I would like to be, behave, record the behavior of a click. Okay, I'll record the click and where they're going. When that click happens what else do you like to record? I would like to record scroll when they reach the bottom of the page, I'm going to record that as a scroll. And this is all on its own. This thing does this on its own and it can even do things like YouTube video form submissions. It'll do it automatically. Whereas Universal Analytics, that required a ton of customization, right? Yeah. Now with GA 4, it kind of does it on its own and there's different ways to do it. There's different levels to this, but just out of the box you can turn that stuff on and it automatically collects not just regular page views, but clicks, scroll form submission, video embeds that you have on YouTube that they start the video, play the video, all that sort of things.
File downloads. So things that people might not typically be measuring because they didn't know how to get that behavior measured. GA 4 just sort of starts from these multiple set of different behaviors that it can do. And then because of the model that it uses, what they call the data schema to get technical, but it's an event. And then there's things that describe the event. So an example of a click that's just an event, a behavior, a click. What do I need to know about that? Where I wanna know where they clicked too. Where they going, okay, well that's information we'll collect too. So now the click and information about the click, that's all it really is. But the beauty of what they did is they made it wildly so you can make anything and then details about anything you want. So for example, I could, if I'm an e-commerce store, right?
Say I'm a Shopify store, whatever, I got an e-commerce store and I can create an event called product engagement. Literally just make up that thing and say, oh, I want a product engagement event. Well what happens when product engagement, I wanna know how they're engaging with the product. So it could be product engagement and then clicking on images. So I know that they're virtually pulling the product off the shelf and maybe looking at it because they're clicking on product detail images. I could do product engagement and looking for size. So now I'm looking, oh, there's different sizes they're investigating for product engagement, looking at colors. So now I'm like, and now because I can literally put that into GA 4, I can get a story back that's perfectly built for me as an e-commerce store owner. So I could say, well I need to see all my product detail pages and I want to see, in other words, how many people saw the different versions of products that I've got.
Then I can see the conversion rates of who actually bought that and I might see two or three products are really selling a lot more than the other ones. Well then I can go and find out why. Cuz not only do I know the results, but I would know how that's happening. So I can say, well what's the engagements on these? Well, these top products have more engagement than these other products do. But what specific engagement? Well the ones that are really outselling tend to be the ones that people are looking at the reviews, right? Oh, okay, well maybe we should go back to these other products and enhance reviews maybe. Oh there's these other products have reviews from three years ago. Let's do an email campaign and get reviews freshened up now and then we would expect that's going to prove sales. So now measurement is guiding the marketing actions and it's not a guess, it's a better than average chance of success type of thing. It's all probabilities, but that at least focuses the effort so you can start to move the needle a little bit faster. And that's cool about GA 4 because you can do some really cool custom stuff pretty quickly with it, but at the same time, because you can do anything, it's like, well what do I do? And that's where planning comes in and learning measurement strategy is why it's
Brett:
It so important. That's what I've heard from our internal analytics specialists. And of course we just do set up and troubleshooting for our media clients. We don't offer analytics services outside of that. But yeah, they, they've said, Hey, there's a lot to, this is super complex. So when you can do anything, it also makes it harder to wrap your mind around all of it. But what you're saying though is that some of these things that we can view all these events, some of them are relatively simple to set up because G4 is kind of built to do it. It's
Chris:
Built for it. And to your point, and I get it because okay, I hear that too with our students with like CASA is really complex, but at the end of the day you're like, it is because there's a lot. But that doesn't mean it's complex. It's actually really simple. There's just a lot of simple, I mean, here's what I mean by that. Everything that I talked about, page views, clicks, scroll, purchase, add to carts, all the traditional e-commerce things, these are just behaviors. So all it does is collect behaviors and then details about those behaviors. That's it. So everything's just a behavior and the details about behaviors and
Brett:
Details about those behaviors.
Chris:
So I wanna know purchase, but that's right what they bought, but
Brett:
It does,
Chris:
Right? Behaviors. So
Brett:
Now are you able to then build segments where you can look at people that engage with a pdp? I wanna look at the people that clicked on images and looked at reviews and compare them to people
Chris:
That not, let me give you just an idea of the back and forth or the differences between Universal and GA 4. So Universal, they had this thing where you could set up, they called 'EM goal funnels where you'd have to go in and set it up, but the problem was if you forgot to set it up and you set it up after all the traffic hit, you were outta luck, right? You had to set these things up ahead of time and you would go and see the Gulf flow and it's pretty useful. Well in GA 4 there's what they call an explorer section what they call workspaces. So you go into the explorer workspace and you can set up a funnel report and you can literally say, I would like to see people who landed on this page, watched this video for 30 seconds then went to this product detail page and added to cart within 10 minutes.
And then you see your conversion rates pop up. So you can see a customer path, talk about listening to the conversation, right? So now you can see the conversation, then you can say, I would like that to be an audience. Let's send that to Google Ads so they can retarget them because they didn't buy yet and I wanna give them a coupon offer and just refresh that every 30 days. I wanna have whoever's done that in the last 30 days. But the key thing that they're just to emphasize is that 10 minutes thing, it knows time. Universal analytics never
Brett:
Knew time didn't no time, yeah.
Chris:
4 is built, it knows every single second. So you can literally ask it and build questions like that. Well, who's going through, who's buying a product? Maybe the people who are your highest ticket people are buying by time. They see the product detail page, they add to cart, checkout and purchase. They're doing that within 30 minutes. And the people that are low ticket are doing it within five minutes. So then it's like, wow, how do we slow down people? Cause we slow them down, they'll buy more. Yeah. And that's counterintuitive. How do I maybe add a little bit of friction that might, what are these people, oh well they're seeing other products because again, you can tell GA 4, I would like to know when somebody considers also recommended products that you might wanna buy, you can measure for that. And that's the beauty of this platform is it can do anything which is, it's again, very simple and at least theory, it's behaviors and then what do you wanna know about those behaviors? But because it could do anything, you just really have to think it through. So I do lots of notes and whiteboarding of what are we trying to figure out? What questions are we trying to answer? What information do we want to collect to get those answers? And then what actions would we take if we knew what those answers were? And then assuming it makes it through that, it's like, okay, cool, this makes sense. Cool, now let's go set up the measurement so we can do that. And that's sort of how that whole thing works.
Brett:
Yeah, that's awesome. And yeah, that understanding and measuring every second is interesting, right? Because the way Universal Analytics worked, it was only if you closed the page or once you took one action, they could only measure the time between that and the next action, right? Exactly what they
Chris:
Called exactly right? Yeah. It would only tell the, so if you landed on a page and then you left and it had no measurable action, it would be like zero time on page. And even if you spent the time, maybe it was a really long blog post or a video or something, you watched it and did all these behaviors. Universal had no idea. Yeah, GA 4 will, GA 4 actually has, they technically brought back something called bounce rate. It was one of the most misused metrics in the world for sure. But they brought it back. But they have a better version of it called Engaged sessions. So it literally counts to 10 seconds and you can change it up to 60 seconds. So you have that ability in the settings, but within 10 seconds it goes, okay, they're still here, they're now engaged. So even if I land on one page but I stick around 10 seconds, it goes well, they're engaged, they're still here.
That's an important metric to know because there's a big difference between somebody that comes to a product detail page and leaves within 10 seconds and didn't buy and that's why they didn't buy. Versus somebody who comes to a product detail page, sees the product, investigates the different sizes, looks at the different colors, and then doesn't buy, right? Two different problems. One was, Nope, wrong place, I'm outta here. And maybe there was a mismatch on the expectation that brought 'em there. The other one is just didn't get 'em around. They're looking, but maybe they missed a color they were looking for. Maybe the,
Brett:
Yeah, maybe they're not ready. Maybe they're just shopping. Maybe they're shopping for something.
Chris:
Maybe they little push, right? Little discount coming in. But why give the discount to somebody that wouldn't even stick around 10 seconds? They don't need that. And more importantly, why put that crowd in an audience to have Google Ads do that? There's no point that you want the people who are engaged with your brand to actually be in that audience. And that's the power of GA 4. And that's really really why, I mean, at the end of the day, this is why Google's doing it. We mentioned earlier, so you can spend more money on Google ads, but that's okay,
Brett:
The money on Google ads. And so Google ads get sued. That's like, there you go.
Chris:
And hopefully it's driving more results because if you're feeding their algorithm, this is the buyer I want, and then you say, well go find other buyers like that and you're using Performance Max or whatever else to do that, well now Performance Max is getting smarter cuz their algorithm is getting better quality data from you because it's coming from GA 4, right? Right. So there's a lot of reasons to switch over to this platform and again, expect the learning curve. Nobody, the only reason I think people will really get spun out of this is if they think it's going to be exactly universal. And because they quote no Universal, they're going to know GA 4. That is not true. It is a completely different platform. So you're going to have to get in there and learn it, but give yourself 90 days and as long as you give yourself that 90 days of playing around with it and you don't really have to use it and it's not detrimental if it didn't work and all that sort of stuff, within 90 days you're accidentally going to start getting good at it. That's going to happen. And you're going to be like, ah, this is not a big deal. And then you just sort of build and grow as you go through.
Brett:
That's awesome. So you've already touched on a few of these things that are really cool, but anything else you're really excited about with GA 4 that's that's going to be an improvement. Make our lives easier, make our lives better, that you haven't already talked about. I know you've already said mentioned several.
Chris:
There are a, there's a lot in the exploration section that they have. So this is where it's, they broke it up in different workspaces, they called 'em. So there's the reports and Universal just had reports like that's all they had in GA 4. There's a report section that has some of the standard reports, not as many but I think that's okay. Cause Universal most people weren't using all the reports anyway. So you have the reports that shows what they call lifecycle of reports. So it's how did we acquire the users? What actions, behaviors did they take? What were the results of those behaviors? That sort of stuff. And you get some information around demographics of the users. Same stuff you would do with the Universal Analytics. Then there's this other section called explorations where you can really customize and that's what they want people doing.
It's back there going, okay, well I wanna build a report that answers this very specific question. And you can do that. What used to be Custom reports and user me Universal Analytics is now that it's called Explorations and there's a bunch of different ones. So you can do the goal of the funnels like we talked about before. You can do Path reports where you can see, I wanna see people who purchased, what did they do before that? What did they do before that? What did they do before that? Or people who landed on this page. And then you can go backwards and forwards with pathing reports, which is pretty cool. You got lots of segment overlap reports, user explorer reports that are back there, LTV reports, cohort reports. So anybody that is into data, it can do a lot more than Universal ever could hope to. So that's there, there's a whole advertising section that's really there to push budget in the Google ads for the most part. But it's useful, right? Because that's where you start to see, here's how all the different traffic sources are working together to cause a purchase or whatever the behavior is you're trying to measure for. And it's really easy to see
Brett:
How it's easy. Any insights on the advertising piece? Cause I have not dug into this much on Google Analytics, but I know what or g4, but I know with Universal Analytics as an example, it would severely under report YouTube ads, Facebook ads, anything top of funnel because it's still, even if you didn't have it set up as last click it still, it just favored things that were further in the funnel. Do you have any clear insights into how advertising measurement might be different, better and how attribution might be different?
Chris:
It's a good question. To some extent it's going to be the same. It depends upon how you set up the attribution though, right? So now GA 4 has this whole data-driven thing, which of course is what Google Ads is mostly set to where it's like, Hey, let us tell you. And to be honest, I don't actually like that cause I've just control freak and I hate black boxes or
Brett:
Not. What the model model you're using you, we were whatever model we want,
Chris:
Whatever we wanted, trust us. It's like the smart goals I used to do in Universal Analytics we're like, ah, don't use smart goals. It's like, we'll tell you what you should be going for and then we'll spend your money. You're like we'll tell you the goal. That's too much black box. I would prefer not exactly but GA 4 does have this data driven attribution that can be in there as default, which wasn't something that Universal is particularly good at. So it can start to get a little bit better when it comes to some of that. I personally still like last click. And then measuring for what is a much, much easier now because remember everything's an event. An event is just a behavior and it's collecting behaviors and details around this behaviors. And then because you have a list of all these behaviors, it'll start collecting stuff and you're like, oh, it's clicks and scroll and purchases and whatever else.
Lead generation, lead gens or signups or sharing. Imagine all the behaviors that are happening on your store that you don't know about. GE 4 can collect those and tell you. And what's cool about it is you can go in there and you can call them conversion events. So universal Analytics, people are probably familiar. You have goals, go goals don't exist anymore. Everything now is a conversion. So it's an event, but it's a particular important event. I would like this to be a conversion event. And you literally, you see your list of events and you toggle, you push a button, it's like, yep, make that a conversion, make this a conversion event. I wanna know when this happens. And that's it. Super easy to set this stuff up. Wow. And then you can start to say, okay, well that's a conversion event. Well I can hook that into Google Ads and now Google Ads can start going after that and say, oh, the objective is to get more signups and so I'm going to do that.
And I took a little conversion event, hook it into Google Ads and it's off to the races. So there's a lot of stuff they're doing to help with that. And again, it's in process. I absolutely don't wanna say this thing is fully cooked. I don't think it is, right? I don't think it'll be for years to be honest, but it is 80, 85% there. There's a few nuances that are a little annoying, but at the end of the day, I can use it to make marketing decisions. And for me I'm like, cool point. As long as I can do that, I can
Brett:
Make it happen. If you're able to make good marketing decisions, good business decisions, what it's there for. Do you still have your clients mostly running Universal, universal Analytics and GA 4 together? Or do you have some people that are just 4 exclusively at this
Chris:
Point? We are mostly GA 4. Let's say GA 4 primary is probably how I would say that. Where there is Universal analytics there, just in case we need something. But almost everything is GA 4 NICE primary. So all GA 4 would hook into Liquor Studio or something else and we can build a reports so that they can see it kind of on their CEO dashboards a little easier to get through than the GA 4 interface, but it is GA 4 that's powering all
Brett:
That stuff. Yeah. So is there any solution, and maybe it's through Looker Studio, which used to be Data Studio, it's what we use for our reports and stuff. So this 14 month expiration of data, is there any way to keep data longer, you just have to create customer reports and save 'em or
Chris:
What's a great question? So the answer is no, because that's a whole point is they don't want the data cuz they don't wanna be sued by Europe when Europe's like why do you hold people's data for five years to really need that for business reasons? And Google's like no, but we can't get rid of it. So they're automatically going to flush that data. However, one of the, again, benefits of GA 4 IT and it can get a little techy, but it's important because again, measurement's a department in an organization now. Yeah, it is not just gimme your report, you have to keep up with measurement because tech is changing, laws are changing, users are changing. You have to keep up with that. It's like seo, you didn't just learn SEO and then people it 20 years ago are not doing the same stuff they do now, right? They've evolved. Right, totally. Same thing you have to do with measurement, right? So when it comes to Google Analytics 4 and it's, it's got all this information coming into it again, it's got modeling. So I can tell you kind of what's going on there and forgive me man, I'm losing my train of thought. What was the question? God, yeah, I got caught up. Got caught up in that, but I had the answer in my head. I just lost it.
Brett:
Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. That's hilarious. I was actually looking at the time, so what was I asking you? I was asking you, oh, the data, how long to can you
Chris:
Oh, perfect. Yes. 14 months. Okay. Big big query is the short answer. So the in Universal analytics, you could connect Universal Analytics into BigQuery, which essentially makes a copy of all your analytics. It is now your data you control, you can do whatever you want with it. It's not Google's anymore, right? Nice. So that's Universal Analytics. But that was only available for the 360 accounts, which was the paid version, the ones that were 150 K a year. So that was just something that most companies couldn't do with GA 4 by default, they give you this free connector to BigQuery. Nice. And honestly, I think this is what Google's doing. This is all conspiracy, but I believe this to be true. Imagine if Universal Analytics today, if everybody that had that account was paying two or $3 a month for it, everybody Google would be
Brett:
Awesome. It's insane amount of money.
Chris:
So what's happening with GA 4 is Google Analytics 4 connects into BigQuery. It's not that hard to set it up different. It's a skill. So it's a little different. But once you get it, when you get your account created, you connect it and every day it just dumps the data into BigQuery. So you have a copy of your data. So then what you do is you start using BigQuery as your database, as your data source. So initially you can use GA 4 for maybe the first 14 months, but if you start asking questions about what happened 4 years ago, well that'll be in your big query cuz you've made copies of all that data. And to your point, it is your data, it's your copies now. So they are automatically setting this up where it's easier for small businesses to have copies of all their data. But the important part is it's not Google's data anymore, it's yours, it's
Brett:
Your data. But BigQuery also you pay for, right? You pay for sure
Chris:
That. And that's exactly right. So BigQuery is a cloud-based database that requires it. But we've been doing it for months or more than months now at this point. And I think our about every month, give or take, and don't quote me on this, about every month I think we are almost paying almost 2 cents a month.
Brett:
Okay?
Chris:
Right? Not expensive. Not expensive. You could put a dollar in the kitty and that won't get spent probably for a year for a lot of companies. Now that said, what if it ramps up a lot? Right? Well it depends what you do with BigQuery database and how you use it. But if you're just backing up stuff, it's relatively cheap. So well within range for small businesses and over the years, maybe you grow into two or three bucks a month, not a big deal. Now if you start using it all the time, it'll ramp up. But you'll understand if you are using it all the time, you will understand that cost. And it's still relatively cheap.
Brett:
Still super cheap. But to your point, it's infinitely more than free for Google. It's exactly right. Makes a big difference. Well this is exactly right. It's super fast. I have so many more questions, but we're coming up against time and man, this has just been awesome. I really appreciate it. A couple thoughts, what do people need to be doing now to get ready? Cuz July is coming. So what do you need right now to get ready?
Chris:
So two tips. One would be start, you have to start get the code and put it on your sites and get an account up and running. The big, big, big tip I would give everybody is Google's putting this wizard out that says like, oh, connect universe analytics. And we're going to automatically going to port it over to GA 4. Most companies don't have proper measurement anyway. So if you just copy over the junky universal analytics and you put it into your fancy kitchen of GA 4, you were essentially just going to be boiling an egg with your fancy kitchen and now you're never going to figure out how to cook because you got all this junk in it. So I would recommend you start from scratch. It's like Google did start from scratch with GA 4. Build it in the way that you want to build it while you're using Universal Analytics.
Cuz right now we all can still do that. So use Universal Analytics as your primary production platform if that's what you're currently using, very quickly move into GA 4 so you can get practice. Give yourself 90 days and just constantly repeat this phrase, I'm getting good enough to get going and I will come back and make it better later. And give yourself permission to do that. Because I think a lot of people think I need to be perfect at this right away. I saw this person on a podcast and they said it was so easy. Well, it's easy for me cause I've been doing it for years, right? Yeah. But that's done the same.
Brett:
This is your language anyway. And so you do it every day.
Chris:
That's the thing. I'm numbers tolerant, right? Yeah. Like numbers. But I'm not a, I don't wanna stay in a report all day long either. I need to get marketing, I need to grow my companies like everybody else does. So if you just focus on using this platform to get a little bit better every time and you realize at a certain point you're just going to, there's no more to it. You just gotta keep rinsing repeating and then you get better and better and better and better and it'll happen naturally. So give yourself the permission to do that. And obviously we've got tools, tools that people can use if they need it. We've got migration checklists and everything else they can start working with.
Brett:
Love it. Love it. And I do love that mindset of give yourself permission, you're going to get better because you've tried to be perfect. You try to absorb it all in one fell swoop, you're going to get frustrated, you're going to get overwhelmed, you're going to quit potentially. So yeah, like that mindset and that approach for sure. So yes, let's talk about what tools, what resources, what do you have available to make this easier for folks and so they can really leverage it like they should.
Chris:
Sure. So I mean obviously our site is measurement marketing do io, so we can go there and check that out. We have a bunch of free training on the YouTube channel, measurement marketing.io 4 slash YouTube, and you can see some playlists there. We've done for GA 4 if people want that. If you want the tools, we actually give those out for free. We call it. It's a free level of the Measurement Marketing Academy, which is kind of our just in time learning platform to learn all this that you guys are familiar with. So we have that available as well. We call it the toolbox and that's just@measurementmarketing.io slash evolution. So measurement marketing dial io slash evolution will take you to the toolbox. You create a free account, it'll give you a login or password and you have access to all the tools. Plus we give weekly training back there as well. Just how
Brett:
People get. Yeah, and it's so good. I highly recommend it. So check it out. And thanks for creating the special URL for listeners. Measurement marketing I oh slash evolution on LinkedIn. In the show notes, I'll link to the YouTube channel. All that'll be in the show notes too. If you're driving and you forget or whatever it'll be there for you. But listen guys, this information is fantastic. This is what we send our team through. If anybody reaches out to me like, Hey, I wanna learn analytics, I'm like, go to Mercer site measure marketing dot, I like that. You are the source. You guys are awesome. So fantastic. Any final words of wisdom or where can people connect with you? Are you active on the socials or mainly active on YouTube? Or where
Chris:
Can people really not? We have the YouTube channel. That's about it. I need to get better at the socials, like LinkedIn. It's probably the one I'm going to eventually force myself into but I've definitely been that guy when it comes to social, I'm like, get off my lawn, you kids and your standard TikTok.
But I tell you, honestly, it's just the best advice I have. Obviously if we can help you out, the YouTube channel is a great resource. There's lots of people that are doing training out there for this. So us or somebody else. The trick is just get started. Get started. You give yourself permission to be not great and be like, Hey, that's okay. That's what I've expect. I expect it to not be good because it's a new skill. Right? Totally. But, and that's where I think people put too much pressure on themselves and they're like, I can't even do this. Someone's going to buy something else and then they buy something else and they will eventually come back to GA 4 anyway, because these other platforms that are out there don't model like GA 4 does. And you're going to have to get used to modeling and what that's
Brett:
Like. Modeling is a future just because of some data's going away. And so that's
Chris:
Exactly right. There's no other way to do it.
Brett:
Yep. Yep. Awesome. Well, Mercer, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much. We gotta do this again. And my commitment is I will do my best to not make it 4 years before you're on the podcast again, this again soon. Love it. All right, man. Thank you so much. It's been a blast. Thanks Brent. Awesome. And thank you for listening. Really appreciate it. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the podcast if you've not done it? We'd love that five star review. If you think we've earned it on iTunes, it helps other people discover the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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