Lecture Slides
About the speaker
Meet the Speaker
Stacey Cooper
Stacey is the Founder of Sharper Digital, and Analytics Consultant, specialising in bespoke implementations, delivering accurate insights to help businesses optimise their digital user journeys.
Lecture Transcript
Sponsor Introduction
Thanks once again to Hyper Science for all of their incredible support for us with this event.
Speaker Introduction
Our next speaker is Stacey Cooper. She will be teaching us how to use Google Tag Manager to enhance your data quality in GA4. So quick few words about her. She is a Google Analytics expert specializing in bespoke implementations, delivering accurate insights to help businesses optimize their digital user journeys.
Yay. With nearly a decade of experience, Daisy uses ingenuity to tackle the most complex and unique tracking challenges, providing relief and reliability to businesses across various industries and skills.
Fun fact her agency is called I’m sorry if I’m calling it agency, I think it’s more appropriate to say consultancy, but yes it’s called Sharper Digital, as you can see on the screen and it’s just because her maiden name is Harper and Harper plus S makes Sharper, and she said that scooper doesn’t really have the same ring to it.
Give a round of applause to Stacey.
Lecture by Stacey Cooper
thank you for that lovely introduction. So, I’m going to start with a little bit of my history with GA4. I was introduced to GA4 back in 2018, but back then it was known as App and Web. So, I was lucky enough to be introduced to a mobile app project and to implement the app analytics on it.
So, at that time, the training was, of course, really lacking. It wasn’t really something that was quite common in the industry at the time. But it was this new data model of focusing on more on users and events. And even then, I still try to implement it with GTM. In hindsight, I’m not sure I would do that now.
So fast forward today unbeknownst to me I matured with the platform. I. Kind of worked with it and a real advantage to me was that I kind of was exposed to ga4 right when the data model was really just kind of getting going. So, it really put me in a very strong position there because I’d, as I said, I’ve matured with it and figured it out along the way.
So, when Google said that they were going to be sunsetting universal analytics and everyone’s going to be moving to GA4, Okay, cool. I don’t mind one bit. Come at me. So, I have quite a strong passion for making sure that data is useful and efficient. And also, purposeful but following really what Gemma said is that there’s a lot of opinions about GA4 at the moment of its lack of customization, that it’s inaccurate, it’s difficult to use, but really the problem is, is that the time hasn’t been invested in really implementing it and doing it right.
And I think with that, I think a lot of people think GA4 is crystal ball. Well, it isn’t. So, get your pens and notepads at the ready, because I’m really going to be taking you through some really actionable and valuable things today that you can at least do one of them when you clock back into work on Monday.
I can guarantee there’s at least one thing here that you can think, yeah, I can go away, and I can do that. We’re going to really develop the skills and the experience throughout the slides. So yeah, enjoy.
I’m really sorry. I’m starting with the worst one, so let’s get it out of the way and then.
We can move on. So, content mode has been the absolute thorn in my side for since March, basically there’s been a lot of issues with companies implementing content mode in the, well, first of all, they didn’t even realize most of them that they had to do it. But. Being in the EU, it’s really, really important to make sure that it’s set up properly not only to make sure that you’re in compliant, but kind of getting the most out of your data as well.
So, I’m going to just take you through my process of doing that. It’s debatable whether it’s the right one. I think it’s the right one. So that’s what I’m going to share with you. So, in my opinion it should always be implemented through Tag Manager. There’s a lot of solutions out there where you can just deploy it straight onto the website and then it will just block everything.
Whether you consent or don’t consent and that’s fine, but then you’re really not utilizing the opportunity of Tag Manager of being able to manage those tags efficiently and really get the most out of your data. So, the example I’ve used here is a solution called cookie bot. It’s very common.
It’s very cheap. And I think most businesses can. Implement this one. So, you can check that out. Another common one is called key S as well. It’s very similar. Um, so once you’ve implemented the consent banner onto the site using the community tag then your next step is to enable consent overview mode.
So, I thought this one was not obvious, but I felt like, well, it was just a standard part of the process, but I have come across a lot of setups that haven’t actually enabled content overview. So, it does make you think, well, are you implementing it properly then? Probably not. So, make sure that you tick this box.
It’s going to make your life a lot easier. When you come to manage your tags and triggers, depending on the consent. So, using the consent overview mode, you can bulk apply consent to each of your tags. However, I’m going to make an important note here, which is again, commonly missed is that any tags particularly Google tags that have this here – built in consent you don’t need to ask for additional consent on top of that. So, I’ve seen a lot of people where they’ll tick GA4, for example, and say, okay analytics is required for this tag to fire. You don’t have to do that. Google has built. With content mode, its own smart interaction with the compliance.
So, what this means is if you’re going to rely on this, which is the right way to do it, you will notice your GA4 tag will still fire, even if you’ve declined cookies or before you’ve even interacted the banner, you might be thinking, oh, well, that doesn’t sound right. Well, that’s because in Google sorcery, the tag still fires, but it collects anonymized data.
And then when you do, hopefully, accept cookies, it will then send the correct data. The reason for that is because inevitably when you land on a site, we want to collect the correct channel information and store that until the user has then consented. And again, this applies to like Google ads tags and stuff.
So, bear that one in mind. So, I’ve had many disagreements with a couple of developers about this one saying like, well, the tag’s still fine. Yeah, no, that’s the point. So, the reason for that is because then once you set it up that way, you can check your GA4 reporting identity. And I could spend a whole day talking about all of these but just try and remember this specific one.
Once you’ve done it that way, modelling will kick in. If it hasn’t kicked in, it will say inactive. And the reason for that is because it’s noticed that you’ve done content mode properly. It knows that the tag is firing regardless, and it will still model that anonymized data. Which is great for everyone.
So, you know, it’s good for users. We’re not collecting specific data on them, but it gives us a really, really good indication of how the site would still perform, even with. Non consented users.
Okay. That’s the worst one out of the way.
So custom events. So again, just kind of echoing what Gemma said, really custom events are incredibly important to really gain the value and insight out of your GA4 setup.
But kind of, how do you think about how you’re going to implement them? Well, first of all, you need to ask yourself this question. Does the data already exist in an event? And that’s referring to the enhanced events that Gemma was talking about, that you get automatically by switching them on when you deploy the tag.
So, I’m going to guide you through that process and give you some examples here. And some of these might apply to you. And if they do take a picture remember it for later. So again, I’m going to We’re going to get more complex and increase the skill level as we go on here. So, a simple one that I think most people to some extent requiring their setup is that they need to mark a conversion on the completion of an action.
Usually that’s when the user has viewed a thank you page. And this is how you would do that in GA4. You would set a customer event up where the user is viewed a page view, and the page path contains thank you. And that’s because we know that page views are already tracked, right? We’re just isolating and inheriting data from that main event.
Okay. Another version of this outbound clicks is tracked again through enhanced event, enhanced events in GA4. Telephone click and an email click are classed as an outbound click. That event is just called click, believe it or not. That doesn’t track all clicks to your site. It’s only tracking outbound clicks.
I wish it was called outbound click, so it’s a bit clearer. But again, you can isolate those by saying, okay, I want to track where users click to call from their phones. And you can isolate that by doing this and you can do the same for emails where link URL starts with mail to as well.
This is inheriting data from existing events. This isn’t overwriting events. That’s something a little bit different. So, think about it as like, you’re just taking like a little piece of the cake and you’re isolating that. And what it means is that you can then mark those events as key events. And that’s much more useful.
So, example where the data isn’t already in GA4, it’s not tracked by an enhanced event. So again, a simple one that is applicable to most people. Say you just want to track all the button clicks on the website. Here’s a very simple example to do that. If your site is set up well, you can likely use this exact example. So that will track the button clicks. And this is how you would set that tag up.
You can call it whatever you want. I just call it CTA clicks, but you can also populate the standardized parameter of link text with the click text parameter. So again, that just adds another parameter of further context to what you’re tracking. So, for example, this will track a buy now button.
Don’t know why I use that as an example. It’s a terrible example. No one should be doing that. So next one, a little bit more complex. So, if you’re a bit more familiar with Tag Manager this is tracking newsletter signups based on a success message. So, by doing this, you have to have a look at the CSS of the page, find that out, pop it in here.
It’s a little bit of trial and error if this if it’s your first time trying this, but I implore you to give it a go. And this is what a newsletter signup event would look like. And again, this is really good insight so that you could apply this to an audience. So those are showing intent if I’ve signed up to a newsletter, I’m showing intent and affinity to the brand.
So yeah, that would be a good audience. So, let’s go a little bit further. I want to track form submissions because the standard enhanced event isn’t doing it. Okay, the page is set up a little bit funny, so I can’t track that using, um, the form submit trigger in Tag Manager. So, this is when you would ask a data a developer to help you by implementing a data layer push.
And here’s an example of the snippet of code that you send to a developer. You don’t need to be a developer to do this. I’ll show you why in a bit. So, all you need to tell them is the event I want to capture is the contact form submit, and in this example, it was a company that wanted to track the difference between businesses and individuals that were being contacted so we have an extra parameter here, and in this example is an individual but an alternative would be business.
And then again, increasing in Skill level, we want to track a purchase. So, if you’re using something, if you’re using a custom-built site, so not something like Shopify, for example, where you can just enable a plugin for GA4 for e commerce. You will need to manually implement this with a developer. So again, I’ll show you how you can do this.
And that again, you don’t need to be a developer to ask them to do this. It takes some thought into knowing what you’re asking for. And again, just to echo what Gemma was saying, this is where you would define exactly what you want to track about your product and all of those different categories, but once you’ve done that, and that data is in your data layer that you can use for many things, by the way, for all the marketing tags, Google ads, et cetera and then you enable the tag in tag manager to collect that data and send it to GA4.
A point I want to make with this is a, it’s not a new feature, but in the past few months or so finally, we got this kind of automation here where it will automatically recognize e commerce parameters in the data layer, so you don’t have to do anything manual, it’ll just pick it up itself.
Okay, so, and you might use both. So, let’s go back to that contact form submit I was just talking about. So, this company, they wanted to isolate specifically business leads because they were really high value leads to them. So, I’ve implemented that in Tag manager. We have that parameter there that tells us the difference between the two different contact forms.
So, I’m going to isolate those and I’m going to say, right, these ones are generating business lead. As I said, we know that they’re high value. The client can tell me that I know that that lead is worth a hundred pounds. So, I’m going to add that to the new event. So, it’s isolated those and applied a revenue figure to that event.
To summarize, if the data already exists in event, use GA4, if not, then that’s when you need to use GTM. So, I’m just going to touch on an overlooked feature of GA4 that I think a lot of you will hopefully find useful. And something that Was used a lot in universal analytics but not, I don’t hear it so much now in GA4 but it’s particularly useful for SEOs and content marketers because it will just make your life easier.
So, it gives you just a really good holistic view of the content performance of the site. And it’s super easy to set up, which is why I wanted to share it here. So, all you need to do is go to tag manager and choose a regex table and then set up a regex for each of the kind of folders. On your site and apply just a sensible name to them.
And you can go wild with this. Like if you want to go really deep into like different levels, different if you have many blog categories, for example, you know, this is one of those like every evolving thing you, when you build new content, you might want to review this, for example. And then all you do, once you’ve built this parameter you just add it to your Google tag.
And then I was going to say Bob’s your uncle then, but I don’t know if that’s a reference in Bulgaria.
Or you could cheat, and you could just get chat GPT to do it for you. So, using chat GPT has massively changed my working life in the it’s brought me a lot of efficiencies in that I know I need to know what to ask but hopefully that sharing this with you today really gives you the confidence to just give it a try. So, all I did here is this prompt. So, I want to sell content grouping for my website using a Regex table. And I just basically got chat GPT to do it for me. So, they came up with the categories it came up with the regex, and then I just dumped that in GTM.
So that might take you all in all 10 or 15 minutes, but by doing that brings you, I’m just going to flick back if I can. This brings you immense value in the. Once you’ve got your groupings, I’ve intentionally left not set here, by the way, because that’s what happens if you have some pages that don’t fall into any categories.
And that’s what I mean. It might be an ever-evolving process because you might find like, oh, it’s a bunch of pages that we didn’t even know about. And then you can apply your conversions or key events to each of your categories. And it gives you a really good holistic view of how they’re going. So, another one I use the same kind of concept really created a regex table for to all the social media platforms and then applied that to a tag for outbound shares as well.
And then that contact form submit that I told you about earlier, ChatGPT did that. I didn’t do it. So yeah, don’t be scared about things like this. And again, do you know what? Like I say, you kind of need to know what to ask it. But yeah, I, I hope you all give it a go. So, I just asked ChatGPT to write me this data layer script for contact form submit and the parameter, an example parameter there for individual.
I also used it for, so this is getting a little bit more, this is a little bit more complex, but you can, you’ll get the idea of it. I had a client where their URLs were just weird and just a mess. It had like punctuation in it and stuff like that. So, I’ve used the example here of page title.
But I use chat GPT to help me basically rewrite it in the format that I wanted it. Cause anyone knows if you’re exporting to CSV, and it’s got. Special characters in it. It’s hell. So, I asked ChatGPT to tell me some custom JavaScript that I can put in Tag Manager to rewrite this and clean it up for me.
So that’s another example. You can also use it to help you create metrics. So, I’ve talked a lot about dimensions here. But I had a client where we implemented e commerce, but we didn’t do the tax parameter because at the time they just weren’t bothered and it’s not it’s not compulsory and then later on they decided they were like, oh, actually for our profit margin reporting, we, we kind of need it in.
So again. That’s ChatGPT to write it, and then it created the metric, the e commerce metric for me, and I just applied it to the purchase tag in Tag Manager. Really simple. Oh, is that it? I thought I had one more. Sorry, maybe I flicked the bastard. Anyway, I also use ChatGPT to spit out that data layer for the purchase event as well.
So again, if you’re unsure, if you want it to help you, provide that script so that it helps your conversation with a developer to say, right, I know that it needs to track these parameters, and it needs to look something like this. Then again, it just makes you and their life easier. It really helps with that communication between you and the developer in saying, right, well, this is what I need the output to look like.
How you do it is none of my business, but this is what I want it to look like when it comes out. Thank you.
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