Making the switch to Google Analytics 4: Frequently asked questions

The American Press Institute, along with some outside help, has developed a roadmap to help you make the transition to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) go as smoothly as any transition to a new analytics platform can. Below are some frequently asked questions we’ve heard from newsrooms.

Want more resources? Follow our “Transitioning to GA4” series here. Have a question not listed here? Email them to shay.totten@pressinstitute.org.

• What will happen to legacy (UA) Google Analytics data?
  • You’ll be able to access your data for 6 months to CSV, TSV, TSV for Excel, Google Sheets, and PD. Use the Google Analytics Reporting API to export the data. Google Analytics 360 customers can also export to BigQuery.

• Is there a way to export historical UA data, and if so, what do folks recommend?
  • The best way to do this would be with a data warehouse. One example would be BigQuery, which is owned by Google. The challenge is that, unless you have the technical skills to extract and analyze the data from these warehouses, they won’t be of much use to you. It’s probably a good idea to involve your analytics team in this process if you have one.
  • If you don’t have a dedicated analytics person/team and you want to make exporting and analyzing historical UA data a priority, it’s probably worth hiring outside help.
  • As a “last resort,” you could update as much of your data as possible into CSV files, though this would be unwieldy and probably not very user friendly from an analysis perspective.

• If this is a completely different language for me, I’m assuming it would be better for me to go through a developer to set this up. Yes?
  • Not necessarily a developer, but definitely someone with prior experience setting up GTM and GA4.

• For folks new to setting up analytics tracking: What is the recommended set up for a website plus apps?
  • If you have both a website and an app(s), you should create one data stream for each within the same GA4 property, e.g. springfieldnews.net would be a Web stream in your GA4 property. Springfield News iOS would be an App stream, and Springfield News Android would be a second app stream, for a total of three streams.

• How do I set up a Google Tag Manager account? What are some basic things I should be aware of? What are some of the best custom tags to set up?
  • Go to tagmanager.google.com and use the same account for which you sign into Google Analytics. To simplify the process, you’ll create a container, publish it and put the code on your site. From there, the tags you set up depend on the user behavior you want to track, e.g. newsletter sign-ups, account creations, tracking bylines or sections as parameters in the page_view event.

• Why is there a drop in traffic from UA to GA4?
  • GA4 and UA track and attribute sessions differently. GA4 uses a different sessionization algorithm that takes into account cross-device and cross-platform interactions, and it also uses a different session timeout. Read more here.
  • GA4 has a different way of handling bot traffic, it uses a machine learning model to identify and filter out bot traffic which may cause lower numbers.

• Can you reuse a trigger from a legacy GA setup?
  • Yes, most Google Tag Manager triggers that work for Universal Analytics should also work for GA4. You will, however, need to create a new GA4 tag, which requires slightly different settings (mainly, parameters).

• Is the ability to configure triggers allowed or denied by a user level within GA4?
  • Triggers are actually part of GA4, not GTM. That being the case, you can set particular permission levels in GTM just like in GA. This can be done at both the account and the container level. (A container in GTM is more or less equivalent to a property in GA.)

• Does it matter if you set the user_id as an “event parameter” or a “user property”?
  • User IDs are something you set up yourself on the backend. You then have to make sure each User ID is being applied to the same user every time they log in. (This can be done by matching their user ID to an email address, for example.)
  • In fact, Google recommends not creating up a dimension (via event parameters) since you could have so many unique user IDs.
  • Resource link

• Still wrapping my mind around how to get the data streams in for multiple apps and a website. Right now, they are separate properties altogether, and I think there is a better way to do it.
  • If they are all related to the same news organization, they should all be in the same property. This would allow you to analyze user behavior across different devices and platforms. If they’re already set up separately in GA4, you should consolidate them into a single property and delete the extra properties.

• We had some audience segments in legacy GA that I want to replicate in GA4, but I’m not 100% sure on how to make that work. The first one is geography, we had a segment of users on an IP address within a certain region. The second one is being able to segment our logged in subscribers. I think the latter was set up through GTM, but I haven’t been able to replicate it for GA4. I don’t know if I can do the geography as audiences in GA4 or not.
  • Audiences are the best way to replicate what we knew as segments in UA. There are segments in GA4, but they don’t work exactly the same way.

• How do UA reports map to GA4 reports?
  • It’s best to avoid trying to map UA reports to GA4 reports as a 1:1 exercise. There are two many differences in how data is measured. This is the whole reason Google isn’t allowing migration of UA data directly into GA4. Even terms that have the same definition (such as bounce rate) might not necessarily be measured in the same way.
  • Resource link

• How do we ensure that GA4 is accurately tracking events with our new CDN (Zephr)?
  • The best way to do that would be to follow Zephr’s documentation. FWIW, they recommend using Google Tag Manager to connect your data layer to Google Analytics.
  • Resource link 

• How do I navigate the GA4 reporting interface? All the data I liked from UA isn’t immediately apparent in GA4 and I really haven’t had the time to dig in and recreate it.
  • There are two primary reporting tabs: Reports and Explore.
  • The Reports tab is probably more closely aligned with what you’re used to in UA, though it’s more limited. You can customize and add new reports to this dashboard, but again, it’s cumbersome.
  • Explore is more flexible and, if you take the time to set up, probably more visually appealing. The problem is that you can only share reports as read-only, so it’s not great for intra-team analysis unless you have someone manually updating and/or distributing the reports on a regular basis.

• I’ve seen a delay in getting metrics on page views, users, etc. For example, on a Tuesday morning, my Monday numbers aren’t accurate. If I look at them Wednesday they have changed.\
  • This is pretty common as GA4 usually doesn’t update data until around 24 hours later. We don’t know whether this will change going forward.

• Will Google Tags replace analytic.js? I’ve read conflicting sources about removing analytics.js script but others recommend keeping the tag and the js script.
  • If you didn’t install GA4 via Google Tag Manager, you will need to switch from analytics.js, which you’re probably using for Universal Analytics, to gtag.js.
  • Resource link

• What is the best way to bring in app data to your GA4 account: Firebase or Google Tag Manager? This is the piece I am struggling to figure out for our broadcast outlet.
  • Follow the Firebase documentation to add events and parameters (which will bring in data) for your app.
  • Resource link

• Is there a tag manager equivalent for managing custom events on apps?
  • Use Firebase (see above)

• Has anyone been able to successfully use the GA4 measurement protocol to send a user agent string that Google will actually parse?
  • Yes, follow these instructions:
  • Send User IDs
  • Measure activity

• Is there a way to set up GA4 to see multiple newsrooms together with the ability to segment. We have five newsrooms as part of the journalism school and share some content. We have had a shared Universal Analytics account where we could view the full url, but I’m not sure if there is a best practice for creating a GA4 platform with data from all sites.
  • You could set each newsroom up as a separate data stream in the same property and filter them by data stream.