Month: April 2024

Tracking the “Thank You” page is essential for evaluating marketing effectiveness, optimizing conversion funnels, and enhancing ROI. It offers valuable insights into customer behavior, enabling businesses to fine-tune strategies and elevate user experience for better outcomes.

To Set Up An Event Tag in GTM:

1. Navigate to Tags.
2. Click on the New button.
3. In Tag Configuration, select Google Analytics > Google Analytics: GA4 Event.
4. Input your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Measurement ID in the Measurement ID section. This ensures that the event tag we’re creating will inherit certain settings from the Google tag.
5. Enter “generate_lead” in the Event Name field.
6. Leave the Triggering section empty for now and proceed to save. We’ll revisit it later.

I used “generate_lead” as the event name because it is listed among Google Analytics 4 (GA4) recommended events. However, if you prefer, you can choose a different name for it.

Create a Trigger to Track the ‘Thank You’ Page

To effectively track the ‘Thank You’ page, the form should redirect users to another page upon successful submission. This redirected page must possess a unique URL, ensuring users only reach it after submitting the form.

Now, let’s proceed to create a trigger specifically for the success page:

1. Navigate to Triggers in Google Tag Manager.
2. Click on the New button.
3. Choose the trigger type – Pageview. For this trigger, set conditional firing by selecting the Some page views option.When the visitor is redirected to https://www.example.com/form/thankyou.html, you can define one of the following rules for this trigger:

• Page Path equals /form/thankyou.html.
• Page URL contains /form/thankyou.html. It’s advisable to be as specific as possible. 

Additionally, ensure to give the trigger a clear and descriptive name, such as “Lead – Thank You Page View.” Clarity in titling is crucial for maintaining organization within your GTM account in the long run.

Do the Test

• Assign this new trigger to the Google Analytics 4 Tag you created at the beginning of this blog post.
• Open or refresh the Preview and Debug mode, which will open up a new browser tab for you to test the page.
• Then, fill in the form and submit it. Upon successful submission, you’ll be redirected to a “Thank you” page. If the Google Analytics 4 Tag fires, well done! Additionally, if possible, try submitting a different form on your website to ensure the tag did not accidentally fail to fire.
• Open the Google Analytics > Reports > Realtime to ensure that GA4 is tracking the “generate_lead” event correctly.

Effectively tracking visits to the ‘Thank You’ page is essential for refining marketing strategies. By implementing event tags and triggers through Google Tag Manager, businesses can gain valuable insights into customer behavior, ultimately optimizing ROI. Thorough testing and monitoring procedures are vital to ensure the reliability of the data collected, enabling informed decision-making. SmartLi provides Google Analytics 4 (GA4) audits and training services, empowering businesses to maintain informative and actionable data for making informed decisions.

Cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) pertains to monitoring users and their interactions across multiple domains.

By default, GA4 lacks the capability to monitor users and their interactions across different domains due to its utilization of first-party cookies, which are restricted to the domain of origin. Consequently, implementing cross-domain tracking must be done manually.

Cross-domain tracking becomes necessary in Google Analytics 4 when your session extends across multiple domains, aiming for Google Analytics to recognize sessions across various domains as one cohesive session.

Lacking cross-domain tracking setup, you’ll encounter difficulty in comprehending and monitoring a user’s journey across multiple domains.

Consider a scenario where you operate two distinct websites, each equipped with its own individual GA4 properties.Your aim is to establish cross-domain tracking between these sites.

Given Google’s recommendation to employ the same GA4 property and web data stream for cross-domain tracking, and considering your current setup with separate GA4 properties for each domain, integration into a single GA4 property becomes necessary.

Essentially, this entails reinstalling GA4 tracking for one of the domains involved in cross-domain tracking to ensure both domains utilize the same measurement ID.

However, this approach may not be feasible for many users who prefer maintaining separate GA4 properties for each domain and may find consolidation solely for cross-domain tracking impractical.

As an alternative, rather than merging two GA4 properties into one and reconfiguring GA4 tracking for one domain, it’s advisable to establish a third GA4 property exclusively dedicated to cross-domain tracking purposes.

If you encounter difficulties configuring cross-domain tracking or seek expert assistance in setting up your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) properties, conducting audits, testing cross-domain tracking, or visualizing data from multiple domains within the same data stream, feel free to reach out to SmartLi. 

(not set) is displayed in the interface when a dimension being utilized in the report lacks a value, serving as a temporary placeholder. To resolve this, allow up to 48 hours for Google Analytics 4 to process data. Newly configured settings may take at least 24 to 48 hours before reflecting in the GA4 reports.

Source/Medium is (not set) in GA4

When accessing your Traffic Acquisition reports and selecting the Session Source / Medium dimension, encountering ‘(not set)’ indicates that such traffic will be categorized under the Unassigned session default channel group. There are several reasons for the absence of data in the Session source/medium labeled as “not set.”

Measurement protocol is not implemented correctly.Events sent to GA4 lack a correct session_id, especially if they’re sent without a timestamp_micros parameter when sent up to 72 hours in the past. 

The session_id must correspond to a session previously tracked by GA4 on the website; otherwise, if randomly generated, the source/medium will appear as (not set). For events sent to the past, a valid session_id and accurate timestamp (with timestamp_micros parameter) reflecting when the session occurred on the site are essential.

Session_start event is missing. It can result in traffic-source-related dimensions, like Session source / medium, displaying a (not set) value. One possible cause is server-side tagging, where this event may be excluded from transmission to GA4. While other reasons for missing the session_start event remain unidentified, it’s typically a minor occurrence affecting only a small percentage of sessions. Although GA developers released fixes on November 2nd, 2023, the issue persists. Any updates on this matter will be reflected in this guide.

Audience triggers. Audience triggers in Google Analytics 4 initially seemed promising, enabling the creation of intricate audiences with automatic event dispatch upon visitor entry. However, there is a drawback: an increase in (not set) traffic sources. This inconsistency varies across properties and is particularly evident when audience triggers are linked to predictive audiences. In such cases, events may not be attributed to existing sessions, resulting in (not set) / (not set) for source/medium. Even standard audience triggers can contribute to this issue. Unfortunately, as audience triggers are managed within Google Analytics 4’s backend, there’s no direct solution. Users employing triggers should anticipate higher occurrences of (not set) traffic sources.

Check UTM parameters. Ordinarily, if these parameters are absent, GA4 will attribute the traffic source to direct, referral, or another trackable source. However, if the UTM parameters are incorrectly configured (e.g., with invalid syntax or missing values), it might encounter (not set) in traffic reports. It’s challenging to provide detailed advice due to the myriad of potential scenarios. Therefore, carefully review UTM parameters and the links shared across different channels by you and your marketing team to ensure they contain valid values.

Resolving ‘(not set)’ instances in Google Analytics 4 reports requires patience and thorough investigation. Whether it’s allowing sufficient time for data processing or checking the correctness of UTM parameters, attention to detail is key. Understanding the nuances behind ‘(not set)’ occurrences, whether related to session tracking, audience triggers, or UTM parameters, empowers users to enhance the accuracy and reliability of their analytics insights. SmartLi offers Google Analytics 4 (GA4) audits and training service to help  businesses to ensure their data remains informative and actionable for making informed decisions.