Where to Start with Google Analytics 4? GA4 Implementation Guide - Step 1

Whether you previously implemented Google Analytics 4 to your website or are about to alter the current implementation and start from scratch, I welcome you to pause and reflect on the results first. This has nothing to do with the technical implementation of the tool but the outcome it might bring to your business. Also, this step is easily forgotten the most, either by choice or some other reason.

I understand the urge to skip the non-technical things and get into the bone right away, but one thing I learned with life so far is that it has its ways of reminding you of the skipped, forgotten, untouched responsibilities in one way or another. So stick with me with this first step, and I'll guide you to the last.

Goal

First, let's address the elephant in the room. First of all, no tool or most beautifully collected data do anything by themselves; it's us humans who use these tools and interpret the data to ask questions, validate our hypotheses, take actions on the learning, learn from turn-out-to-be-wrong assumptions, and move the business or the cause one step further. Thus, if we start with the end in mind, we can already get closer to the goal. Therefore, the goal is to create a compass (actionable insights) using data to reach the target, and GA4 can play a vital role in this journey.

Stakeholders

I start GA4 implementations by asking who will take action on the analysis this tool will provide. And who will be responsible for specific things along the way? Naturally, in all cases,

• marketers are closely related to the tool. They'll take action according to the data, whether paid campaigns, content marketing, persona validation, or beyond.
• Sales teams also show great interest in the insights as they gain more knowledge about their leads.
• The legal team should guide the rest of the stakeholders on what data can and cannot be tracked.
• If it's a production business, the production engineers can also discuss what separates the process from the rest of the competitors.

Planning Data Tracking

After documenting the goals and the needs of the stakeholders and aligning with participants, you can start planning the implementation.

In this phase,

• We draw KPI trees that show the relationship between the overarching goal of the business, strategies they will give, and tactics they will apply. We reveal metrics and KPIs to measure the success of any effort.
• This step is followed by a Data Tracking Plan, where we create a technical tracking document and share it with either our developer or the clients. This document lists all identified events, variables, code snippets, and screenshots to imply where to implement the tracking.
• After adding snippets to the website, we can work with Google Tag Manager to prepare the event tags and test the implementation.
• Another essential document I want to mention is the Taxonomy Document, where we lay out events, variables, and triggers in a tabular format, define the 'conversion' events, list potential Google Analytics 4 segments, and more.

The practical use of these documents is that our clients can share them with internal and external stakeholders. If they wish to check how the event is named and the conditions for these events, they can always refer back to them, and as long as the clients maintain it, the taxonomy documents can be helpful for a long time.

Wrapping up Where to Start for GA4 implementation question

Be curious, ask questions, take action, measure results, learn from failures, don't give up, ask more questions, come up with hypotheses, test them, improve incrementally and continuously, and repeat. This is analytics as a discipline. It's not a once-and-done thing, but rather, as defined above, creating your compass and adjusting its correctness to the ever-changing environments.

What's next?

Now that we have covered the foundations, we can take the next step, data tracking.