How to migrate to GA4 Step by Step

You might now by now that the Universal Google Analytics will stop collecting data on July 1, 2023. In this video I’ll show you how to easily migrate to Google Analytics 4 and how to setup a event & conversion.👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻 Start here 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

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⏱️Timestamps⏱️
0:00 Intro
0:20 Start Setup Assistant
1:24 Check if data is flowing
2:23 Property Settings
2:44 Set up Conversions
3:26 Set up Events
4:43 Define Audiences
5:16 Link to Google Ads
5:48 Advanced Setup
6:49 Import old data to GA4?
7:42 Historical data
8:20 Dismiss the GA4 Setup Assistant reminder

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📖Transscript📖

In this video we’ll be setting up Google Analytics 4 for your WordPress website. We’ll be doing this step by step, and I also show you how you can track your submitted contact forms on your website. Its really easy, just follow these steps. And we’re gonna start right now!

So if we log into our Google Analytics this is what we see. The property will stop processing data starting the 1st of July 2023. And then this beautiful countdown clock. The first thing we do is actually click on ‘Go to setup assistant’ over here. I’m gonna click on this blue button ‘Get started’. “This setup will create a property, Copy the basic settings from your original property and enable the data collection using existing analytics.js and gtag.js. Great. Press ‘Create’. It has been created, well done and it also have been connected. Then we click on go to your Google Analytics 4 Property in here. This is your property Google Analytics 4. if you want to see the interface of Google Analytics 4 you can go over here to ‘Reports’, and it’s actually quite different than the Universal Analytics. So yeah it’s a little bit of looking and searching where everything is, but you’re gonna be fine, trust me. You will keep seeing this red bar over here because of the setup we need to complete right here. What do we need to do is data collection – collect website and app data.

If you click on this button over here ‘Actions’ you can see the ‘Manage data streams’. We need to click on this one. And then you can see that no data has been received in the past 48 hours. But if we go over here to ‘Reports’ if all is good… so you need to visit your own website in an incognito screen or private window. Just click a little bit around, just do something on your website, just click on a few pages over there. And then you will see in Google Analytics 4 that you have a real-time user, one user from the Netherlands! Hey that’s me. So now you know that Google Analytics 4 works great. From here you click on here ‘Complete setup’. Because now we know everything works. So data collection is okay – it has started but it’s not yet in here, but it’s okay. If I click on actions and press ‘Mark as complete’. “Data is not flowing” well it actually is, but it will update this in the next 48 hours, because it’s gonna take a little bit of time. And now you scroll down and we go to the ‘Property settings.

Now Google Signals is very important if you have Google ads on your website. If you’re showing ads or you’re advertising with products for your website, then this is very important. If you don’t have this, you can just click on ‘Mark as complete’. Then we’re going to set up ‘Conversions’. The conversions could be the contact page or somebody filled in your contact form, those things are really important to measure, or else you don’t know if your website really works. So we’re gonna click on this arrow ‘Actions’ you’re gonna ‘Manage conversions’ over there. Standard in here is the ‘Purchase’. But I’m not an e-commerce website so what I’m going to do is going to create a new conversion event over there. So let’s change this event name to ‘ContactForm submission’ like this. You can’t use any dashes stripes or anything, so just use this. And press save. Then we have created the conversion event ContactFormSubmission. After that you go over here to ‘Events’ we’re gonna create a new event. So create it. Then we click on ‘Create’ over there. I’m going to give it the exact same name as the conversion we’ve just created. So ContactFormSubmission. And remember it has to be exactly the same. The event name -> equals and then you fill in page_view. Then we’re gonna add another condition over there. And then under parameter we fill in page_location like this. And then equals and then we need exactly the same URL as your thank you page. On this website it is https://amusementparksusa.com/contact/thank-you/.
This is the URL. When you’re all set and done we press ‘Create’. You can now even create more custom events if you need more conversions. For most simple websites the thank you page is actually enough. Close this one.

Now we get a information from Google analytics itself which says “Mark your event as a conversion”. So we go back to Conversions over there. We already did this, so you can just close it. With this we’re gonna press on ‘Complete setup’. And now we can actually set up conversions we have two right now, and we can press ‘Mark as complete’. Well done! Click on it. Then the next thing to do is to ‘Define audiences’. If you didn’t create audiences in the Universal Analytics I don’t think you want to create them now, because most website and most clients I have, never create audiences. They might not even look at the data unless I ask them to do and we look at them together. So in this case, you can just import them if you have them, it’s really easy, or just press ‘Mark as complete’ if you have no idea what audiences are and why they are even here. So press ‘Mark as complete’. We go to the next step. If you have Google ads you can link them over here. You can just click on ‘Manage Google Ads Links’ and you can just set that up. It is way easy. If you have no idea how this works, and you really want me to create a tutorial about Google AdSense and Google Ads, let me know! Drop them down in the comments and I will make a video about this. For now we’re just gonna mark it as complete as this website has no Google Ads on it. In theory the setup is a now complete, but we also have the advanced setup. If you click on this one you can change the users. How many users are allowed to check in your Google Analytics 4 property, and make changes and everything. You can also import data, but not the data from the Universal Analytics unfortunately. You can actually import some offline data for example to put in your also your Analytics. Import costs etc so it’s really interesting to see. Most of the time however if you have a webshop, you just calculate it inside of your shop and there you see all the results, but it might be fun to really connect those two. You can also link it to BigQuery. Very interesting if you have large data sets which most of the time corporate companies have. And you can also set up user IDs if your business generates them then you can do some cross platform and cross device tracking. This might be interesting if people log into your website and they log in through their tablet, and they’re paying eventually via their mobile phone for something like that. But most websites don’t use this.

I get a lot of questions from my clients “Will we be able to import the old data into Google Analytics 4?”. The answer is actually no. And you might say “Well they can build anything they want so if they wanted it, they could definitely do this”. And you’re absolutely right. If you are Google and you have an Analytics service and you have millions of websites using this data. You might actually want to clean up once in a while and start fresh. I think that’s really the case in here, because there is no way to import your old user data – the visits, the time, the referrals and everything, into your new Google Analytics 4. And from the first of 1 st of July it will actually just stop working. It will not collect any data anymore, only Google analytics 4 will do that. So there is actually no way. But when we have set this up right now, if you click over here your property, you can also use still the old one. It will still be available and you can still look at all the historical data. You want to go back to – I don’t know 2020? No problem, you can still do that with the old Google Analytics data. But the new data is not in here. So if you want to see the new data, you have to go into there and you go to Google Analytics 4, over here. So comparing it to last year will be a little bit more difficult but it still can be done manually, and I think there are some tools around that can do this for you. If you now go to your historical Analytics you will see that this bar has been changed, you can actually dismiss it now, you can go to your Google Analytics 4 property, because you’ve already set it up and it has been completed. And we click on ‘Dismiss’ over here, because everything’s all right now. You’re set for in the future.

If you have any questions or you just want to say “Thank you Matt!” drop them down in the comments, I’ll always reply. Hit that like button so I know I was on the right track, and if you want to see more videos subscribe over there to my channel. And also check out this video which is also amazing to analyze!

Analyse it really good.