GA4 - Google Analytics 4 - Tags

[Adam Goodrich]

Hi,

I have been using Invision for 6 months now, and have in general been very impressed with it.

I use my site for customer support, and I also use subscriptions and plan to introduce product sales as well.

As part of this update in the way I am running my business, I want to do a lot more with metrics, and integrations to other systems in order to do more with automation.

Google now suggests that you swap all analytics over to GA4, so I did, and my initial sense of this is very positive. However, it does not give me any metrics on conversions/monetization through my site, and this kind of defeats its purpose.

Can someone please advise or give some pointers on what I need to do to set this up? I can not find any relevant information anywhere.

Thanks,

Adam.

Edited July 7, 2022 by Adam Goodrich

[Marc]

Hi Adam,

We do not have anything which is specific to GA4. Have you taken a look in their documentation to see what is required for you to capture that data?

[Adam Goodrich]

Hi Marc,

I am new to it and was kinda hoping there would be something here, as it seems a common requirement.

I will go dig through their doco and see what I can find and report back with what I learn.

Cheers,
Adam.

 

 

[Marc]

We have the facility to add standard google analytics code, however, how to ensure set things are working is really something in their documentation. Of course, once you get to those, if you have problems with adding them, please let us know and we can advise accordingly.

[Dll]

I'd maybe recommend reading up on using Google tag manager @Adam Goodrich - we've found it's generally easier to implement these sorts of things in GA4 through that + I believe Invision have added some functionality which hooks into it in the latest release. 

[Marc]

Yes, there is the datalayer which you can use for this. You can find these settings in System->Settings->Data Layer

[Adam Goodrich]

42 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

Yes, there is the datalayer which you can use for this. You can find these settings in System->Settings->Data Layer

I was unable to find a setting called data layer.

This is what mine shows:

So... I have worked out how to track and tag pages. Much easier than I thought.

The next thing I want to do is to be able to detect commerce transactions and pass through what they are for, and how much they are for.

My sense here is that this might be more difficult. Can you advise on page flow, and how I could extract this info from Invision?

[Marc]

The reason you are not seeing that is it's a new feature in the latest 4.7 release of the platform, so I would advise you upgrade to that version first of all

[Adam Goodrich]

I saw a bunch of messages in the forum saying that the upgrade was causing site crashes. I am wondering if this might be a bit risky for us. We are in the middle of a sale.

[Marc]

No problem. There of course is nothing forcing you to do so, however the functionality you are looking for there is in the latest release, so you would need to await that until you can use the datalayer function

[Adam Goodrich]

Thanks. Is there a way to revert the upgrade if it has an issue? We are using the cloud version of Invision.

Edited July 7, 2022 by Adam Goodrich

[Marc]

We would generally fix it if there are any issues, rather than revert

[Adam Goodrich]

Ok thanks for your help. I will take the plunge tomorrow 🙂

[Marc]

No problem, Adam. Good luck with your upgrade

[Adam Goodrich]

Hi there,

We have upgraded and switched this on... and in debug mode I am not seeing anything coming through. I don't think we should need anything as you are injecting events and data.

Is there something else I need to be doing ?

Thanks,
Adam.

[Marc]

Sorry, please could you provide more information as to what you are checking there, and what exactly you switched on?

[Randy Calvert]

Marc, he may be referring to the new info included with DataLayer. I’ve enabled this on my board, but the extra detail from datalayer push does not seem to be making it into GA. 

I was going to try to figure this out more later and create my own issue for it, but I’ve been busy today. Lol

[Daniel F]

1. If you're NOT seeing the link in the ACP menu, please take a look at the Admin permissions and verify that the account has the "Manage general Data Layer settings, Events, and Properties" permission.

2. Once it's enabled, you should see such output at the top of your HTML source code: 

3. ( I'm looking now at the push issue )

[Adam Goodrich]

I am seeing this at the top of my html... but still not seeing these events in GA.

Oh... and what I meant about debug mode.. you can show events in debug mode in GA. You add a plugin to your browser.. and you see whats happening on that session via the debug mode.

No debug events are showing, as I have not connected my browser.

And here is snippet of dump from web site.

 

Edited July 8, 2022 by Adam Goodrich

[Marc]

You would need to refer to google on these unfortunately. As you can see, the datalayer there is actually showing. From the point of view of what the software does, its switched on and working.

[Matt Finger]

Hi Adam,

To pass Data Layer Events from GTM to GA, you have to add the Universal Analytics Tag to your Tag Manager configuration (not the GA config).

Currently, if you go to your Account/Container in Tag Manager, you should be able to add a new tag and see the Google Analytics options

You'll also have to setup Event Triggers in Tag Manager so it knows to send the Community Events to GA.

Glad to see we're getting some feedback on our Data Layer integration! Also stay tuned since integrating Commerce with the Data Layer is on the board for Phase II.

To recap, our Data Layer integration is designed to push data to Tag Manager not Analytics, which are separate services.

[Randy Calvert]

@Matt Finger ahhh haaa..  I think I'm starting to pick up what you're putting down.  

In order to push from Tag manager to GA, do you need to define each individual event in the data layer (account_login, account_logout, content_view, search, etc) or once you create one will it pass through all of the various events that exist?  

[Matt Finger]

That is correct, to my knowledge, creating one event for each is the only way.

[Randy Calvert]

Hey @Matt...  you need to hire more Matt's like @Matt Finger.  He's doing an awesome job of holding up the reputation of the namesake!  

I think I'm on a roll now as the debug view is now pulling in the info as expected in GA.  That was a LOT of typing though to define all of the tags, triggers, and variables!  (Not the fault of IPS...  though sometimes good things deserve it's cost in effort!)

I'm going to give it a day or so to make its way out of the debug view so that I can start creating some interesting dashboards.  But this is EXACTLY what I've been hoping for when I asked for better GA integration.  

9 hours ago, Matt Finger said:

Glad to see we're getting some feedback on our Data Layer integration! Also stay tuned since integrating Commerce with the Data Layer is on the board for Phase II.

That's awesome!  That was literally going to be my next ask.  

[Adam Goodrich]

Ok... so as promised I am sharing some learning back to the community.

First - while I am not new to Google Analytics, I am new to Google Analytics 4 / GA4... and there is a lot of confusing information out there. GA4 is infinitely superior in my opinion, so it's worth the effort to dig into it so that I can get the metrics I want.

I found that there was so much information out there on the internet, and a lot of it was out of date. So to bring me up to speed I went to Udemy, and subscribed to their Personal Learning subscription. The first month is free, and the rest is around $26/mth... an amazing deal since there is so much content there.

I then started working my way through this course... it included free in that first month:

Master Google Analytics 4 Reports and GTM Basics in 2022

https://www.udemy.com/course/google-analytics-4-with-tag-manager/

This gave me some background information and was extremely helpful.

Then - I fixed the mistake that I had made... I had put my GA4 config on my site.

What you actually need to do is create a GTM (Google Tag Manager) account, and create a special tag that routes events from GTM through to GA4.

In all the reading I have done, it seems mixed as to whether you should also create a Universal Analytics account and also route those events. I chose not to as I want to craft the reports I get out of it and wanted to keep it 'clean'.

The next big trick is to work out how to get Invision events from GTM through to GA4. That was nontrivial as well... and while I know what I wanted to do ... I was still a bit confused... and then I found this web page... excellent!

Track Events with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Tag Manager (analyticsmania.com)

The Invision events are non-standard from GA4. As this is new, and GA4 is the future of analytics from google, then why not use their standard events - the whole thing would largely have just worked.

So I routed the account_login event from invision through to the GA4 login event, and the account_register event from invision through to the GA4 sign_up event. Flick to debug view... and finally, the more detailed events I wanted to see are flowing through!

It's been quite the learning journey... and my recommendation for the invision team is to create a video tutorial where you take people through this from end to end.

Now... for the Invision team when will we be getting commerce events... which among other things is kind of the point of all of this?

Please also, do not make subscriptions a second-class citizen. It's the primary way I want to run my site.

Another thing with subscriptions that I get all the time is a request from my customers to get a special deal on them (as we want to encourage our existing customers to come over to our invision site). I am happy enough to do this, but I do not want this listed on my main page as then it would massively devalue our normal subscription. So an 'unlisted' version for subscriptions as well would be awesome... something where I can approve the subscription before it is switched on for the customer.

Great work from the Invision team... once you work your way through all of this, it opens up many cool use cases for the platform!

Edited July 10, 2022 by Adam Goodrich