Jump to content

GA4 - Google Analytics 4 - Tags


Recommended Posts

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 by Adam Goodrich
Link to comment
Share on other sites

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:
Could contain: Text, Menu

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?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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: Could contain: Text, Menu

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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.

Could contain: Text, Text Message

And here is snippet of dump from web site.

Could contain: Text, Menu, Page

 

Edited by Adam Goodrich
Link to comment
Share on other sites

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

Could contain: Page, Text, Document, Word, File

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.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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 by Adam Goodrich
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...