Custom Analytics Filtering in GA4
Background:
With an ever expanding range of reportable metrics, Google Analytics is a complex reporting tool. The industrial company I worked with, required a series of filters to focus on qualified website traffic. They needed to better understand website performance within their specific customer demographics, while reducing the amount of unqualified traffic that skewed performance metrics.
Process:
I built a series of reports and explorations in GA4, utilizing customized filters to help the marketing team report and visualize performance. We already had IP filters set up for internal traffic across their company’s location network, as well as safeguards in place like Chrome extensions to keep marketing team traffic from being reported. Once we had filtration narrowed down to external visitors, we looked at traffic from customers the company can actually service. For example, the company didn’t operate outside of North America, so I first narrowed down to that geographic area. After that we focused on things like scroll depth and session duration. The company had several instances of bot traffic from seemingly random areas outside of their territory.
Challenges:
This project took place about the same time Google switched from their Universal Analytics (UA) setup to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). The company had been reporting with UA for years, however several metrics weren’t able to easily transfer due to Google’s shift in focus toward cross-platform reporting. For example, in UA we were easily able to filter users based on session duration. In GA4, we needed to lean on their “Engaged” sessions metric, however we had no way of updating its time parameter of 10 seconds (we previously used 5 seconds). Because of this, I needed to go back and pull data from the previous year to match with the year of overlap data we captured with both platform generations running simultaneously.
Results:
In the end, we were able to get issues with the generation upgrade ironed out and have a setup in place that the marketing team can easily report, on a monthly basis. As Google releases new functionality, the team should also have a great foundation they can build on for further understanding of their qualified visitors.
Interested in a collaboration?
Reach out and let me know! I’m always happy to look at a project and see how I can help!