The No Jargon Email #04 - GoodBye Bounce Rates

Love this. Popped up in my LinkedIn feed this week. A great reminder when you are trying to build an audience (like I am)

Martins musings - Goodbye bounce rate hello GA4 (The sunsetting of Google Universal analytics)

Google has had enough! They quietly launched GA4 over 2 years ago and most of us have been seeing those messages at the top of our Google Analytics accounts ever since asking us to switch to GA4. The problem for Google is - Nobody is paying attention.

So they have good nuclear on the situation and will be sunsetting universal analytics (GA3 in all but name) on July 1st 2023.

Why are they bringing in this hard cut off date to make GA4 the default? Well here is what the director of product management at Google Analytics said:

"Universal Analytics was built for a generation of online measurement that was anchored in the desktop web, independent sessions and more easily observable data from cookies. This measurement methodology is quickly becoming obsolete. Meanwhile, Google Analytics 4 operates across platforms, does not rely exclusively on cookies and uses an event-based data model to deliver user-centric measurement."

This is about making their default analytics offering fit for the digital world we are in now and for what is coming. This makes sense and is not anything to be too worried about. But that does not mean it is not going to cause you a few headaches along the way.

So what are the big things that will change as GA4 becomes the default:

See ya bounce rates

You will not find bounce rate in Google Analytics 4 (no matter how hard you seek them) This staple metric (a single page visit) is no longer available. It has been replaced by a new one called Engaged Sessions. It is similar but different. So like for like comparisons from your old GA3 data will be tricky.

Views no more

A best practice set up for GA3 was having at least 3 Views for any web property – a catch-all view, plus a test view and a reporting view (although i have to say this was not always the case with accounts i worked with). It purpose was to ensure you could have a “clean” version to run your numbers from.

Views no longer exist in Google Analytics 4. Now we have the concept of?Data Streams?(all sounds very Tron-esque to me). You can replicate the View functionality but you will have to relearn how to do to it.

Events are everything

This is one of the best new bits. In Google Analytics 3, page views and Events (any non-page view related interactions) were treated separately. One of the biggest issues with Google Analytics 3 was that setting up Event Tracking (even using Google Tag Manager) wasn’t the easiest task (requiring you to understand the difference between Event tracking and treating Events as Goals) very often this was not utilised so business missed out of the insights that could be gleaned from well-structured event tracking.

In Google Analytics 4, everything is an Event, Page Views are just another kind of Event. So setting up basic Events a much easier process, which is awesome. Also, it brings a lot more flexibility to naming events as well as the parameters that can be associated with them.

Reporting....yes and no

This is one of the areas that many people will find tough. Google Analytics 3 offered a raft of pre-built report formats. (Although you should be building customised report formats, most just took the reports they were given)

In Google Analytics 4, there is a handful of very rudimentary off the shelf reports – but the basic message is - that you now have to put some serious thought into exactly what report formats you want – and you will have to build them yourself.

This is a play to get people using Google Data Studio more as Google's own advice on this is "reporting should be done in Data Studio and GA4 should be used an intermediary “analysis” platform as opposed to a reporting tool.

This post from Google covers more of what to look for in GA4 and some tips on migration.

At Relearn we are building a new course and marketing analytics for business owners and will be pulling together a free mini-course and GA4 migration and essential reporting set-up. Coming soon.

Curated reading

• Blogging niche research -?This is a super interesting post about how to conduct blogging niche research. The process outlined in the post is gold. It steps out a process to find low competition keywords in any given niche. So if you are looking for inspiration to get a blog started for your business and getting a bit stale with content then check this out.
• Business can be a force for good?- I am always in awe of founders that do more than pay lip service to doing good through business. Founders that have inspired change or highlighted a different way. In my view, this is an area driven by women-led businesses and founders and it's inspiring to read these stories. This is an inspiring post highlighting how?6 women-owned small businesses are doing good.
• April fools day -?Every year without fail businesses jump on the April fools day bandwagon, and this year was no exception. I saw some great ones on Twitter here are a few to tickle the funny bone:

Lego - Lego Maxifigure

Hollywood bowl UK - Rugby Shaped Balls

Walkers Crisps (Chips for you Aussies) - Sandwich sized crisp

Ixgio - Future shoes

Get stuff done: Embrace Procrastination

I work alone (no violins please I love it). But maximising time and being productive is hard and the modern "hustle narrative" heaps pressure on small business owners and solo entrepreneurs to maximise every minute of the day.

In the book,?“Time Management for Mortals”?Oliver Burkeman shows us how to tame our inner Productivity Junkie, through 6 core areas.

1. Embrace Procrastination
2. Pay Yourself First
3. Limit WIPs
4. Intentionally Lazy
5. Hobby ≠ Side Hustle
6. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

Let dive into 3 of these to get a good dose of common sense & reality:

Embrace Procrastination

First, we need to get more comfortable with procrastination.

Rather than run from it, accept it. It’s a natural human tendency.

We’ve got to stop beating ourselves up maximizing every minute of our day. It’s okay to not be fully optimized!

Limit Work in progress

For high achievers, it can be tempting to start a bunch of projects at once.

We get excited about something and we go. But we’re creating hundreds of open loops.

All “unfinished.”

All a source of more anxiety. Keep open loops to a minimum.

Hobby ≠ Side Hustle

At some point, we replaced one with the other. But they’re not the same. A hobby is done for the joy of it, nothing else.

So no, you don’t have to turn your obsession with model planes into an Etsy store.

No matter how loud Gary V screams it.

I have really embraced the idea of limiting "work in progress" and it has made a massive difference to my daily working patterns and productivity.

Do any of these resonate with you?

Digital marketing tools

Google Chrome web browser has a global market share of?nearly 65%. So I am guessing most of you reading this will be using Chrome, so here are 4 super useful?FREE?chrome extensions to help your digital marketing:

Similarweb: See the traffic and source of any given site.

Workona: Helps you get your work under control by allowing to bring all your tag management and projects into one place on your browser.

Keyword Surfer:?See the estimated search volume and CPC of any keyword in Google.

Pocket:?Saves any webpage for reading later and any device

Creative

Being creative with creative is a constant battle. Here is a good example on an ad creative that taps into a trend to help stop the scroll.....

Here’s why this works:

• Uses popular Wordle format to stop or slow the scroll
• The use of short snappy words to describe what you get when you buy Huel
• Shows a hand in the shot, which personalises the image which might otherwise be too cold

What are your thoughts on this, replay to the email and let me know.

Relearn Digital

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