Web Analytics Services Designed to Fit Your Business Goals

Website analytics enables each website owner and webmaster to understand their consumers. It will allow them to monitor their customers, change the trouble spots on their website, and improve the conversion rate of new customers.

Google did not include bounce rate in the initial launch of GA4. In July ’22, Google reversed this decision and introduced the popular metric to the new platform. Google’s description of bounce rate in GA4 is “Percentage of sessions that were not engaged sessions. For example, if a user visits your website, reviews content on your homepage for a few seconds, and then leaves, then the session will count as a bounce.”

This metric does not exist in the new Google Analytics. Its replacement is the more meaningful ‘average engagement time’, which you can find in the ‘Pages and Screens’ report in GA4. The ‘time on page’ metric was flawed as it didn’t calculate for all pages. Exit pages or pages where the user bounced could not calculate a time on page, making this metric one of the most misleading ones in Universal Analytics.

Set up content grouping needs via Google Tag Manager. Go to your GA4 config tag, under Fields to Set, add a row with Field Name’ content_group’.

For the value, create a regex table with dimension {{Page Path}} where you develop a set of rules, similar to creating content grouping in the UI for Universal Analytics.

Preview and publish, and the data will become available under Content Grouping in your GA4 property. Using the page path to create your regex, the lookup table should look something like the following image.

Click on ‘Share this Report’ in the top right corner of the window, then select ‘Download File’, which gives you the option to either download a PDF or a CSV.

There is no opportunity to push straight into Google Sheets which is a massive shame. Hopefully, this is on the product roadmap.

One big positive is that a CSV export will export all rows, not just the ones you see in the table. GA power users will know that this is a significant improvement! One big negative is that the export does not respect the search/filter box! So, you may filter for all pages containing /blog/, and when you hit the export button, you don’t get a list of all blog pages but every single page on the site.

There is no connector for Google Optimize and GA4, but this is on the roadmap and should be released soon.

There is no connector for Google Search Console (currently), but the release is imminent (alpha access available at the time of writing). One workaround would be to combine data from GA4 and Google Search Console in Google Data Studio, using the ‘Blending data sources’ functionality, and unifying the two data sets over the page dimension. Alternatively, you can combine the two data sources in Google Big Query.

The benefits of server-side tagging are many. You regain control of your data and what is shared with third-party marketing platforms. You improve both campaign optimization and the accuracy of your marketing reporting and data collection.

Most marketers know that when they kick off a campaign, they get prompted by their chosen marketing platform to integrate a pixel or code snippet. We then use that code snippet on our websites to gauge how many conversions resulted from the traffic generated by each marketing platform or channel. 

So, when we implement that code snippet (or “tag”) on our website, we know that we establish a direct communication channel between our user’s web browser and the third-party vendor’s platform we use to run our marketing.

While server-side tagging is still a tag, it’s your tag. It’s a single script on your site that you own – sending data to your cloud or on-premise server. So you can feel comfortable saying “bye-bye” to third-party tags.

Once you have this data on your server-side environment, you decide what you want to pass on to your marketing platforms. You can choose what data you feed the algorithms and remain in control.

The key benefits, as mentioned earlier, are:

• Improved campaign management: You have better campaign follow-up for users that have taken certain actions on your site. You can feed your algorithm with the data that you know is valuable so that your ad platforms are continuously optimized.
• Improved site performance: Your site’s performance improves because you’re not running a dozen scripts. Fewer tags in your website or app mean less code to run.
• More security and control of your data: You decide what data you want to share with third-party vendors. That data is safer when collected and shared in a customer-managed, server-side environment.

So, there you have it!

Server-side tagging is a fantastic way to improve your website’s performance, user experience, and what you share with other platforms.