Hey, friend, I’m so glad that you join me for today’s episode. Today I am talking about Google Analytics, because they’ve recently made an announcement that the tracking code most of our websites have been using to track our analytics is being shut down. And that means that website owners like you will need to update your site to the new version.
I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what all of this means and what we need to do about it. So today, I am giving you the nofluff must-know info about what’s going on with Google Analytics and what you need to do on your website.
Let’s start with talking about why you need Google Analytics in the first place. Google Analytics adds a little piece of tracking code to your site, and then pulls data into the Google Analytics dashboard to give you all of the information that you might need about visitors to your site, and about how your pages are performing. This helps you determine which posts and which pages you might want to promote, or even what you might need to create more similar content for.
Some of the things that you can learn from Google Analytics are how people are getting to your website, what device they’re using, down to whether it is mobile, or desktop, what type of mobile device even which operating system and which web browser they are using
You can see where in the world people are coming from to visit your site, that’s a really fun one to look at. You can also see which of your pages or posts are more popular than others, and which ones are getting the most traffic. One other really cool feature is that you can see the behavior flow of what people are doing when they get to your website.
You can actually almost watch the path that they take through the pages on your site visually in this behavior flow map. It’s really interesting to see where people are coming to your site from, what page they land on, and then what actions they take from that page.
So you might be able to see that a visitor landed on your homepage, clicked on a specific blog post, clicked the link within that blog post to another related blog post, clicked another link to maybe a product in your website store or an email opt in. And you’ll even see where they drop off of your site, meaning where they leave your site to head over to wherever else they are browsing.
It’s really interesting look at your content that can help you figure out if you have gaps in your content or places that too many people are dropping off, where maybe you need to add some better internal links to keep people sticking around your site. Or maybe a piece of content isn’t really serving the people that are going to that page and you need to beef that content up a little bit.
So Google Analytics can give you a ton of information that you can use to improve your website as a whole.
Now, the reason that we’re talking about this right now is that Google just announced that they are sunsetting Universal Analytics as of July 1, 2023. And everyone will be required to use the new Google Analytics 4 tracking to track their website data from that point on.
Now if that sounds like Greek to you, don’t worry, I gotcha covered. Here’s a simple explanation. Universal Analytics is the old way of tracking visitors. Google Analytics for is the new way. You can think of it like an operating system upgrade on your phone. Except unfortunately, this isn’t gonna happen automatically overnight while your phone is charging and on Wi Fi of course.
For Google Analytics, you will actually need to log into Google Analytics and set up your new Google Analytics 4 tracking and install it on your site. To do that, you’ll log into Google Analytics, go to admin, and then click on the Google Analytics 4 Setup Assistant.
That will walk you through setting up the GA 4 tracking code, and then you’ll need to install it on your site. Now, if you have no Google Analytics installed at all yet, then just install that Google Analytics 4 code.
However, if you already have Universal Analytics installed on your site, for right now, I am recommending that you keep both versions. So you’ll have Universal Analytics and GA 4 both on your site. The reason I am recommending that is because there are a lot of third party integrations that we might be using with our Google analytics that are not working with GA 4 just yet.
So if you have Universal Analytics installed, especially if you have it connected to any kind of third party integration, you will want to leave both versions installed. The reason for that is you need the old version to go ahead and continue tracking your data so that you can use those third party integrations between now and whenever they become compatible with Google Analytics 4.
But, if you wait until the last second, in June of next year to add Google Analytics 4 then you will have no historical data on visitors to your site. Your Universal Analytics data will go away as of July 1 2023. And if you don’t install Google Analytics 4 until close to that time, then you won’t have any old data to look back on.
So you want to go ahead and get Google Analytics 4 set up now, so that it can start tracking visitors to your site. So that you’ll have historical data to look back on from this year and from the first half of next year at the point that we have to switch over.
Now, if you are on Blogger, it is important to know that as of today, blogger does not support Google Analytics 4 yet. So you’ll just keep your Universal Analytics for now. But be on the lookout for when this is available for Blogger so that you can go ahead and update as soon as possible.
On WordPress, there are multiple ways that you might have Google Analytics installed. Sometimes you may have used a plugin like Monster insights or jetpack to install Google Analytics, or even Google Site kit. The problem is a lot of those will slow down your website. And they really don’t serve much purpose outside of installing the Google Analytics code.
My recommendation is that you add the code directly to the head code of your site. And you’ll see instructions for that when you’re setting up your code on Google Analytics.
Now, your action step for today is to go install the Chrome extension called Google Tag Assistant Legacy. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. Use it to check and see which Google Analytics version is running on your website. If you see a code that starts with u – a that is Universal Analytics. So you’ll need to add the Google Analytics 4 code as soon as you can.
If you see a code starting with G, or if you see both of those, a code with UA and another code with G, that means you have Google Analytics 4 installed and you are good to go. Now, if all of this makes your eyes glaze over, and you really just want someone to handle it for you, I can help with that too.
Just head over to the show notes at kristendoyle.co/episode8 for all of the details about how we can help you make that transition and get everything updated. Thank you so much for listening today. If you have a TPT friend with a website, be sure to share this episode with them so they don’t lose all their Google Analytics data come July 2023. I’ll talk to you soon.
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you did, please share it with another teacher seller who would also find it helpful. For more resources on Growing Your TPT business. Head to Kristin doyle.co forward slash TPT. Talk to you soon.
