Advanced GA4 Settings

Contents

• Create New Events
• Google Signals
• Enhanced Measurement

If you have further questions about Google Analytics 4, or would like help with the transition, please contact Brad Gerick: brad.gerick@pressinstitute.org.

Create New Events

There are two ways to create new events. One is within Google Analytics itself, and the other is via Google Tag Manager.

Via Google Analytics

1. Click the Events tab near the bottom of the left menu bar.
2. Click the blue "Create Event" button.
3. Click the blue "Create" button.
4. Add your event name, configure its settings and click the blue "Create" button.

Via Google Tag Manager (Recommended)

1. Sign in to your Google Tag Manager account.
2. Create a trigger related to the event you want to create.
3. Create a GA4 tag connected to that trigger.
4. Add your desired settings and parameters.
5. Test the tag/event simultaneously in the GTM preview mode and the GA4 debug window.
6. If everything functions as expected, publish the tag and trigger in GTM.

Google Signals

By enabling "Google Signals," you allow cross-device tracking via ad personalization.

"When users turn on Ads Personalization, Google is able to develop a holistic view of how those users interact with an online property from multiple browsers and multiple devices."

Let's think of an example as to why you might want to do this.

Molly is an avid reader of your website. When she wakes up in the morning, she checks the latest news on her home computer. When she gets to the office, she often checks the news on her work computer. In the afternoons, when she's waiting to pick up her children from school, she checks your website (or app) on her phone. One user, three devices.

If Molly is signed in to the same Google account on all three devices, her ads will be personalized no matter where she reads your site. If Google Signals is turned on, GA4 recognizes that Molly is the same user on all three devices, and counts her as the same user in your GA4 dashboard. This can give you a really good idea of Molly's behavior.

If Google Signals, however, are not turned on, GA4 will recognize Molly as three different users with three very similar habits. This could skew your data in the sense that you may think a lot of different people are interested in a certain type of content, when in reality, many people are being double- or triple-counted, giving misleading "weight" to reader interest of certain content.

Ultimately, it's up to you whether you enable Google Signals, and it will not affect your aggregate analytics data. Before deciding, consider discussing the pros and cons with your team, and make sure turning on this feature would not violate any local or national privacy laws.

To enable Google Signals:

1. Admin
2. Property
3. Data Settings
4. Data Collection
5. Enable Google signals data collection
6. Acknowledge User Data Collection Acknowledgement

Enhanced Measurement

We recommend turning on enhanced measurement, which can be found within your individual Data Streams, accessible via the Property column in your Google Analytics admin. (See image below.)

Enhanced measurement are Google's six default events incorporated into your GA4 dashboard. While not all of them may be useful – though Page views will be a cornerstone of your analytics – you never know if you'll want to explore this data in the future, and it won't do any harm to have them enabled in the meantime.

Here are Google's explanations of each item.*

*Scrolls by default measure 90% scroll depth on a page. It's possible to change this or add additional scroll-depth tracking via Google Tag Manager.