Weeknotes #40
This week is a quick tip to stop Google automatically creating additional (and unnecessary) Google Analytics 4 properties, and I spoke to Live Theatre, Upswing Aerial, Barnsley Museums, Dulwich Picture Gallery, LatinoLife, Eden Arts, Museum of London, and Kettle's Yard.
It’s the final countdown
In Google Analytics news, the countdown is on! If you log in to a Universal Analytics account you will be faced with a huge ticking clock.
You may have also received an email from Google with the same message:
Google are threatening to create a new property for you if you don’t take action. This is all despite the fact may of us have actually already set up a new Google Analytics 4 property.
To stop Google creating an additional GA4 property in your account go to each Universal Analytics property > Admin > GA4 Setup Assistant and toggle off the Automatically set up a basic Google Analytics 4 property setting.
Conversations this week
On Tuesday I helped Lisa Campbell (Marketing Communications Manager) and Caitlin Ivory (Marketing & Communications Officer) at Live Theatre set up Google Analytics 4 with Spektrix, following the step-by-step guide I created earlier this year.
Later on I caught up with Bridie Tyler (Digital Communications Associate) at Upswing Aerial and we set up Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with CookieBot. This uses Google Tag Manager’s consent mode to hold back any tracking scripts until the user has opted in or out, the compliant way of managing cookies.
On Wednesday I spoke to Devinia Skirrow (Marketing and Communication Manager) at Barnsley Museums. The organisation looks after five different physical properties, with six different websites. We talked through the recommended set up for GA4 and how to get things up and running before the 1 July deadline.
Later that morning I met with Affly Johnson (Digital Marketing Manager) and Tom Short (Marketing Officer) at Dulwich Picture Gallery, a South London gallery with a huge collection of work from 17th and 18th century European Old Masters. We talked about tracking relevant metrics, marketing funnels and data visualisation for ongoing reporting.
On Thursday I spoke to Amaranta Wright (Managing Director) at LatinoLife, a Latin media, events and music organisation, producing online and print media and events. We looked through the historical website analytics data to explore the amazing international reach of the organisation and what content is working well.
Later on I caught up with Lakota Kendal (Operations Manager) at Eden Arts, an artist-led company based in Cumbria. Lakota is setting up GA4 for the organisation on Craft CMS and missing permissions to edit the template files or modules.
Following the series of workshops we’ve had together, Katharine McInnes (Digital Product Manager) at Museum of London got in touch about checkout funnels using Universal Analytics (UA) data. UA has severely limited funnel visualisations (one of the benefits of GA4!) so we build one using Looker Studio instead.
Universal Analytics funnel visualisation (test data)
On Friday I met with Tom Bray (Digital Marketing Officer) at Stonyhurst College Museum to go through the complex set up of Tag Manager and GA4 data across multiple websites and objectives.
One screen at Kettle’s Yard. Photo: Katherine Brown
Finally, in the afternoon I was beamed into Kettle’s Yard by Katherine Brown (eCommerce Tech Champion). Katherine was on an in-person visit with Laura Pryke (Retail Manager and Buyer) and Helen Dickman (Communications Coordinator) to understand more about the organisation and how they manage retail operations. I talked through different parts of GA4 - the new Shopify integration and building custom reports.