Weeknotes #46
It’s the final week of Google Universal Analytics! Goodbye to an old friend and hello to a terrible GA4 integration from Eventbrite.
Goodbye Google Universal Analytics 👋
The day has finally arrived. Tomorrow, the old version of Google Analytics will stop collecting any new data. Fear not, you’ll still be able to access the historical reports until 1 July 2024 so there is plenty of time to export any data you need.
I’ve written a short news article to explain what is happening and what you should do next.
The transition to Google Analytics 4 has been painful, as there is further pain ahead (see below!). I’m glad it’s here though, it does have a lot of significant benefits from the old version - despite how much we all liked it.
To help creative and cultural organisations through this shift I’m continuing to work on webinars, resources and templates for the year ahead. There’s lots in the pipeline and the next one is How to enhance Google Analytics 4 data with Google Tag Manager on Wednesday 12 July, come along!
Eventbrite’s (rubbish) GA4 integration
At the very last minute, the ticketing platform Eventbrite have quietly released an integration for GA4.
However, it’s terrible!
For an ecommerce platform used across the world and processing millions of tickets a week, they’ve had the time and money to build a proper integration - passing through checkout steps, product information and transactions. Instead they’ve released something with the bare minimum and even that is wrong.
It passes through three GA4 Events:
event_listing
event_register
Completed Order
There are no additional Parameters passed through, so they’re pretty much useless. The worst part is the last Event, they couldn’t event be bothered to make the required snake_case 🐍.
Conversations this week
On Monday I spoke to Paty Bennett (General Manager) and the team at Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature. We looked through the new data available in GA4, exporting data from Universal Analytics and reporting in Looker Studio.
Tuesday I met with Ian Pitts at Royal Armouries. The organisation has multiple subdomain websites for different areas of the business - collections, images, shop - so we discussed conversion tracking for each and consolidating cookie consent.
Later in the morning I met with Kate Learmouth (Marketing and Audience Development Manager) at First Art and we discussed GA4 and building custom Events.
In the afternoon I spoke with Kathryn Preston (Senior Information Librarian) at Wiltshire Council - Libraries. The library uses Arena for it’s catalogue so we turned on Enhanced Measurement and configured Site Search to track interactions with it’s results. Pages are dynamically generated through URL parameters so I’m interested to see what search terms feed through to reports.
On Thursday I caught up with Samia Malik, a visual artist, about configuring Meta Pixels and getting the most out of GA4.
Final 1-2-1 of the week was with Nai Chapman (Marketing and Design Officer) at The Garage Trust. Nai has implemented Ticketsolve’s GA4 integration to pass through ecommerce data. The website uses another platform for workshop bookings so we investigated the purchase pathway and data available through eZ Platform.
I’m off to Wales 🐉 for a week, see you in July!