3 reports in GA4 that use analytics to eliminate customer friction

Do you feel like your marketing team is drowning in analytics reports? You are not alone. Data surrounds today’s marketers, making it difficult to understand how to connect business problems with data that offers solutions.

One use case for web analytics data is to reduce customer friction points.

In the autumn presentation MarTech conferenceJulie Jones, product manager at Baylor Scott & White Health, showed marketers how to create a list of actions they need to track and reports to create to eliminate customer friction points.

The key to quick and actionable insights about friction points, Jones said, is thoughtful event tracking and the right event structure.

Dive Deeper: Understanding Customer Entry and Exit on Event-Based Journeys

Don’t try to follow everything

Thoughtful event monitoring does not mean monitoring everything, as this is not the key to identifying friction points.

“Tracking everything it creates a number of problems,” Jones said, “including too much data. If you’re using a free platform like Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you’ll run into platform limitations if you try to track too much. If you choose to enable auto-tracking to track everything, you also run the risk of missing data structure.”

This often leads to high leverage if you have similar features on your site.

Finally, tracking everything increases the risk of personally identifiable information (PII) being linked to your analytics platform, which is against the Google Analytics terms of service. So what should marketers be watching? Track page views, which is done by default on most platforms. Next, watch for important clicks, including:

• Navigation.
• calls to action.
• Any outbound clicks.
• Downloading
• Contact click.

You should also track submitted forms. You’ll want to do a lot of quality control with forms, as automatic form tracking is unreliable on some platforms.

Finally, monitor web search, either within your platform’s user interface or by configuring it in Google Tag Manager.

“Once you have the events you want to track,” Jones said, “it’s time to think about the structure of the event. With Universal Analytics, that wasn’t a problem because no matter what custom event tracking you did, you always had our category, our event, and our label.”

With GA 4, event-driven data models became the focus. And that means easier reporting with custom event descriptors, but requires a bit more planning ahead.

The examples in this article use GA4, but for users who don’t use GA4 or prefer session-based data, Jones recommends looking at tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Pivot Pro. Remember that each platform uses its own terms and nomenclature.

Dig deeper: How to increase your organic reach with behavioral analytics insights

Report no. 1: Do you have the right words on your page?

You won’t see any mention of bounce rates in the reports Jones recommends. And that’s because bounce rates won’t give you quick, actionable information.

Bounce rate tells you where people are leaving your site, but it doesn’t tell you why.

The first message looks to see if you have the correct words on the page. This includes your content, but also your calls to action.

You want to understand which pages are making the most use of global site navigation, meaning that a visitor looked at your page, didn’t find what they were looking for, didn’t find the right CTA, and immediately went to global navigation .

Here’s how Jones creates the first part of the message:

The second part of the report looks at which global navigation elements were clicked. Here’s how Jones puts it together:

Report no. 2: Unsatisfactory search experience

Another message Jones suggests is unsatisfactory search results. Ideally, you want people to use search on your site just once because they’ll find what they’re looking for immediately. You don’t want them to have to search twice.

Here’s how to create a report for unsatisfactory searches and the search term they use in the second search:

Report no. 3: Frustrating buttons and misleading button text

When you can determine which buttons users click more than once, you can identify and resolve a number of friction points.

Jones compiles this overview as follows: