Common Analytics Assumptions — Whiteboard Friday

And of course, last but not least, you’ve probably seen this little bonus I have down here. GA4 is not set. This is a big problem people see in GA4. They say, “I looked at my landing pages and a bunch of them weren’t set up, or I looked at my acquisition and a bunch of them weren’t set up. What’s going on?”

So this is how GA4 works and how it differs from Universal Analytics. GA4 measures a series of events that happen on your website, a page view, scrolling, someone clicking a call-to-action button if you’ve set it up to track that. If I have, say, a tab open on a website, maybe this tab that you’re on right now, maybe you clicked on it from, say, a newsletter, and then you decided I’m going to watch that video later. And then you went back later and clicked play on the video, that page didn’t reload. No more page view events. But since you’ve clicked play on this video you’re currently watching, there’s a video play event.

The problem is, since there’s no pageview, we don’t know how you got to the webpage because that pageview event, that session start event, goes with that initial pageview. So if you went back to this tab, hit reload, and then hit play, we’d know where you came from. But since you didn’t, you just hit play, maybe go back and reload and then hit play, so we know where you’re coming from; the problem is that it will show as not set.

So if you see a lot of things not set in your GA4, there is one small part that is a bug that Google may or may not fix. But the other part of it is that people are hoarding cards. How many cards do you currently have open? I bet it’s more than this. Because of this, you’re bound to see a lot that isn’t posted in your reports. The amount not set you see will depend on how many people are stacking your cards.

Hoarding cards isn’t necessarily a bad thing. People like to read things later. People might say, I’ll think about this product for a week and then buy it. So this can tell you how many people are doing these things. But you should think about it when you report. Should you include this unset data? Maybe report it in a slightly different way.

So if you see that it is not set, don’t worry about it. That’s what’s happening. You may or may not want to include this in your analytics. I find that when you’re reporting to people who don’t do what we do, like your company leadership or your clients, sometimes it’s best to get rid of it because it just confuses people who aren’t us. But certainly, you know, depending on what kind of data you’re capturing with unset, you might want to report that or not report that.

On that note, these are common analytical assumptions that I find people get mostly incorrect. I hope this has helped you on your analytical journey and I promise that eventually we will all love GA4 because we are stuck with it now. Thanks for watching.