ROI-Boosting Measurement: Google Leader Shares What's New (And Next) in GA4

Segments can’t be used outside of GA4 yet, but it’s a common request, especially from folks using BI tools like Looker Studio.

“ It’s not on the roadmap yet, but just know that it’s on our radar… the more feedback we get along these lines… it really influences our roadmap.” – Steve

Eventually yes, Google Analytics chat will be able to help create Explorations. Right now it’s focused on reporting, but the long-term goal is a full-featured assistant that can help with any part of the product.

“The expectation is that it will translate over to the Explorer experience as well.”

There are technical limitations to the length of GA4 event parameters, but Steve emphasized that Google cares more about solving problems than ticking off features.

“Don’t just request a super long field—tell us the use case you’re trying to accomplish.”

The best way to give feedback to the Google Analytics team is to use any channel—product UI, social, support. Steve noted that Google is now using AI to parse feedback across platforms to identify patterns.

Adding an AI Overview tracker is on the Google Analytics radar. Google is aware of the need to distinguish this new traffic channel but hasn’t rolled out a solution yet.

“ We’re thinking through the right way to represent this, but we’re aware of, it’s a pretty natural and obvious need to understand and distinguish this traffic. Exactly how we’ll do it is TBD, but just know it is on our radar.”

Until then, here’s how you can track traffic from AIO, featured snippets, and PAA results in GA4 with a workaround we recommend.

Currently, GA4 has limited ability to detect so-called “dark social” traffic. That’s traffic from apps that don’t pass a referrer string or lack UTM parameters. This means traffic from sources like TikTok or Slack often shows up as “direct” even when it’s clearly from a social share.

Steve acknowledged the issue and called it a reasonable request, but said there are no current plans to address it. This is an area Google may prioritize if the demand, and technical feasibility, are strong enough.

GA4’s upcoming view-through tracking feature won’t track individual users directly. Instead, it will work by importing impression data from connected third-party ad platforms (like TikTok, Snap, or Pinterest) into GA4 in a privacy-preserving way.

Steve explained the high-level process:

“You’d be able to link your accounts on third-party platforms … and impression data from those platforms would come into Google Analytics … to be used for matching to your conversions.” – Steve

This integration happens only after explicit authentication and within a clean room environment. More technical documentation will be released when the feature becomes available.

Reconciling visitor counts in Google Analytics with an offline system like a CRM is a common issue. Someone refuses tracking but still becomes a lead or makes a purchase, which shows up in your CRM but not in GA4. Steve explained that GA4 is better prepared for this challenge than Universal Analytics thanks to Consent Mode and behavioural modeling.

Even if a user doesn’t consent to cookies (especially in regions like the EU), GA4 can still capture conversions like purchases, just not session or user-level data. That’s where modeling steps in.
“In this model where we don’t have a user identifier, a purchase happened. You should still have basically the ground truth on the number of purchases. What you’re missing is how many users made those purchases and across how many sessions … that’s where the modeling comes into play.”

So while GA4 will not match your CRM exactly, behavioural modeling helps fill in the gaps for user and session data to provide a more complete picture.

It’s possible that behavioural modeling will work for smaller audience sizes in Google Analytics in the future, but there’s no clear timeline as Google is prioritizing model accuracy. Right now, GA4 needs a high volume of consented and unconsented users to model behaviour reliably.

“We want to make sure these features are built on high-quality models … Our quality bar is pretty high because we want to make sure if businesses are making decisions about their business or their marketing spend on the data, the data is high quality.” – Steve

Smaller sites may eventually benefit from behavioural modeling, but only if Google can maintain the level of data integrity required for decision-making.

Annotations. GA4’s new annotation feature allows teams to share context and collaborate more effectively.

“I’m hearing a lot of creative usages … to proliferate information and decision making.”

If you haven’t tried annotations yet, check out our complete guide to GA4 annotations—it covers everything you need to know to start using them strategically.

Dana DiTomaso: [00:00:00] Hi everyone, and welcome to our webinar today. I am really excited about today’s webinar with Steve Ghanim. So first I should start with me though before we get into the webinar itself. I’m Dana e DiTomaso. I’m founder and lead instructor here at Kick Point Playbook, and today I am joined by Steve Gannon.

Dana DiTomaso: He is the director of Product Management for Google Analytics itself, which is amazing. I’m so very excited and grateful. That we get to hear from the source what’s new in GA four and what we can expect to see coming soon in GA four. Please make sure to ask questions in the chat. We’ll get to them at the end.

Dana DiTomaso: And if you have to drop out early, we’ll be emailing everyone who registered on LinkedIn a recording of today’s session. So if you’re watching on YouTube, please make sure to hop over to the Kick Point Playbook, LinkedIn page and register, or just message me and I can help you out. And now let’s get this rolling.

Dana DiTomaso: Hey Steve, thanks for joining us.

Steve Ganem: Hi, Dana. Happy to be here. Yeah, awesome.

Dana DiTomaso: Of course. I really appreciate it. As I mentioned, so here is [00:01:00] your presentation. So yeah, I’m just I’m just gonna be here hanging out and watching, so go ahead and take it away.

Steve Ganem: Yeah right on. I’m Steve Ganham. Like Dana mentioned, I direct product management for Google Analytics and I’ve been on the team for.

Steve Ganem: 10 years now. So that’s a milestone for me. But we’re excited today to celebrate another big milestone, a big number a year for Google Analytics, our favorite product being used by millions of businesses around the world. And more importantly, I’m here to share how the product is evolving to meet the needs of modern businesses.

Steve Ganem: Without further ado, let me jump into it today in our, my agenda. We will share where we’re at today. We’ll talk about what’s new, going another level deeper to some of the announcements we recently made at Google Marketing Live and what’s coming up later this year. We’ll also talk about what’s next, what’s beyond that, and we’ll have some time afterwards for to q and a so I can try to address some of your questions.

Steve Ganem: So where are we at now? So it’s hard to believe, but this year marks the [00:02:00] 20th anniversary of Google Analytics. It all started back in 2005 after Google acquired urchin software company. Those UTM parameters, and love, that actually stands for urchin tracking module. For those of you who don’t know.

Steve Ganem: So still an homage back to urchin, even in the modern Google Analytics. So 20 years ago. YouTube and Facebook were just getting started. Smartphones weren’t really a thing and neither were apps, and the way that people engaged with the internet was mostly through their personal computers at home, and this was the world that Google Analytics was originally designed for.

Steve Ganem: Obviously the world has completely changed, especially the digital landscape since 2005, but over the years we’ve continued to evolve and invest in the platform to make sure it meets the needs of businesses. So today, obviously, the way that people interact with businesses is no longer simple or linear, and that’s why we needed to transition to Google Analytics for, and that was so critical.

Steve Ganem: That it wasn’t just like an update or an iteration or a tweak to the old product, but it [00:03:00] was a complete re-imagining seeing fundamental shifts happening in the ecosystem. Let’s touch on that for a moment, and you’ve heard probably time and time again, and it ring true. As a, from a personal experience, consumer journeys are a lot more complex and diverse than they used to be.

Steve Ganem: You have a number of devices, a number of touchpoints. Consider that the average consumer on a daily basis has over 130 touchpoints with broad products and brands and services as they use their devices. And think about your own behavior, how you might be on your phone and scrolling through an endless feed and encounter a product that catches your eye.

Steve Ganem: And later maybe when you come home from work, you do an internet search on your computer, and a couple days later, either on the internet or in the store you make a purchase. How do you connect all of these dots and how do you understand which touch points were most meaningful and influential in that purchase?

Steve Ganem: I. And compound that with the fact that a lot of these touch points are they’re disappearing because of changes to the [00:04:00] regulatory or ecosystems. These make it a lot harder to even collect the touch points and even if you could, making sense of them and trying to connect it back to your marketing strategy to determine which channels are driving your marketing strategy the best.

Steve Ganem: Is a very difficult task to do to say the least you and budgets are being pressured by executives, for example, who are making everyone justify the amount of money they’re spending on marketing. So you really need to prove that return on investment. So the pressures highest because you can’t afford to waste your budget on channels that aren’t performing.

Steve Ganem: So how do businesses navigate this difficult landscape? This is the vision and the inspiration for Google Analytics. Four. We built GA four to meet these needs head on, and that’s why we had to transform Google Analytics and continue to invest in it to not only meet the needs of website or app businesses to measure engagement on their properties, but to measure your whole business, including all [00:05:00] customer touchpoint and encompassing all the channels you’re engaging your customers with.

Steve Ganem: It’s also why Google Analytics is built to be media agnostic. So it’s measuring across paid channels, Google and non-Google it across your unpaid channel, SMS, email, et cetera, and your organic touch points with customers. So you can get an unbiased and com comprehensive view what’s really driving your results.

Steve Ganem: So how are we gonna go about transforming Google Analytics? There’s basically, we bucket our investments. Into these five buckets and briefly I’ll walk through them and then we’ll go deeper into each one with some examples. The first is about measuring the entire customer journey across channels and platforms, channels here being where your customers engage with your product or service outside of your digital footprint, your properties, your website, et cetera, and platforms being those that you actually control, website, app, and beyond.

Steve Ganem: So we have investments in this [00:06:00] category. The second is now that you have that foundation of data, how do you glean insights from it? And then the most common way that it. Which is the hallmark of Google Analytics is the reporting. We have a variety of reports in the platform, but we’re actually improving the platform, making it more flexible in a number of ways, and customizable.

Steve Ganem: So we’ll talk about some examples of that. The third is, as we talk about bringing more data from more sources in more data, it does not necessarily mean more insights. In fact, for a lot of users, more dimensions and metrics can actually be more confusion. It can be harder to find the needle in the haystack with more data.

Steve Ganem: And that’s where AI can really play a big role in diving deeper into your data, finding anomalies, highlighting them for you, presenting opportunities for you. No matter what your level of sophistication is, AI can add value, but I would say even for those less sophisticated in your organization who still need to make data-driven decisions, AI is gonna play a much significant role in the future.

Steve Ganem: The fourth is [00:07:00] around optimizing media investments with both the cross-channel budgeting features and also cross-channel activation with our audience features. We’ll get into that. And all of this is underpinned by platform investments and making Google Analytics more resilient and applying all of the latest and greatest in privacy preserving technologies.

Steve Ganem: So that we make sure that user privacy is respected while the utility for our, for customers and for marketers is retained. So let’s talk about what’s new in each of these categories.

Steve Ganem: The first measure, the entire customer journey. Google Analytics historically has focused on and back in the 2005 urchin days, certainly website measurement. And I’d say about 10 years ago we reimagined Google Analytics for apps and that’s when we launched Firebase Analytics. And up until now, Google Analytics four is really focused on web and app, but we know that many businesses have their data in other places as well.

Steve Ganem: [00:08:00] There’s both other online platforms like PC or console, and there’s also there’s non. There’s non online platforms where you store your data, let’s say CRMs or sales databases as well. So we wanna make it as easy as possible to bring in your data to have comprehensive bus business measurement, bringing that data in, lights up, basically all of the features of analytics.

Steve Ganem: So that’s a, it creates a very powerful foundation of data. The second is Google Analytics has historically focused on mid to lower funnel touchpoints in customer journeys. That is once a user lands on your site, what can you infer from their URL and their behavior on your site or in your app? Where we’re transforming the product in the future.

Steve Ganem: And what we announced at Google Marketing Live last month is we want to allow customers to bring in their upper funnel touchpoint from all of the marketing platforms that they use. We wanna be, we announced that we ha we’re establishing partnerships with third parties [00:09:00] such as TikTok and Snap and Pinterest and others to allow our customers to bring in their touch points from these platforms.

Steve Ganem: So that would give you the upper funnel. To match the mid and lower funnel that’s already in analytics. And last but not least, we are transitioning from just having focusing on NATA narrow data sources, such as your website or app, or the measurement protocol to expanded data sources. And this would include being able to bring in more easily.

Steve Ganem: Your cost data or your campaign data from all of your platforms. This is possible today, but it’s very manual and labor intensive through in our integration with Data Manager, we’re gonna make it a lot easier to bring in data from a. Your other marketing channels and CRMs, et cetera, into analytics and to apply the latest and greatest privacy preserving technologies as we do it.

Steve Ganem: So all of this PR will result in if properly implemented a strong foundation of first party data for all of the [00:10:00] subsequent use cases we’ll go into. One of those most exciting use cases, which we highlighted at Google Marketing Live is view through and engage view conversions across Google and non-Google channels.

Steve Ganem: So Analytics today has multi-touch attribution, but it mostly focuses, again, on click-based journeys by allowing customers to bring in their impressions from other platforms as well as YouTube. Google Analytics will be able to provide a more comprehensive view of performance, looking at each conversion that happened, being able to see not just the clicks that proceeded it, but the impressions from video or display on all of your channels that matter to you.

Steve Ganem: Is going to be a game changer for analytics. And the way that we’re doing this is going to again, involve using privacy preserving technologies to make sure that privacy is upheld, but this utility of giving these great insights into which channels are more effective for you and for your strategy will be delivered through this.

Steve Ganem: The next I wanna [00:11:00] highlight is bringing back a by, there’s a strong demand for this report from Universal Analytics, which is not yet present in GA four. The assisted conversions report Assisted Conversions. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, this is giving credit to those touch points, which preceded the last click.

Steve Ganem: So in the last click model, the last click gets credit for the conversion, but it’s not really accounting for any proceeding touch points in that user’s journey. And so with a assisted Conversions report you’ll get more insights into how effective your, let’s say, brand or demand gen campaigns were, how influential or what role they played in actually driving the result that you wanted.

Steve Ganem: Today. This is possible if you export data and if you do enough analysis to. Intersect and subtract the last click from the touch points of your campaign. It’s very labor intensive. It can be very expensive. So this will be a really easy way to see which campaigns are assisting in conversions, even when they weren’t the last click.[00:12:00]

Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, Steve, I just wanna jump in and say that I am very excited about this report. It is super labor intensive to do this now and requires, big query, which a lot of people don’t have access to. So this really levels the playing field and makes this so much accessible to other people. Yeah, one feature I’m very excited about.

Dana DiTomaso: I’m excited about most of them, but this is great.

Steve Ganem: I love to hear that. And I guess what I’ll say is that’s evidence that your cries are being heard, that your feedback is taken seriously, and that we’re always trying to improve the product. Next, a couple of features that I would put in the category of budget allocation.

Steve Ganem: This, there’s a feature that’s right now in test, and by the way, most of the fe or all of the features that we’re going through in this section are gonna be available later this year. So this one in particular, we have an alpha test going on. It’s called the Projections report. This one will give you as your campaigns are getting started, it’ll give you early insights into the pacing of your campaigns, towards their targets.

Steve Ganem: So it helps you understand, are you going to reach your KPI or do you need to make any changes [00:13:00] along the way? And the goal here is to be able to get insights into the pacing of them so that you can make adjustments. Now, how do you make adjustments and what adjustments you make? That’s actually the focus of the next feature, which compliments it, which is scenario planning.

Steve Ganem: This feature helps you to understand whether you are allocating your budget most efficiently and what changes you, if not, what changes you can make to allocate it most efficiently to achieve your marketing goals. So a lot of customers we hear, we’ve heard feedback that you try to do this today in a variety of ways, including export your.

Steve Ganem: Aggregate data to spreadsheets, running formulas on top of it to see how they’re pacing, trying to do some math and maybe apply some machine learning to allocate your budget most effectively. It’s again, labor intensive, probably error prone, and everybody’s got a different solution for it. So what we want to do is make it super simple.

Steve Ganem: If you just bring in the data again through these connectors to. You link to ads, but also bring in data from other [00:14:00] platforms. The tool will do the rest of the work for you and highlight the insights for you of what you can do to allocate your budgets more effectively.

Steve Ganem: Next. I’ve hinted at it, but, and you can’t be surprised when I want to talk about AI and chat. AI is not new to Google Analytics, even back to universal analytics days. We’ve had AI insights smart goals, et cetera. But in GA four, and especially now with the emergence of large language models, we’re investing this more and more heavily.

Steve Ganem: We really do have a strong long-term vision to have for everyone to be able to have a personal analyst at their. At their hip, their own personal GA expert that they can summon at any point. So you’ll be able to use, to have conversations about the insights that AI is pointing out to you today.

Steve Ganem: There are. Insights on anomalies or projections, et cetera, that show up in your analytics reporting. AI will be able to summarize those for you in natural language. But more importantly than that, you’ll be [00:15:00] able to ask follow up questions and actually have a conversation which mimics for those of who work with analysts either in our company or we contract them.

Steve Ganem: There’s this model that you have where an insight is shown to you, and of course you have 50 follow up questions ’cause you wanna make sure that. All of the edge cases are taken into account and wanna really get down to the meaning of it. So this sort of experience, we want to enable every user to have this in the analytics interface.

Steve Ganem: Not only will it be able to answer questions about your data and your property in a very personalized way that looks at how your account is set up, but it’ll also help you discover more features of the product. We’ve heard feedback that it’s hard to find where features are, or for users coming from Universal Analytics.

Steve Ganem: They don’t know where one of their favorite reports is, so you’ll be able to either ask questions about the data and get immediate answers or. To find your way through the product, it can link you to different areas of the product. And beyond that, it’s also skilled in our help center [00:16:00] documentation.

Steve Ganem: So if you have any questions about how the product works, what some term means, you can ask this, chat, this Google Analytics, chat those questions and get those answers. So this is a long journey, likely a transformative one, but the goal is to make sure that every user of an organization, regardless of their technical abilities, has the ability to make data-driven decisions.

Steve Ganem: Okay, so that was a lot of features that sort of connect them all. In a hypothetical, real world example here imagine you are a direct to consumer apparel business and you sell shirts and you have a website, and right now you, you’re advertising on Google search. So you have analytics and users coming to the website.

Steve Ganem: You’re able to see how many of them organic or how many of them coming through your search campaigns. So things are going well and you run a demand gen campaign on top of that, and you are seeing obviously, some increased conversions from it, but it’s hard to tell exactly how much of that is being [00:17:00] driven or influenced by your demand gen campaigns.

Steve Ganem: So with our EVC and VTC. View through conversion measurement coming, you’ll be able to see more granularly what the, how many paths included these these other touch points, how many conversions were assisted by your demand gen campaigns, and have a better sense of how much of an influence those campaigns are having on it.

Steve Ganem: So you go beyond that and you say, okay I’m gonna advertise beyond Google. I’m gonna advertise on TikTok and Snap and Run video campaigns there. So you run those and at first you’re just seeing the clicks come through, but you’re wondering what influence the video views that didn’t have clicks like EBCs and BTCs.

Steve Ganem: How much influence did those have on your. Campaign goals, that’s when you would connect to those platforms to bring in that data. And now all of your paving and your attribution reports, they’ll account for the EBCs, VTCs and these touchpoints on these other platforms, the way that Google touchpoints would be incorporated, as well as your non-paid touchpoint.

Steve Ganem: And then you set up a popup shop at a [00:18:00] physical location with a point of sale device and purchases are being made there. And you’ll bring in those purchases from your sales database via Google Data Manager into analytics and the intersection or the union of all of those data sets along with the reports that we’re talking about here, will enable you to not only understand the performance, historical performance of your campaign, but to make sure that you can maximize the efficiency of your budget allocation.

Steve Ganem: Going forward with machine learning, looking at the pacing of your campaigns, understanding which touch points are most influential, and giving you the advice that you need in order to make those budget changes as simply as possible. So really excited about putting it all together. All the individual pieces, even on their own, have a lot of value, but the sum of them is particularly exciting, I believe.

Steve Ganem: Okay. We’ve talked a lot about features that, that are coming later this year that you have access to. Lemme talk about a couple that are gonna come [00:19:00] along after that. We haven’t announced before. Somewhat of a sneak peek. When we say cross channel, almost always historically we’ve talked about measurement, but one pivot we’re making or one investment we’re making is also giving you the ability to activate your data in a cross channel way.

Steve Ganem: And we’re doing that with audiences. It’s true to some degree today, but we’re gonna make this a lot richer. Let me go into an example today. When you create an analytics audience, and this is like a set of rules that define a set of customers, that audience is useful for reporting. So you can see what do these users do, what are the demographics of this audience?

Steve Ganem: It’s also, you can also engage or activate those users by exporting them to ads to run remarketing campaigns, let’s say. You can send them to Firebase to send push notifications to them. You can also export them to Salesforce if you’re a Salesforce customer. Last year, we also made them a avail, this, these audiences available via [00:20:00] BigQuery and also an audience export, API.

Steve Ganem: And this was the beginning of us entering this space of cross channel activation because we talk to a lot of marketers and they like the idea or they want to use this concept called audience nurturing or audience. Activation, and that is you take a set of users and you move them through the funnel systematically by engaging with them through various marketing channels.

Steve Ganem: So we’ve heard that customers have a hard time get, like sending our audiences to other platforms. It usually involves getting a developer to pull the data and then repeatedly upload the data to your platforms, and then marketers can go and activate them. So we want to make it as easy as possible for a marketer to connect.

Steve Ganem: Their analytics property to these marketing platforms of their choice. And then to be able to select the audiences to export to those the way that you would to say Firebase or Google ads in a seamless fashion. Have an update in real time and so that you can nurture your audiences [00:21:00] through the funnel and toward conversion.

Steve Ganem: So that’s a very powerful one that we’re excited about. That’s on the horizon. And another one, and this is based on again, a lot of customer feedback, is we’re investing a lot more in the flexibility of our dashboards as well as customizability. Google Analytics four does have reporting customization features.

Steve Ganem: We’ve heard feedback time and time again that some customers don’t know exists. It’s hard to discover, but even when you discover it, it’s a lot of steps in order to set up a dashboard. And our mission again, is to make sure that everyone in every organization has the data they need in order to make data-driven decisions.

Steve Ganem: Customizability and AI are really key parts of that, so we wanna make it as easy to use and set up dashboards for every user of an organization. And that includes offering a whole new set of visualizations and drag and drop type of interface to make sure that the layout is most conducive to decision making for [00:22:00] organizations.

Steve Ganem: So more to come, but we’re really streamlining the mo the reporting experiences further. And there’s a lot of this is based on customer feedback. So keep that coming.

Steve Ganem: To wrap things up first I just wanna reiterate it’s time to really embrace the new landscape. I know GA four is different from Universal Analytics, but it’s built for a new era, a new age, and I hopefully now that you can see where we’re going, you understand that the world Universal Analytics was built for was a different world.

Steve Ganem: And so there’s a new way of doing things and it’s only going to get better and stronger over time. The second is measure the full picture. Bring in order to do that, you need to bring in all of your data from all of your sources, not just your website or app, but you want to have a rich first party data foundation for all of the features.

Steve Ganem: It really makes everything we talked about light up and then connections to third party platforms will bring in the other missing upper funnel touch points. [00:23:00] Third is to lean into ai and hopefully by this point, you I don’t need to convince anyone. And most folks are using AI as a tool in a variety of the ways in their life, but in analytics, charts and graphs are really going to be only one way in tables.

Steve Ganem: One way to interact with the product and get answers most important things is getting those insights which are actionable, and AI can play a role there. For everyone despite their irrespective of their level of sophistication. And last but not least, I wanna highlight we’re continually making improvements to the platform and not just adding new features, but also investing in making the current ones more usable and to improve and maintain data quality.

Steve Ganem: We know that over the last six months in particular, there’s been some. Noise in the data, some challenges in getting really trustworthy results. And we’ve been, and hopefully you’re seeing this, investing heavily in making the data quality higher and giving more transparency into the status of campaign data.

Steve Ganem: This is with like respect to [00:24:00] not said and data not available, et cetera. So hopefully you’re recognizing this and it helps you understand that we’re continually, we’re keeping our eye on this and investing in it with that. I think it’s time for q and a, Dana.

Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. I yeah, I have to say the not available was a really great move because explaining to clients, it’s not set but not set within 24 hours is actually not.

Dana DiTomaso: Processed yet, I think not available was a fantastic change just to make sense to users. Yeah, we have lots of questions in the chat and I have some here that I’m gonna selfishly start with one of mine or two of mine. So one of the things, I love the advertising section, but of course you have to have a Google Ads account attached.

Dana DiTomaso: And not all companies can have a Google Ads account because of regulatory requirements, like for example, cannabis. Companies can’t have Google Ads accounts, so they still wanna see Multitouch Journeys, or maybe they’re in the EEA, they don’t wanna reuse Google ads ’cause of privacy concerns. Will they be able to [00:25:00] access these multitouch reports without having a Google Ads account attached?

Steve Ganem: That’s a very good question. I would say that, first of all, I want to highlight that we listen to feedback and the product evolves. So the current. Product is a point in time. Yeah. So yes, right now it does require you to have an account. Notably, it doesn’t require you to be running a campaign.

Steve Ganem: So that’s what I tell people

Dana DiTomaso: is just make an account. Don’t run anything attached anyway but some people are concerned yeah.

Steve Ganem: Yeah. So in our minds, we recognize that there’s this need we just haven’t prioritized yet. So keep that feedback coming, that this is an important. Like segment or set of customers that are unable to use the feature for one reason or another. Yeah. And you’ll see that we’re, we’ll be responsive to it, especially the as that the volume intensifies and the demand is there.

Dana DiTomaso: Great. Yeah. And the ai chat conversations. That’s great. Will they be recorded so admins can see what questions are asked?

Dana DiTomaso: Because I know right now like any intelligence searches are recorded in the admin, will that be the same for chat questions?

Steve Ganem: You mean recorded? By Google,

Dana DiTomaso: [00:26:00] Yeah, like in GA four somewhere. So I can say, here’s the questions my users are asking that would tell me what kinds of reports I might need to make.

Steve Ganem: I see. So like in Gemini, for example, shows a history of the conversations you had. Exactly.

Dana DiTomaso: Yeah,

Steve Ganem: it would be great for an admin to be able to see what,

Steve Ganem: He’s

Dana DiTomaso: not,

Steve Ganem: they’re not, we’re not currently planning that, but that’s a clever idea. I hadn’t thought of it.

Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. I always tell people like, record that stuff because then you’ll know which reports.

Dana DiTomaso: If someone’s asking the same question again and again, just make them a report and then you don’t need to, especially with the new flexible reporting, which looks very. Cool. The steps to go through now to make an overview report are tedious. I’m excited to see something a lot faster.

Steve Ganem: Absolutely. Yeah.

Dana DiTomaso: Okay, great. So Meir had this question on YouTube. Can segments be added to the data? API, I know of course we have audiences, but segments have a little bit more functionality. Will segments which are only in explorations right now be added to the API in the future?

Steve Ganem: It’s possible. And hi, mayor.

Steve Ganem: Thanks for the question. It’s actually something we are discussing in a, in a. A request that’s come up time and time again, actually. Because we know that a lot of customers are trying to [00:27:00] visualize their GA data in other BI tools, so that’s typically where we hear this request. It’s possible, and we’re discussing it now, but I, it’s not on the roadmap yet, but just know that it’s on our radar and for folks watching, again the more feedback we get along these lines through as many channels as possible, it does really influence our roadmap, as I hope you can see.

Steve Ganem: So thank you. Yeah,

Dana DiTomaso: absolutely. Okay, Kate, I had a question. And this was talking about the connectors to bring in data from say, TikTok or Snap into GA four. If those connectors will be free, because currently of course if you wanna connect this data in Looker Studio, you have to pay for a third party connector, which can get pretty pricey over time.

Steve Ganem: We, we. Yeah. I believe these will be free. Don’t, okay. It’s not finalized yet. Yes. But the goal really here is to help marketers understand what their performance of their media is. And we feel like this is, we don’t wanna put any barriers to that. It’d be weird for us to have, like, all of the click data is coming in free, but to say the impression data is not, so we really don’t want to have any barriers.

Steve Ganem: And so it’s likely that if you’re a free customer connecting to [00:28:00] TikTok, snap, et cetera, to bring in your cost data, that we won’t charge you for that. Okay.

Dana DiTomaso: And of course, it could change. Don’t quote us on that six months from now, but That’s right.

Steve Ganem: It hasn’t launched yet, but at least the current plan is we won’t charge.

Dana DiTomaso: Okay. Joey wanted to know if the Google Analytics chat, the AI chat, will be able to help out with the process of, I assume, creating explorations. I.

Steve Ganem: Hey, Joey, thanks for the question that, that is, the goal is to have AI be present across the whole product and to help you with the whole interface. Now we gotta start somewhere, and we’ve started with the reporting side of things, but you can imagine over time it, the goal is to have it be aware of the, and be able to use the whole product as a tool at your disposal.

Steve Ganem: So yes, the expectation is that it, it will translate over to the Explorer experience as well.

Dana DiTomaso: Okay. And speaking of explorations one of the things that I wish was elsewhere. So for example, some dimensions of metrics are only available in explorations like entrances and exits, and I wish they were in the main product.

Dana DiTomaso: ’cause I would love to make a calculated like entrance rate, exit rate metric, for example. But you have to export the [00:29:00] exploration into, a Google sheet and then do the math there. Is it possible that some dimensions and metrics where only in explorations will make it out to the standard reporting interfaces in the future?

Steve Ganem: Yeah, good question. I highlight that we want to make the whole experience reporting more flexible, and this is actually one of the areas, I didn’t go deep into it, but we hear from customers that there’s arbitrary limitations that sort of force them to make choices that are not optimal for them. And a common one is some dimension or metric is only available in explore or in explore.

Steve Ganem: Certain condition or operators are not available in certain cases. We want to do away with that and have the product feel like a cohesive one that doesn’t force you into any corner. So longer term, we are looking to more unify that the data model experience between the two and then explore becomes a place where you really, if you really do need like a work.

Steve Ganem: Working area or scratch pad, you can dive deeper into the data but all the data you need once, once you find some report or set of metrics and dimensions you want, promoting that sort of report on a dashboard should be easy. You shouldn’t [00:30:00] have to think, oh, a demetric cer certain data points are only explore worthy.

Steve Ganem: So we are definitely, we hear that feedback and that’s along the lines of what we wanna do by improving the reporting platform.

Dana DiTomaso: Awesome. And then speaking of improving reporting, so this is a question I got in advance ’cause the person asking this couldn’t make it, but one of the things with events, event parameters, love them, use them all the time, but they’re limited at a hundred characters, which means that it makes it difficult if you wanna capture something longer than a hundred characters, like a a user agent string.

Dana DiTomaso: Or I’d like to capture meta descriptions, for example. ’cause then I wanna see if we changed a meta description, did it improve the click through rate? And then. Did the velocity of page views from organic change over time, for example, so is it possible that we might have even just like one parameter on an event that would allow longer than a hundred characters?

Dana DiTomaso: I know there’s obviously storage concerns. One person asking for this means, millions in budget for storage. But is that something that might be on the roadmap?

Steve Ganem: Good question. And by the way, there’s storage concerns on the Google side. [00:31:00] But oftentimes when we think about these costs, we also think about its extra network transmission.

Steve Ganem: So it might cost end users more money or on mobile devices. It might incur more storage there or use more battery life as you send more data. These might not seem like big things, but in the Google Analytics, they are actually really big things. So these are among the considerations we have and.

Steve Ganem: When we put our limits in place, it was based on analysis of the data from Universal Analytics and what customers are mostly using. So I would say, I think we got mostly in the ballpark of what customers need from a data perspective. But what you’re highlighting has come up before. And my question as a product manager, usually when someone says, can I have one extra long field?

Steve Ganem: Is. What’s the use case? Yeah. Because there are other ways of, possibly other ways of accomplishing that use case in maybe more first class ways that I wouldn’t discover if I just reflexively gave you this long field. Yes. And so I would say just again, give us feedback, not just in the form of a granular feature request for one super long field, what [00:32:00] the use case is that you’re trying to accomplish.

Steve Ganem: And that’s gonna be the most effective way to make sure that. Change the product improves to enable that, whether it’s a long string or something else. But I, yeah, I have heard that approach by the way of breaking it up

Dana DiTomaso: into multiple Yes. Yeah. You can ate it. It’s just, it’s a lot of work, but, yeah. What’s the best way to get feedback to the team?

Dana DiTomaso: What is, what are the channels that you pay attention to the most when you’re hearing feedback from users?

Steve Ganem: All channels, by the way. We have, we’ve started to use AI to look at all channels, including social, including in the product. When you give feedback on a different page customer support, if you’re a Google supported customer, all of these now are making their way into a holistic I.

Steve Ganem: Database of feedback that we’re using AI to parse, to understand what are the common themes in pa of pain and feedback from customers. So I would say if you have a Google representative, contact them directly, but otherwise don’t think that your voice is, not going into the ether and heard by [00:33:00] no one in any channel where you can give this feedback.

Steve Ganem: Provided we’re looking for patterns and data.

Dana DiTomaso: Awesome. That’s great. Yeah, it’s just hanging out, for example, on Reddit in the GA four subreddits, like lots of interesting stuff comes up there, so I’m glad you’re monitoring that and seeing what common themes come up for sure. Okay. Question from Kyle.

Dana DiTomaso: Will GA, four ever add an a IO tracker? Like GSC is rolling out, so just. FYI for everyone and Jesse to us in the chat, I did write a post on how to add some JavaScript to GTM to record if someone comes to your site via a IO if the text highlighting is shown in the URL. But it would be interesting to see if we could have a separate channel of, organic search versus say, AI enhanced organic search.

Dana DiTomaso: ’cause it is almost a separate category.

Steve Ganem: We’re thinking through this right now, so no surprise, the more popular this is, the more people start to realize what this means and they think about it as a distinct channel. Exactly right. So we’re thinking through the right, right way to represent this, but we’re aware of, it’s a pretty natural and obvious need to understand [00:34:00] and distinguish this traffic.

Steve Ganem: Exactly how we’ll do it is TBD, but just know it is on our radar.

Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, for sure. That’s good. And then great question from Cindy here. So dark social traffic, people share URLs on social. There’s no UTMs. It comes from an app to a website, so there’s no refer string, so it just shows up as direct. There are ways to see, I know that on Android, for example, you can see a string that says that they calm Android, whatever the app was, that does not exist on Apple devices in quite the same way. Do you think that there would be a way for GA four to understand that someone is coming from an app to a website instead of using the classic web-based refer JavaScript variable.

Steve Ganem: Let me, can I ask a question?

Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, for sure. I wanna make sure I

Steve Ganem: understand it. So they on say, TikTok, there’s a URL, you tap on it and it opens a website.

Dana DiTomaso: That’s right. And so because there’s no UTM on that URL, it just shows up as direct because there is no prefer JavaScript [00:35:00] variable for GA for to grab onto.

Dana DiTomaso: And because there’s no UTMs GA four’s just I don’t know where they came from. They must be direct. But clearly it’s dark social because that URL would be shared only on social media. For example, and not everyone includes UTMs all the time.

Steve Ganem: That makes sense. I haven’t actually heard this before.

Steve Ganem: The, it seems like an obvious need to me to be able to understand this is traffic and the more significant it is, I could see why you would be making this request. There’s no current plans. But again, keep the feedback coming through all channels and we can see if the how much the need is and prioritize it accordingly.

Steve Ganem: ’cause to me this seems like a reasonable request. So long that there is a technical way to distinguish it.

Dana DiTomaso: Yeah and for me, because I’ve done some research into this, there, there is a technical way to distinguish it for Android, apple of course hides things. And Cindy, you might even notice this too, when you look at devices, for example, you can see the individual devices for Android devices, you can see that this is a galaxy whatever, or your pixel 13, but then just for Apples’ iPhone and that’s it.

Dana DiTomaso: And you don’t know what model number. Or [00:36:00] anything. And a lot of them even have the same screen resolution, so you can’t even make a guess based on that. So that I think also will probably be ecosystem dependent, even if you do come up with a way to grab it. Because it does also depend on what people give us.

Dana DiTomaso: So for example, some social platforms like slack don’t include a refer string, even if it is website to website, they strip out the refer string. And in those cases you literally have no idea where people come from. And if that’s the case, it’s just gonna show up as direct. And there’s nothing GA four can do about that.

Dana DiTomaso: It’s just. The internet, am I right? So it’s, there’s gonna be a limit to what can be done, but I think that there might be enough, at least on Android which, I’m an Android user, use Android that’ll help you with tracking this stuff. I’ve never been an Apple person. I make jokes about it all the time, but it’s yeah, Android does give you more information than Apple does for sure.

Dana DiTomaso: Just generally. Okay Nico has some questions about how users will be tracked through third party platforms and ga for view through tracking. How is that gonna work?

Steve Ganem: Hi Nico. I wouldn’t say it’s users being tracked, but the, what we described as view through conversion tracking [00:37:00] for third party platforms, you would in the Google Analytics.

Steve Ganem: Property be able to, the way that you’re able to link to Google ads, you’d be able to link to your accounts on third party platforms. And when you do impression data from those platforms associated with your account would come into Google Analytics in, in a privacy preserving way and be used for matching basically to your conversions so that at a high level, that’s the approach.

Steve Ganem: And it’s only, again, done once you connect your account to it and you authenticate that it’s yours and it’s done within a clean room

Dana DiTomaso: environment.

Steve Ganem: So I can’t go into more detail about the actual approach, but at a high level, that’s how it will work.

Dana DiTomaso: Okay. And I imagine too when this feature’s out, like we’ll have a lot more detail on exactly how this works and how it works behind the scenes.

Steve Ganem: Yeah, certainly the questions that folks will need to answer in order to use it for their business, we make sure that’s documented.

Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, and I think too, if people want more information about this, I think look at the Salesforce implementation, for example, because. The Salesforce implementation, which we’ve set up for a few clients now, is [00:38:00] really well documented.

Dana DiTomaso: It’s great. It works. There’s obviously a number of steps that you have to do because you need to make sure that everything is talking to everything else, but it is very clear to go how to go through it, and it’s been. An easy process and I just appreciate the level of detail in the documentation to go through it was, like I was saying, one of my first jobs ever was a technical writer, and so I appreciate good technical documentation and I think that’s where I’m hoping to, I just appreciate like the level of quality in terms of the step-by-step has really gone up for things like explaining the Salesforce integration.

Dana DiTomaso: So that’s the kind of standard I think that we’ll hopefully see from future documentation of these kinds of integration features. Good

Steve Ganem: to hear.

Dana DiTomaso: Okay, great question from Philippa. So she wants to know, and this is obviously consent is a huge problem. How are we gonna reconcile numbers of visitors who refuse consent with complete records imported from a CRM backend?

Dana DiTomaso: So somebody says no to being tracked. They still go ahead and buy something or fill out a form. You can’t hide from that. So you have their information. How do you get it back into GA four? And [00:39:00] of course, this is an issue with Salesforce. Someone refuses tracking, but still gets in touch. And it’s difficult to explain to clients why these are so different.

Dana DiTomaso: Why you have less conversions in GA four than you see in your CRM or if you import the visitors, from your CRM backend. Like why the records are different.

Steve Ganem: So one of the ways that GA four is in my opinion, much better and more prepared for the modern world, is the consent mode implementation in Universal analytics.

Steve Ganem: If a user did not consent, then none of their data made its way into your reporting at all. And in GA four what we have is called behavioral modeling. So if you use consent mode and if a user doesn’t consent to their cookies. They’re the cookies in the eu, for example. No cookies are being used, but the actual conversion, let’s say a purchase is being sent.

Steve Ganem: So in this model where we don’t have a user identifier, a purchase happened, you should still have basically the ground truth on the number of purchases. What you’re missing is how many users. Made those purchase and across how many sessions, and [00:40:00] that’s where the modeling comes into play.

Steve Ganem: Based on the users who have consented, we’re able to build a model to give us a way to fill in those gaps and the number of users and sessions that in which those purchases occurred. At a high level, Philippa, this would be where behavioral modeling would kick in and fill in those gaps.

Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. And I actually before we get to the last questions and just wrap things up here, I do wanna ask about behavioral modeling. We’ve had a couple questions in the chat about that. One of the things with behavioral modeling is it only works if you have a certain volume of visitors. A thousand people who say yes, a thousand people who say no a day at a seven days less 28.

Dana DiTomaso: And smaller volume sites don’t necessarily have that. So is there a way that we’ll see behavioral modeling extended to smaller audiences?

Steve Ganem: It’s possible.

Dana DiTomaso: Okay.

Steve Ganem: We really, we wanna make sure these features built on models that you have high quality models. Yeah, of course. Before you roll it out.

Steve Ganem: So this is the tension of a, availability of the feature and quality bar. And our quality, our bar is pretty high ’cause we [00:41:00] wanna make sure if businesses are making decisions about their business or the marketing spend on the data. We need to make sure that data’s high quality. So that’s the tension.

Steve Ganem: So we, we do have plans to improve the model quality or to keep working on it, to make more and more properties eligible. But it’s hard to say on a given customer basis whether their property will meet that bar. But it is an area we’re exploring improving.

Dana DiTomaso: Okay, great. All right, so I have some last questions that I just wanna share with you before we end things off here.

Dana DiTomaso: What is a tip that you recently learned that you wanna share with everybody?

Steve Ganem: Sure. Annotations comes to mind. We released annotations in GA four, and yes, there was an annotations feature in new universal analytics but just like a number of other features that we carried over. We took a look at it and we took a look at all of the feature requests and feedback on the old features, so that way when we introduce it into the new product, it could be as useful as possible.

Steve Ganem: So annotations are a great way, especially if you have multiple users in your organization using analytics to make decisions, to communicate important [00:42:00] context about the reports that you’re seeing. To other users, and this can be insights that occurred during a certain span or period or changes that were made to implementation that might explain why a metric went up or it went down, or it can be external events, it can talk about world events or things that occurred outside of your digital property, which influenced the behavior of users.

Steve Ganem: So I, I’m hearing a lot of creative usages of. The annotations feature in order to proliferate information and decision making ability to the whole company.

Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, great. Yeah, and I have a article too about annotations, which we’ll make sure to share in the recap. And by the way, I just wanna say there are some questions we didn’t get to keep asking questions because I am gonna pass along anything we didn’t get answered to the Google team.

Dana DiTomaso: And hopefully we’ll be able to get some questions. ’cause obviously time is a limitation and people have lots and lots of questions about GA four. So keep asking. So one thing, another question I wanna ask you. If you could change one thing about a tool technique strategy, commonly accepted knowledge, [00:43:00] what would that be?

Steve Ganem: About our own tool or any tool? Yeah, any

Dana DiTomaso: tool at all,

Steve Ganem: man. For me personally, I’m really excited about agentic AI and the possibility that it can help manage my calendar and yes. And like in the way that I had mentioned in analytics, it would be amazing if everybody had their own personal analyst.

Steve Ganem: I think it would be amazing if folks had their own personal assistant. And so I’m one of these folks that’s just excited about connecting the dots actually giving my own assistant, my own AI assistant more information about my life and have it like, make more optimal decisions for me or gimme suggestions based on what I’ve done in the past, et cetera.

Steve Ganem: So to me it would be along those lines.

Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, I already use, I use Claude quite heavily and I do that with my calendar and my tasks and be like, have I overdone it? And it’s usually pretty helpful with that. Yeah. And so last question I have for you. If someone leaves this webinar and implements just one thing you’ve shared today, what would you want them to implement?

Steve Ganem: Really that data [00:44:00] foundation, if there was one thing you do that have the most impact long term, that will unlock the most value long term, it’s make sure that your, all, your site and your app are super well instrumented to capture all of the important user behaviors that customers do. And then to the extent that you have data outside your platform make sure that you have the, all the consents in place that, to make sure that you can bring that data in and have a strong first party data foundation.

Steve Ganem: And that would really help light up the rest of the product, the existing product, as well as the future capabilities. So really all the data is the unlocker here.

Dana DiTomaso: That’s awesome. Thank you so much. All right, so we do have to end things off here, but please mark your calendars for our next webinar.

Dana DiTomaso: It’s gonna be on July 15th, and I’ll be joined by the best conversion rate optimization person I know, which is pretty, high praise. But Tally Wolf, she just published her new book and she’s gonna be here to talk to us about CRO talking to me all about landing pages, and I’m excited to see what Talia has in store with us.

Dana DiTomaso: And you can sign up for that on the [00:45:00] KP Playbook LinkedIn page right now. Please watch your email for discount on KP Playbook courses along with the replay of this webinar. Make sure to keep asking questions. We’ll keep monitoring this and we’ll pass along the list to Steve and the team at Google. And again, thank you so much for attending today and hosting and giving us all your knowledge about GA four and what’s coming next.

Dana DiTomaso: I’m really excited about the new features and I’m really excited to share them with our clients as well. And if you don’t get that email, you didn’t register, you forgot. Definitely message me on LinkedIn and I can help get that information out to you and I’ll see everyone soon. Thanks again, Steve.

Steve Ganem: Thank you, Dana. Take care.