How to resolve different affiliate marketing reporting in Google Analytics 4?
(The article has been prepared in co-operation with 6clickz Marketing Agency.)
Google Analytics 4 will fully replace its predecessor from as early as July 1, 2023 onward. In Universal Analytics (UA/GA3), you´ll still find historical data only. The measurement and recording of all customer activities in the e-shop will be discontinued in UA as of this date. Merely GA4 remains fully active and the UA-generated data cannot be converted and moved to the new version.
GA4 works on a principle different from that of the previous version. The full analytics is oriented to events in the customer’s shopping journey (event-based analytics), while UA is focused on the visit (session).
In the old version, you set the recorded data filters, which is no longer possible in the new one. Overviews are reported automatically according to the UTM parameters. That’s why it’s even more important how you set them up.
It may happen that GA4 shows even up to a third of the values from the affiliate campaign source as compared to the same period in UA.
Significant differences in affiliate marketing reporting in the new GA4 can be affected in particular by:
- Incorrect deployment of the GA4 code
- Incorrectly set UTM parameters
- Unclassified sources under the “not set” item
- Addition of untracked conversions because of the cookie bar
- Selection of the attribution model (7 accessible)
- The GA4 intelligence that itself decides on the importance of individual channels in the customer’s shopping journey as part of the cross-channel data-driven attribution.
How to get more real figures from GA4?
We offer you a one-minute video tutorial from 6clickz, thanks to which you´ll work towards more realistic figures. You´ll avoid distorted data and thus get a more accurate and transparent view of the affiliate campaign performance.
These are a few steps whereby we will generate a report with turnover from the Dognet affiliate campaign:
- We will create a new report in the Explorations section.
- We will add the source/medium to Dimension.
- We will add the source/medium to the table under Rows.
- We will set up the filter where the source/medium will contain “dgt” or “dognet“, “dognet.com“. (It depends on the campaign integration.)
- We will add Purchase revenue to Metrics and enter it under Values.
This way you will get closer to the values you were getting from the original UA. Thus, you can work better with the overall setup of the online marketing mix and fashion more effectively the marketing strategy of your e-shop or project.
We add opinions of other experts
Google Analytics 4 constitutes a new approach to web analytics. It brings new challenges, chiefly for marketers or e-shop owners who were used to working in Universal Analytics. As these two tools work with data differently, it´s very important not to evaluate the displayed data in the same way as in the previous version of Google Analytics. I recommend that you create reports exactly according to the needs of your marketing mix rather than use predefined reports, know the definitions of metrics and set up a data display that suits you. It´s very important, since a wrong data interpretation or misunderstanding may result in wrong decisions. As a result, it´s now important to educate and work with analytics experts in this area so that you set up GA4 as best as possible at the beginning and thus know exactly what is measured, how it is measured, how to create reports and how to work with the displayed data in the GA4 interface.
Jakub Gombár, co-CEO INVELITY
If you haven’t done so yet, definitely set up GA4 as soon as possible. Or even better – get a professional set it up. Either you, yourself, or your marketers will be working with this tool in the years to come, so it needs to be set up properly, not just pro forma. I at the same time recommend setting aside an adequate time to study how GA4 differs from UA so that you do not look at the new metrics influenced by the current routine. As the very measuring principle has changed, we can’t read those figures in the old manner. And last but not least, you need to become acquainted with the new GA4 user interface which, unfortunately, is not as intuitive as the UA interface was.
Ľubomír Štulajter, Performance Marketing Manager VIVANTINA
The changeover to a different data model will bring us greater efficiency. It requires, however, a fundamental change in thinking, where tracking an activity will be more important than tracking traffic. It´s an opportunity for those new marketers who do not have their thinking burdened with the old approach, but also for new or smaller projects, to overtake their strong rivals where the setup change will be more demanding.
Viliam Kanianský, SEO expert & CEO Made IT Digital
If you have any more questions in regard to displaying the affiliate channel in your GA4, please contact us at hello@dognet.sk.
