Google Analytics 4 (released in 2020) provides many structural improvements over Universal Analytics (the previous version), but default GA4 events and reports leave many important questions unanswered. Fortunately there are numerous places where Google Analytics 4 can be customized or extended to optimize tracking and relevant reporting. In this session, we will outline common optimizations for GA4 and how to leverage Google Tag Manager and Google Looker Studio to keep your optimizations and reporting clean and well documented. In this webinar, we will discuss: - Google Analytics 4 in 5 minutes - Enhanced Measurement Events, Recommended Events, and Custom Events - 3 common ways to track form submissions - Customizing reporting to highlight your target metrics

1. Tame your data: Optimizing
GA4 with Google Tag Manager
& Looker Studio
Nov 1, 2023
1

2. Overview
● Intro
● Google Analytics 4 in 5 minutes
● GA4 events in detail
● Form tracking in GA4
● GA4 reporting options
● Conclusion
2

3. Intro
3

4. Stephen Pashby
4
● DesignHammer Account Manager
● Over a decade experience in Google
Analytics
● Oversee analytics implementations
for most clients

5. Who are you?
● Project Manager? Site Builder? Developer? Communications?
● How would you rate your comfort or experience with Google Analytics 4? 1-5
● Who has installed Google Analytics 4?
● Who uses Google Tag Manager?
● Who prepares/contributes to website analytics reports for your organization?
● Who uses Google Looker Studio?
5

6. Let’s level set:
● I’m not a developer, so you may have technical questions that are more in-depth than I can answer
● I will be outlining approaches that have worked for us, but there are likely other viable approaches
● I’m assuming you have some level of familiarity with Google Analytics
● I’m assuming you have already created a Google Analytics 4 property and potentially installed GA4
on your site
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7. If you are not measuring, you
cannot know if you are
successful!

8. Significant Questions
● What should you track and how should you track it?
○ In your organization, who figures out what should be measured: project manager, developer,
marketing/communications, leadership, no-one?
● Who needs to see the data (who do you need to report data to)?
○ Are they experienced with analytics? Do they expect to explore the data?
○ Would they rather have a bottom line report?
● I hope this session will give you a start on how to move forward no matter how you answered these
significant questions.
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9. Google Analytics 4 in 5 Minutes
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10. Google Analytics Overview
● Free web analytics service offered by Google
● Implemented through adding provided JavaScript to website pages
● Was developed from Urchin on Demand, a previously popular analysis service
● Original Google service was released in 2005
● Subsequent major versions were released in 2009 (Asynchronous), 2012 (Universal Analytics), and
2020 (Google Analytics 4)
● Google Analytics is currently used by 85.9% of websites whose traffic analytics tool could be
identified ( w3techs)
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11. Dimensions and Metrics
● Google Analytics generally presents data in Dimensions and Metrics
● Dimensions are labels that can be used for filtering and sorting, such as:
○ Campaign
○ Medium
○ Event name
○ Platform
● Metrics are quantitative measures (numbers), such as:
○ Purchases
○ Event counts
○ Conversions
○ Views
○ Engaged sessions
● Dimensions and Metrics are combined in reporting to (hopefully) deliver actionable insights
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12. Universal Analytics (Google Analytics 3)
● Initially released in October 2012
● A refinement of the base Urchin on Demand technology (from 1998)
● Since UA leveraged a decades old data model, historical data was largely compatible with previous
versions so upgrades were fairly seamless
● Universal Analytics stopped* tracking new data on July 1, 2023
● Google has only committed to support access to Universal Analytics data through December 2023
● After December 2023, it is unknown if Google will allow access to hosted Universal Analytics data
* Google says they are staging the end of collection for Universal Analytics. As of now, if you UA property is still
collecting, assume it could cease at any time. 12

13. Google Analytics 4
● Released in October 2020
● Entirely new model for tracking and analysis
● Incompatible with Universal Analytics (or earlier models)
● No direct method for migrating historic data from Universal Analytics or exact historical
comparison of Google Analytics 4 data with Universal Analytics data
● Most (if not all) Universal Analytics properties have stopped processing data. If you haven’t
upgraded to GA4, now is the time!
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14. Key Metrics in Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 key metrics operate under the assumption that specific user interactions (scroll, click, file
download, etc.) are more relevant measures of engagement than the number of pages viewed or the length of
time a user interacts with a website (e.g. bounce rate, etc.).
● Engaged Session – Count of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or
had 2 or more screen or page views.
● Average Engagement Time Per Session – User engagement duration per session. Shows the
amount of time the user is actually engaging with the page (e.g., clicking, scrolling, etc) while the
page is the primary window being viewed on the screen.
● Engagement Rate – The ratio of Engaged Sessions relative to total Sessions. If you had 1,000 total
sessions and 130 of them qualified as Engaged Sessions (as defined above), the Engagement rate
would be 13%.
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15. Goals & Conversions in Google Analytics 4
● Conversions directly replace Goals in Universal Analytics (UA).
● While UA provided 4 models of Goals (including funnel tracking), only specific Events can be
marked as Conversions in GA4.
● GA4 does not currently provide a built-in mechanism for Destination (funnel) based conversions.
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16. Reporting in Google Analytics 4
● Universal Analytics provided over 100 pre-defined reports, but many were deprecated or no
longer reported relevant data. Most of the best known reports are tuned for reporting pageviews,
bounces, etc. which are not core to the GA4 model.
● Google Analytics 4 provides less than 20 pre-defined reports. GA4 reports focus on engagement
and which events are engaging users. Custom reporting is more visible and expected (either
through GA4 Explorations or Google Looker Studio).
● Is this a good or bad thing? It depends on your point of view.
○ More isn’t always better! It was easy for users to get overwhelmed by UA reporting.
○ Many of the UA reports aren’t supported by GA4’s data and privacy models.
○ GA4 reports are more easily customizable and the Explorations custom reporting is more robust than UA.
○ If you have been reporting on UA reports, you may need to shift due to lack of equivalent GA4 reports. 16

17. Properties and Multiple Sites in GA4
● Universal Analytics had a model of an assumed one to one relationships of a single UA Property to
a single website or app. Frequently multiple views were configured on a property to allow analysis
exclusion of some traffic for targeted analysis (e.g. internal traffic, blog traffic only, etc.). Combined
cross-site tracking was possible, but difficult to setup and somewhat error prone.
● GA4 Properties support multiple Data Streams in a single property, with the aim of allowing for
providing a 360 degree view of user behavior across multiple interconnected websites and apps.
● GA4 properties do not support multiple views for a single property, but a robust audience and
segmentation system allows for similar targeted analysis.
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18. GA4 Events in Detail

19. Events in Google Analytics 4
● Events fuel GA4’s engagement metrics.
● GA4 provides several included Enhanced Measurement Events (enabled by default when setting up a
new property).
● Google documents several Recommended Events for GA4. These serve as blueprints for common
events that are not preconfigured.
● If Enhanced Measurements Events and Recommended Events do not meet your needs, GA4
supports fully Custom Events can be configured with desired Parameters.
● Enhancement Measurements Events and Recommended Events can also be extended with desired
Parameters, if necessary.
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20. Enhancement Measurement Events
● Enhance Measurement Events can be enabled or disabled in GA4 and do not require additional
tracking code to implement. By default, they are enabled.
● Enhanced Measurement Events covers:
○ Page views
○ Scrolls
○ Outbound clicks
○ Site search
○ Video engagement
○ File downloads
○ Form interactions
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21. Recommended Events
● Google maintains a library of Recommended Events for GA4. Recommended Events provide
patterns for common website events that align with Enhanced Measurement Events and (it is
speculated) that Recommended Events may be used by Google more explicitly in the future.
● Recommended Events include:
○ generate_lead
○ purchase
○ sign_up
○ share
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22. Custom Events
● GA4 supports fully Custom Events, which allow tracking of highly specific site interactions.
● To ensure consistent data, Custom Events (and their Parameters) should follow standard GA4
Event nomenclature (snake_case).
● At minimum, Custom Events (and Parameters) must start with a letter and only use letters,
numbers, and underscores and should avoid reserved event names.
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23. Extended Enhanced Measurement and
Recommended Events
● Enhanced Measurement Events and Recommended Events can be extended, either through the
GA4 interface, through Google Tag Manager, or directly via JavaScript.
● To extend an Enhanced Measurement Event or Recommended Event, generally you will adjust
when an event is triggered or what Parameters is contains.
● When extending (replacing) an Enhanced Measurement Event, be sure to disable the GA4 native
instance of the event in GA4 to prevent double counting.
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24. What Should You Track in GA4?
● Start with your organizational goals:
○ What website interactions contribute to your organizational goals?
○ Does your organization have any defined KPIs related to your website?
○ Who needs to be consulted or included to answer the above?
● When you have defined website interactions and KPIs, you can begin to implement appropriate
GA4 events for tracking.
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25. What is a Conversion?
● GA4 defines Conversions as user actions that are valuable to your business.
● Properly identified Conversions can assist in reporting and analysis about what traffic Sources and
website content contribute to Sessions which include Conversions.
● While any GA4 event can be labeled as a Conversion, but over-labeling Events as Conversions can
make Conversion reporting useless.
● Conversions should be reserved for high value Events or Events that end a funnel.
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26. Form Tracking in GA4
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27. Form Tracking is Important!
Many common Conversion Events are related to some type of form submission:
● Contact form submission
● Newsletter/account sign-up
● Event registration
Ensuring you have effective form tracking can be the difference between actionable insights in GA4 and hours
of painful manual analysis.
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28. Common GA4 Ways to Track Form Submissions
Not an exhaustive list:
● Enhanced Measurement Form Interaction Events
● Thank You pages + Enhanced Measurement Page View Events
● Generate Lead Recommended Events
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29. Form Interaction Events
GA4 Enhanced Measurement Events track form interactions (if enabled) implement form_start and
form_submit events.
The form_start event is fired the first time a user interacts with a form in a session. The form_submit
event fires when a user submits a form. The events have the following parameters:
● form_id: HTML id attribute of the <form> DOM element
● form_name: HTML name attribute of the <form> DOM element
● form_destination: URL to which the form is being submitted
● form_submit_text: text of the submit button, if present
Note: If you wish to use the parameters in your reports, you will need to create custom dimensions for them.
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30. Form Interaction Events
Pros
● Built in
● Provides insight into form starts as well as form submissions
Cons
● Some form implementations will not be tracked for the form_submit events
● If form_submit works for your site, all forms will be tracked as form_submit events, including search
forms and login forms
● Depending on how many forms your site has and how they are configured, form_submit
parameters may not provide sufficient granularity of reporting to see which forms are performing
well
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31. Form Interaction Events
If you have Enhanced Measurement Events enabled, this should be configured by default.
To double check, log in to your Google Analytics 4 property as an admin user. Navigate to the data source
for your website and click on it to view its configuration.
Confirm Enhanced Measurement is enabled and click on the gear icon to view individual Enhanced
Measurement Event configurations. Confirm that the Enhanced Measurement Form Interactions Event is
enabled.
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35. Thank You Page Tracking
If your form implementation supports directing users to Thank You pages, views of these Thank You
pages can serve as a proxy for successful form submissions. This is the implementation that more
traditional Universal Analytics “funnel” goals expected.
If your form implementation does not support a Thank You page with GA4 code, you may not be able to
leverage this approach.
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36. Thank You Page Tracking
Pros
● Almost built in
● If you have unique Thank You pages for all forms, you can leverage these to know which forms are
succeeding
Cons
● If you have a single Thank You page for all forms, you will not be able to easily report on which
forms are succeeding
● Can be inaccurate as users can navigate directly the Thank You pages (reducing the Thank You
pages accuracy as a form submission proxy)
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37. Thank You Page Tracking
As tracking Thank You Page views leverages the Page Views Enhanced Measurement Event (and these
cannot be disabled), there is no Google Analytics 4 configuration necessary for this methodology. The
bulk of configuration will be on your website and/or form implementation and in Google Analytics
reporting.
You can view all pages viewed under the Pages and screens GA4 report. Based on your website traffic,
you likely will need to implement a filter based on your Thank You pages page path to allow you to see all
Thank You page views in one report.
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40. Generate Lead Events
The Recommended Generate Lead GA4 event is defined for tracking website interactions that “generate
leads.”
As defined by Google, the Generate Lead event is not explicitly tied to a previously defined website
interaction so its implementation can be flexible based on the particular form implementation of your
website.
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41. Generate Lead Events
Pros
● Support different form implementations
● Easy to extend with custom Parameters
Cons
● More involved implementation
● May require additional configuration as forms are added
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42. Generate Lead Events
While the generate_lead Recommended event can be configured solely in GA4, we will use Google Tag
Manager to leverage GTM’s Lookup table functionality to match Webform IDs to human intelligible
names.
We will create a generate_lead event using the GA4 Event tag in GTM, but in order to create this event,
we need to do a few things first.
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43. Generate Lead Events
We want to add a form_id parameter to the generate_lead event, but will need a way to populate this
form_id parameter for each generate_lead event.
In order to do this, we need to enable GTM’s built in Form ID Data Layer Variable. This built in Form ID
will be populated by the Form ID in the DOM (not useful for reporting).
We will configure a GTM Lookup Table to map specific Form IDs (or specific Form ID patterns) to useful
names for reporting. You may need to use GTM preview mode or your web browser inspector to identify
the specific Form IDs (or Form ID patterns, depending on how your Webforms are added to your
content). If you have to work with Form ID patterns, you can use a GTM Regex Table instead.
We will use this Lookup Table to populate a form_id parameter on our generate lead event.
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46. Generate Lead Events
Now that we have our Lookup Table configured, we are ready to create our generate_lead GA4 Event
Tag.
Create a new GA4 Event Tag. Select your GA4 Configuration Tag (which references your GA4 ID). Name
your Event “generate_lead”. Add a parameter for “form_id” and select your Lookup table to populate this
parameter.
Add a Trigger for Some Form Submissions that excludes form submissions for your user login or site
search forms.
Save both your Trigger and Tag, test in GTM’s Preview mode, then publish.
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49. Generate Lead Events
While we are leveraging GTM’s built in Form Submission Trigger Type, one of the reasons to use GTM to
implement your generate_lead event is you can trigger this event on other criteria:
● Page paths (e.g. Thank You page paths)
● History changes (i.e. when a form submission changes the page path but does not trigger a new
page load)
● Form implementations that require Custom Triggers and listener code (generally supplied by the
form vendor)
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50. Generate Lead Events
Now you have a generate_lead GA4 event that will be sent to your GA4 property when your Webforms
are submitted. At this point, you may want to mark your generate_lead events as Conversions in GA4.
In order to interact with the form_id parameter of your generate_lead event, you will need to register it
as a Custom Dimension in GA4.
In GA4, go to Admin > Custom Definitions > Create custom dimensions. Enter a dimension name (for GA4
reporting), a scope (Event), a description, and enter “form_id” as your event parameter (this must match
the parameter your entered in GTM exactly).
About 24 hrs after you save, you should start to be able to see your custom dimension in GA4 reporting. I
recommend using GA4’s data explorations or Google Looker Studio to expose this in useful reporting.
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53. Form Submission Tracking Summary
Which one should you use?
● Do you have a single form on your site (no search and no login forms)? form_submit should work.
● Do you have a few forms with distinct Thank You pages (or you can make them)? Thank You pages
should work (be sure to keep an eye out for false positives caused by traffic to your Thank You
pages).
● Do you have a large number of forms, some programmatically generated or placed on pages by
content editors? generate_lead and GTM may make your life much easier.
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54. GA4 Reporting Options
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55. (Almost) Out of the Box GA4 Reporting Options
There are many available options for GA4 reporting. Free and easy ones include:
● Default (and customized) GA4 reporting
● GA4 explorations
● Google Looker Studio
Let’s look at what each of these offer for form submission tracking…

56. Default (and Customized) GA4 Reporting
No default GA4 reporting directly reports successful form submissions.
form_submit can be used to drill-down or segment default GA4 reports, for some insight on how many
forms have had submissions.

58. GA4 Explorations
GA4 Explorations are more advanced (and interactive) data analysis tools that go beyond the basic
reports and dashboards included with GA4. Explorations enable:
● Ad hoc queries
● Switch between exploration techniques
● Sorting, refactoring, and drilling down into data
● Filters, segments, and audiences
● Share your explorations with other users of the same Google Analytics property
● Export the exploration data for other tools

59. GA4 Explorations
GA4 Explorations are best thought of as a data exploration tool, not a reporting tool. Explorations could
be a full day training in themselves, but we will go through a basic Exploration so you can see how they
work.
First, you will need to create a new Exploration. Generally starting with a Free Form Exploration is the
most flexible as not all dimensions and metrics will be available in all Exploration types. Once you have
created a new Exploration, you will need to add or adjust your imported Dimensions and Metrics.
Imported Dimensions and Metrics can be used in your Exploration. You can search, check, and import
multiple Dimensions or Metrics at a time.
Important Note: Imported Dimensions and Metrics are different than active Dimensions and Metrics in your
Exploration.

62. GA4 Explorations
Explorations have many options, but for our purposes, we are going to import Session Source/Medium,
Page path+query string, and Event name Dimensions and Sessions and Event count Metrics.
We will add (drag and drop or double click) Session Source/Medium and Page path+query string as
Dimensions and Sessions and Event count as Metrics to our report.
This will give us Sessions and Events by Session Source/Medium and Page path. To restrict our report to
appropriate form submission events, we will need to apply an appropriate filter for our form submission
Event name.

66. Google Looker Studio
Google Looker Studio is a mature data visual platform that can be leveraged for customized reporting of
Google Analytics data (including GA4).
GLS supports customized charts and visualizations with user controlled filters. GLS also supports
scheduled email reporting, which is not supported by GA4 natively.

67. Google Looker Studio
When creating a new GLS dashboard, you will need to initially set at least one data source that you have
access to. For our purposes, select Google Analytics and select the appropriate GA account and property.
Once you have confirmed, a default chart will be created that you can customize.

70. Google Looker Studio
Similarly to GA4 Explorations, you will need to select appropriate Dimensions and Metrics available in
your data source. Unlike Explorations, you will not need to imporate and add Dimensions and Metrics,
just add the Dimensions or Metrics that you need.
For our example, we will add Sessions source/medium and Page path as Dimensions and Sessions and Event
count as Metrics. We will also need to add an appropriate filter to filter by Event name for our form
submission event.
Note: Not all GA4 Dimensions and Metrics will be available in GLS, though most are. Also if you add new
custom Dimensions or Metrics, you will need to refresh your data source in GLS.

73. Google Looker Studio
This will give us a equivalent chart to the GA4 exploration, but one that can be more easily shared and
customized.
We can add viewer filters for Session source/medium, Page path, and Date range. These can be used by
users with Viewer permission to drill down in the report within prescribed bounds (unlike the full
freedom provided by Explorations).
We can also schedule periodic emails of this report to key stakeholders by using GLS share functionality.
Note: The free version of GLS only supports a single set of scheduled reports per dashboard. If you want more
control/granularity, you will need to go to the paid version of GLS.

77. Reporting Summary
Which one should you use?
● Do you have a single form on your site (no search and no login forms)? GA4 default reporting may
work for you.
● Do you (or your stakeholders) want to have full access to deep dive in all of your data? GA4
Explorations are the best tool.
● Do you (or your stakeholders) need professional looking reports with some interactivity or periodic
email reports? Google Looker Studio is the best option.

78. Conclusion
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79. Conclusion
● Identify and track what is important to your organization/website.
● Leverage common GA4 patterns (recommended events, conversions) to align your KPIs with what
and how GA measures.
● Configure appropriate reporting data for consumption based on your audience.
● Have fun!
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80. Questions?
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81. Thank you Drupal GovCon
2023!
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