GA4 Hot Take: Your first goal should be to setup more goals.

One of the most toxic ways marketers think about analytics is to only think about goals at the end of a customer journey.

Here is an example of what I'm talking about:

If you are going to use GA4 like this, then yes, you should be using Data Driven Attribution (DDA). But don't do that, because DDA sucks 🙊.

DDA is a giant black box and I'll have a dedicated post on why you should not be using that - there are many smarter ways to venture into true data science where you know what is going on...

...but the problem here is if you are using last click and only measuring for bottom of funnel goals, you are only getting a fraction of the story.

Real life example - let's say I want to pick out a Christmas tree and since I live in Colorado (and just did this), I'm going to head up to the mountains to get one.

I got creative with my prompt and told DALLE to have an Elf handing me a coupon:

So did the coupon work? Of course - I'll always take free money. Did it get me to buy? Absolutely not.

I decided to buy when I started searching on Perplexity from home...then drove 90 minutes to get here.

Something to be aware of regardless of your attribution settings and incrementality methods is to realize that all the ad platforms (Google, Meta, etc) are really good at knowing who is going to buy. And therefore they are trying their hardest to get the ad in front of them before that purchase...don't just rely on quant data, use scalable forms of qual to validate that the ad actually mattered in the first place...in this example the Elf handing me the coupon is the Ad in real life/online).

There are 3 points I'd like for you to take-a-way:

1. Stop only setting bottom of funnel goals. (more on solutions below)
2. Stop obsession about attribution models (use last click with my goals types advice)
3. If you really want to take your data to the next level, you'll use incrementality (but you need a lot of data - so focus on goals types first)

I like things in threes, so for starters just use awareness, engagement, and conversion goals types.

(ACE concept was originally inspired from MeasurementMarketing.io)

Awareness goals examples:

• A new user to the site
• A user is exposed to seeing "how it works" on your site (or a PDP if you are Ecom)
• A user sees your offer (one of the most impactful things that isn't measure correctly...and no, seeing isn't scroll depth and time on page - those are lazy ways of measuring that)

Engagement goal examples:

• A user watches a video
• A user clicks the FAQs on your pricing page (for God sake please measure which toggles they are clicking on - it's such a no-brainer to know what objections they are having)
• Chat interaction on the site

Conversion goal examples:

• Purchase
• Lead
• Sign up

(Website really don't need more help setting those up, they do those first - for good reason...that said I usually find the "by" questions leave a lot of missing context on the table)

Examples of ways to enrich the Conversion goals with "by" dimensions:

• Product
• Product Category
• User Type
• First time purchaser or repeat?
• Discount code used?
• Traffic sources (session source and first user sources)
• Landing page they first entered on (if you have subdomains or cross domains then you pretty much have to use BigQuery here)
• Content group of landing page

Those are just a few to hopefully give some extra context to your Conversion goal types.

Your GA4 reports should look very different now...right?!

I mean let's take SEO for example (it usually gets crushed with looking at bottom of funnel goals only)...when you take our branded, there aren't many scenarios where SEO leads to a direct purchase or bottom of funnel conversion (unless there is very little cost/risk).

But if you change your perspective and think about in common sense terms, SEO's job is to drive awareness and engagement. If they purchase, great. But that's usually not the goal.

Guess what happens if your SEO and top of funnel channels stop producing consistnet traffic? You won't have audiences to retarget, follow up on emails with, etc...

...every traffic source has a job, and they aren't all to buy.

The "asking for marriage on the first date" is an overused analogy in Marketing...so let me use another real world example we're all used to: Sales Teams.

A Sales Manager would never open up their pipeline and look at how many deals were closed last week and then stop there. If they do, they probably won't be a sales manager for long...

...what do they look at? The pipeline!

• How many leads did we get?
• How many were qualified (MQLs)?
• How many booked a call with us?
• How many showed up to the call?
• How many did we send a proposal to after the call?
• How many open the proposal and saw the offer?
• How many signed the offer and closed?

...see if you aren't measuring the full sales pipeline, you'll never know where/what you have to optimize.

Same goes for the user journey on your website...if you are only measuring the pageview and purchase, you're not listening to the conversation the user is having with the website (and yes, every user is having that conversation - the question is...are you listening?)

Was this article useful? If so (or if not) I would love to know how I can make it better for you...I'm seriously ramping up my content creation now and into 2025 💪🏼