How LinkedIn Advertisers Set Up GA4 for Maximum Efficiency - EP 105

LinkedIn Ads Show

Show Resources

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Google Analytics Login

Scroll Depth Tracking

Time On Site Tracking

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Show Transcript

Does the mention of Google Analytics 4 send shivers through your bones as a LinkedIn advertiser? Never fear. I'm walking you through everything you need to know about GA4 on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn ads fanatics, Universal Analytics is now gone. And Google Analytics, or GA4 as we'll call it, is the new reality for us marketers, I don't want you to miss a beat during this transition. So we're going to go through everything that you need to set up and use in the new GA4 that will help you analyze your LinkedIn Ads traffic. So this isn't going to be a resource for setting it up. You should already have GA4 setup. So I'm not going to go through any of that. But my aim here is to give you all the tools to analyze your LinkedIn Ads specific traffic. We're gonna go over which reports to use to actually analyze your LinkedIn Ads traffic plus specific events that you'll create to show engagement from your ad audiences and how to create conversions from them.

First, I want to highlight a review here, Vadim Aizenshtein left a review that says, "One of the most awesome professional marketing knowledge sources out there. As a performance marketer, I quite often find myself looking for inspiration and knowledge. The problem is the mass of bs and fluff, "experts" out there that help fill the airwaves with irrelevant and misleading content. AJ's blog and podcast is an oasis of amazing insights and guides for marketers who actually want actual results, and not just show that they're making noise out there. Thanks, AJ." Hey, Vadim, I really appreciate such an awesome review for us, we try extremely hard to make sure that there's no bs here. And that the information we're putting out is exactly what we wish someone would be able to share with us as we were learning. And please, everyone who's listening, do go leave us a review, it is by far the best way that you can say thank you, for us coming out with this content every week. And of course, I want to feature you here on the podcast as well. Alright, without further ado, let's hit it.

As an advertiser on LinkedIn, you're likely not just sending all of your traffic to a form asking for a conversion, or at least I hope you're not. So in this case, you're paying high LinkedIn prices for traffic, but you won't have conversions to show for it, at least not yet. But how nice would it be if you have some proof that the traffic was actually working, they were engaged with your content, they were liking what you were putting out, I've got two great ways for you to do exactly that. The first is called a scroll depth event. We've linked down in the show notes to an article by datarivenu.com. And it walks you through exactly how to do this through Google's Tag Manager. Essentially, what you're doing is you're telling Google Tag Manager to watch and see what the user is doing. Once they scroll past a certain depth of the page, it can fire an event that then gets logged into Google Analytics. Now, it's important to know that by default, Google Analytics 4 has an event that is called scroll event, but it has some serious disadvantages. So I'm going to help show you how to customize yours so you can get past all these. The default Google Analytics for scroll event, it triggers only when visitors get to 90% of the web page. So almost the bottom, this is actually pretty good practice because many websites have footers that take up a little bit of room. So you don't actually expect people to make it to a full 100% Scroll if they have consumed all the content. So 90% is a good rule of thumb. But relying solely on a 90% scroll depth is pretty weak in my book. I would like to go and add another couple scroll depths that would help us understand how intensely people are engaging with our website. So go read the article on datadrivenu that will walk you exactly through how to do this, my recommendation would probably be to create one event that's at 50% scroll, and another one that's 70% scroll, and then the default GA for one is going to trigger at 90%. So now you have three ways of finding out how many people are scrolling past 50%. One little correction that I have for the data driven you article, as you're following it through, we tried to follow it. So about halfway down the article where it actually starts teaching you how to set this up. The headline here says how to set up scroll depth in Google Analytics for with Google Tag Manager. And it starts with a tip it says before you begin copy the measurement ID on the top of your Google Tag Manager account, you will need this in step four. And then when we got down to step four, we actually tried to create this event using the Google Tag Manager ID and it actually fired an error. So we figured out what it's actually asking for is the Google Tag measurement ID from Google Analytics 4. It starts with a G- but other than that, that article is perfectly helpful at helping you get this setup. As an overview, what you're going to do is go into your Google Tag Manager, you create a new tag called scroll depth and then you're going to define how deep that depth is. You have three different choices. You have a scroll depth threshold, so past a certain threshold, you have a certain number of pixels or percentage, and then you can also fire an event based off of scroll direction, if they're scrolling vertically or horizontally. So once you've created these scroll depths inside of Google Tag Manager, now you go into Google Analytics to set to recognize those events. And the cool thing about this is they're already there. That's right, you don't actually have to go into Google Analytics and do anything, these events are being pushed right into Google Analytics. And all you need to do is know where to see them so that you can make use of them in your reports. We'll get to that here in a little bit. And I decided to make my scroll depths based off of percentages, like I said, 50%, 70%, and 90%. But you can decide to do it however you want. You can even do a certain number of pixels down the page or anything like that. I just thought percentages were sure nice.

Okay, so what if you don't really care about scroll depth. So scroll depth isn't the end all be all, because sometimes we want to measure how long they're spending on the site. So the next thing we want to do is create time on site events. In the shownotes, we linked to a really good YouTube video that walks you through exactly how to create these. Again, this is in Google Tag Manager. Similar to scroll down GA 4 already has a way of telling whether someone is engaged for a certain amount of time. GA 4 has an event that comes with it called engaged sessions. Now engaged sessions is anyone who stayed around longer than 10 seconds or converted or had two or more pageviews. So yeah, that's nice. But you know, me, I want a little bit more control here. I want to fire an event, anytime someone makes it to a one minute time on site, a three minute, and a five minute time on site. I feel like if someone spends five whole minutes on our website, they are probably super engaged. Alright, so what you do is you go and create an event inside of Google Tag Manager, and I called my first one web page timer one minute. And then for the trigger, I triggered it to fire at the interval of 60,000 milliseconds. So that equals one minute. So if you want to follow our lead here, you're going to make a three minute one, and that's going to be 180,000 milliseconds, and then a five minute one will be 300,000 milliseconds. Alright, so that's all the math that you're going to have to do here. So again, go follow that YouTube video, we've linked to it down below, it's super easy. And that's gonna get you as many of these page timers as you want to fire. So as you guess, now you have these scroll depth triggers that are firing and you have time on site triggers that are firing and Google Analytics 4 is waiting for these to come in and allowing you to just add them to your report willy nilly. It's great.

7:36 Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into setting up conversions and letting you know which reports to use.

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Alright, let's jump back into it. We're going to be setting up conversions. So the way that GA 4 works is everything is an event. Every page view is an event. These scroll depth triggers and these page timers, all of them are events. Conversions or an event. You get the idea here, okay, so all conversions are in GA 4 is just an event that you've told LinkedIn. This is really serious to me, I want to call it a conversion. And that's really easy to do. What you do is you go into the cog, the admin cog inside of GA 4, and underneath property, you click on events. Now you'll see a list of all of the different events that GA 4 is tracking. If you've been following along, you might see here a scroll depth 50%, a scrolled up 70%, a scroll depth 90%, a web page timer for one minute, three minutes, and five minutes. Okay, that's great. Over in the right hand column, you'll see this toggle switch called mark as conversion. So let's say I wanted to mark a five minute page duration and a 90% scroll as a conversion for something that I'm monitoring, I can flip that little toggle switch or I can flip that little toggle switch to on. And now anytime I'm viewing my reports, and it shows conversions, I know I'm tracking one of those things. Or you can keep conversions for when someone fills out a form. This is totally customizable by you. Now, be aware that when you set up an event inside of Google Tag Manager, it's gonna take a little bit for Google Analytics 4 to recognize it and to start calculating data based off of it. So don't be upset if you've set this up inside of Tag Manager, and then you go inside of GA 4 and you don't see it as an event yet, don't worry, it'll happen. Give it a day or two. So if you had already set up conversions in Google Analytics, chances are all of those conversions that you had previously created got automatically added to your new GA 4 property. That happened with all of ours that we had set up, we didn't have to create a single conversion event. But what if you want to create a new conversion event, let's say you just came out with some new landing pages or a new thank you page and you want to create a new event inside of GA for that's pretty easy. We were already here, but click on the cog, the admin cog, and then go down to events under property. And here, you can click the button that says Create Event. Now it's a little bit tricky. This is very technical, the way they have things worded. So I actually had to look up some help for it. So for my event name, this one's easy, I just typed or whatever, like a thank you page. Then down below, you have three boxes, you have a parameter, operator, and a value. For parameter, you put page location. This is for if someone makes it to a thank you page, you want to call them a conversion. So that's a page location, then the operator we did contains, and then the value is what you actually have in your URL. So in this case, we just said any page that contains thank dash you, let's call that as a conversion. And that's nice and easy, you would just hit submit there. And we've now created a conversion event inside of GA 4. Very cool. Now what you do is go down in that list of existing events, go find your new one that you've created, and toggle that switch to mark as conversion. And now all of your reports are going to see that as a conversion. Very cool.

Alright, so this is where rubber hits the road. Now we want to start talking about the kinds of reports that you can run and look at an actively managed inside of GA 4 in order to tell what your LinkedIn Ads traffic is doing. There are two ways that you can do this. You can either go into reports and look at the pre made reports and maybe even do some light customizations. Or you can go into the Explore menu and create Universal Analytics used to call a custom report. In full transparency here, what I wanted to do for you is I wanted to go and create an exploration, one of these custom reports that would be really easy for everyone to just be able to import right into their GA 4 accounts and use these right off the bat. I jumped into it though, and suddenly realized how difficult this was and how unhelpful this is going to be. The challenge that I found here is that in any report, whether it's one of the premade reports inside of GA 4, or whether you're creating an exploration, like if you're making a custom report, you're limited to being able to see only one event on the page at the same time. That's actually not true, you can either see all events, or you can filter down to a single event. So what I really want to do is I want to create an exploration, a custom report here, that shows me based off of my ad, or my campaign, how many one minute timers fired, how many three minutes, how many five minute timers fired, how many scrolls got down past 50%, 70%, and 90%, I want to see all of that on one page. Well, here's the big weakness in GTA 4, you can only really have one event on the page at the same time. So as much as I would love to have a single report that would be so easy for everyone to scroll through once and see exactly what their different ads were doing. I ended up giving up and going right back to the old prepackaged reports. The way that I do this is I go to reports in the left hand navigation. And then I click on acquisition under lifecycle and then traffic acquisition. This is the report that is going to tell you about where you're getting traffic from. And when you're advertising, this is the right option, we want to analyze where we're getting our traffic from. So there are a couple graphs at the top of the page. But as I scroll down to the table down below, which is where I'm going to spend most of my time, I noticed that everything that I see here are broad categories like organic social, organic search, direct email, etc. So right at the top in the header, it says session default channel group, I'm going to click down on that. And I want to go to session source/medium. So what this does is it breaks down all of my traffic by the source and the medium all in one column, which is very cool. And I can see source mediums here like Google organic, LinkedIn, organic, LinkedIn, paid, Bing, organic, etc. Now, if you've been listening for a while, we've talked pretty good length about reporting and UTM parameters. I'm a big fan of being able to break down all performance all the way down to the unique ad level. The way we do that is through the UTM content parameter. So every one of our ads, if you look at the UTM content parameter, it identifies the exact ad. And these are all 100% unique. So what I could do is right next to the header there that now says session source/medium, I can click the little down arrow and this is us adding a secondary dimension. And immediately you're on a search box. So I just searched for content and found session manual add content. So this is the UTM content parameter that was set manually by the URL that occurred at the beginning of the session. So now as I scroll down, I can see all of those individual unique UTM content parameters and how they performed during this time period. This is way awesome if you want to analyze any individual ad, but maybe that too much in depth for you. Okay, so you can go back up to where it says session manual ad content, and instead click on that and type in campaign and select session campaign. Okay, so now you're looking at each row, not just being a single ad, but you're looking at it being a campaign. For us, the way that we treat this inside of LinkedIn Ads is the campaign name on LinkedIn is what goes into our UTM campaign variable. So now looking down here, I can see my performance by individual campaign, which the way that we create campaigns describes the audience. It's very cool. I'm trying not to get too geeky out on you here. But this is really, really exciting. Once you have your table looking like you want it, scroll over to the right until you see a column called Event Count. Now, right underneath event count, you'll see all events. And that's tracking every single kind of event that you have set up. But as we've talked about in GA 4 everything is an event. So you'll see these giant numbers in the 1000s or 10s of 1000s. Depending on what you have set up. If I click that down arrow there, I can go and select which event that I want it to filter by. Alright, so let's say I want to filter by scroll 50% depth, now I can go and see which of my campaigns is driving the highest quality traffic because they tend to scroll most of the way down the page. I haven't found a sexier way to do this. So if any of you have, please let us know. And of course, you can always reach out to us at [e-mail]. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to keep coming through and selecting a different event. If I want to go see a scroll at 90% or a webpage timer at three minutes, I can go and select those and analyze my traffic that way. And of course, I'm a huge Excel nerds, I want to export this into Excel as fast as I can. But boy, it's got me wishing that I could see all of this on a single page. So if any of you know how to do it, please do think to reach out. So once I got this to where I wanted it, I clicked on the little pencil to customize the report, I saved it as a report in my library. So I thought, hey, this will help me a little bit to just make sure that I don't have to set all this stuff up again in the future. Well, I came back after the weekend and went and clicked on my report that I'd created and sure enough, it had just all reset back to default. So I had to create it again anyway. I'll chalk this up to one of the weaknesses of it just being GA 4 and still being new. But I do hope this all gets fixed in the future.

Alright, so there you have it. This should be everything that you need to make Google Analytics 4 seeing and work for you as a LinkedIn Ads expert. I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around.

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

Alright here the resources we talked about. First off, there's a simple link to your Google Analytics login. I find every time I go in search for any sort of Google product, finding the login button is really annoying. So go hit this link, and then add this to your bookmarks. Next is the article by datadrivenu.com, all about how to set up scroll depth tracking. So go follow that one. It's excellent. Followed by the YouTube video that helps you set up your time on site tracking. So go follow those literally, we're talking 10 minutes here max, and you can have all these events set up and tracking to your heart's content. No matter where you are on your LinkedIn Ads journey. Come join the LinkedIn Fanatics Community at fanatics.B2inked.com. This is where you're going to find the community of other LinkedIn Ads experts, as well as all four of my courses taking you from beginner to expert with LinkedIn Ads. Plus, if you join the community, as a super fanatic, you'll get to join a weekly call with me where I can give you direct feedback on the campaigns you're running. Plus, if you sign up before August 1, you'll get grandfathered into our lowest pricing ever. So go join immediately and hop in either as a fanatic or a super fanatic and we're excited to see you there. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time listening, if you're a loyal listener, please do go especially to Apple podcasts and rate and review us there. And of course I'd love to shout you out. Alright with any questions, suggestions, or corrections reach out to us at [e-mail]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week and I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.