3 Simple Ways To Improve Your GA4 Reporting Accuracy

It has now been 1 year since Universal Analytics (UA) stopped collecting data in July 2023, and more recently (as of July 2024) we have now seen UA historical data and UA properties removed from our Google Analytics accounts. Whilst UA has been available to view such data over the last 12 months, our day to day focus for our clients – even before 1st July 2023 – has been on optimising their Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tracking and reporting, in order to allow for a greater level of insights, and improving accuracy of data gathered.

From our experience working with GA4 on a daily basis over the past year or so, this blog post looks to provide a top level overview of 3 easy ways to improve the quality of the data you are gathering in your GA4 properties. These recommendations do not focus on introducing additional tracking in GA4, but instead ensuring that best practices are being followed, to ensure that the data being gathered has a high level of accuracy. To put that in other words, are we tracking the website users that we should be?

Finally before we get started, we would advise that our recommended GA4 implementation is through Google Tag Manager (GTM), therefore our references and recommendations will lean on GTM. However, if you do not use GTM, please do get in touch if you are experiencing any of the issues references and need support resolving these.

1. Update your internal and developer filters.

Keeping out traffic from your own team and developers ensures your data reflects only real customer actions, giving you a clearer picture of your users. Examples of such traffic you would want to exclude could be:

• Test traffic from your employees
• Preview traffic through GTM
• Automated test traffic through development tools such as Ghost Inspector or pen testing software
• Crawl traffic through Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) such as Cookiebot

The majority of these test traffic examples can be filtered out using IP addresses in GA4, which is now more straightforward as regex can be used to combine multiple IP addresses into 1 field.

However, these IP addresses will be static IP addresses (they won’t change), but for employees (both your own company and agencies) working from home it is more likely that their own IP addresses will be dynamic (which regularly change). In these instances, other options need to be considered to exclude such test traffic. Such options include but are not limited to the following, which combined with GTM can then be used to exclude such traffic:

• Create browser bookmarks using UTM tags to denote internal traffic, which can then be excluded through GTM. For example:
  • UTM_source = internal_traffic
  • UTM_medium = internal_traffic
  • UTM_campaign = internal_traffic
• Work with your development team to fire a dataLayer event and variable when specific internal users arrive on the website, such as the following sample code:

<script>

  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];

  window.dataLayer.push({

    ‘event’: ‘traffic_type’,

    ‘traffic_type’: ‘internal’

  });

</script>

• Work with your development team to fire a 1st party cookie for internal users. However, this option can be less effective for iOS users due to Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) limiting cookie durations.

2. Ensure that the relevant hostnames are being tracked.

Tracking only your main website and relevant subdomains prevents potential internal test URLs, unwanted or potential spam URLs from being tracked and potentially skewing your data. This will ultimately ensure that you are only tracking the hostnames or (sub)domains which you want to track. For example, if you have developers or other employees testing the website on localhost, staging or development URLs, you would not want such test traffic to be tracked in your live reporting, as such users are not true prospective customers or visitors to your website, due to their differing onsite behaviours.

In order to ensure that the correct hostnames are being tracked or not, you can easily check which hostnames are currently being tracked through creating a custom report or new standard report. We would recommend selecting ‘Hostname’ as a dimension and “Users’ as a metric.

If you review this list and identify hostnames which shouldn’t be tracked in your reporting, you can then create a custom variable in GTM, which will list the hostnames you do want to track. You can then use a ‘Lookup Table’ or ‘RegEx Table’ to achieve this, and then use this variable as the ‘Input Variable’ within your Google Tag setup, to ensure that only these hostnames are tracked in GA4.

3. Ensure that the relevant pages are being tracked.

Being able to accurately track the right pages on your site helps you understand which pages your users visit and interact with, leading to better insights about their behaviour. These could be important pages within the checkout process, a key landing page or a product description page (PDP) for your most popular product. However, if such pages are not being tracked, this could restrict your reporting and mean that you are missing out on key insights, or making incorrect data driven decisions due to this missing data.

Through both the GA4 and GTM interfaces, you can now find a list of pages on your website which are not being tracked. From this list you can identify which pages should be being tracked, but also remove pages from the list that do not need to be tracked (such as WordPress admin pages or Sitemap XML pages).

The ‘Tag coverage’ report can be found in GA4 and GTM through the following routes and click throughs:

• GA4
  • Admin → Property settings → Data collection and modification → Data streams → click into relevant stream → scroll down and click into ‘Configure tag settings’ → click into the ‘View issues’ link (such as ‘View 1 issue’ or ‘View 2 issues’ link next to ‘Tag quality’ → See untagged pages
• GTM
  • Overview → click into the ‘View issues’ link (such as ‘View 1 issue’ or ‘View 2 issues’ link next to Container quality’ → See untagged pages

In this blog post we have only briefly looked at 3 potential solutions to help to improve the accuracy of your GA4 reporting, however there are other GA4 features and reports we would recommend utilising to further optimise here.

If you have any more questions about your current GA4 tracking setup (both with or without GTM), or would be interested in a GA4 audit – please get in touch so we can chat about how Uplift can help you or your business.