Custom Dimensions and Metrics in GA4

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Custom Dimensions in GA4
It's essential to set up the most important custom dimensions to best utilize them. This will help you capture key data crucial to your goals. Once you've set up the most important ones, you can move on to the less impactful ones.

Depending on your goals and the level of detail needed, a combination of default and custom dimensions can give physicians email database you a comprehensive understanding of your PPC performance.

Custom Google Analytics Reports for PPC
While the default reports provide a good starting point, GA4 custom reports are often more useful for PPC. You can customize your Google Analytics reports to focus on the metrics that matter most to your campaigns, such as cost per conversion.

A starting point for customizing reports is to fine-tune your basic reports. For example, you can customize the basic Lifecycle - Acquisition - Overview report.

Selecting "View Google Ads campaigns" will take you to a complete overview of your campaigns.

This section provides campaign names, user engagement, session data, revenue metrics, costs, event counts, and more. Additionally, you can explore more detailed information about ad groups, keywords, ad network types, and specific account details.

You can start customizing it by adding the necessary metrics or dimensions to this report.

But before we dive into customizing reports, let’s discuss the benefits and some limitations of GA4 custom reports.

Advantages of GA4 Custom Reports
To better understand custom reporting in PPC, there are four key benefits to leveraging it.

Custom views: Google Analytics custom reports offer more details about what's working on your website and what's not. They help you understand the effectiveness of your ads, your audience, the conversion funnel , and each of its steps.

Advanced segmentation: With GA4 custom reports, you can segment your data based on specific criteria. This can help you identify trends, patterns, and areas of opportunity that may not be visible in standard reports.

Deep Benchmarking – Custom reports allow you to compare metrics, dimensions, and segments to understand your business performance.

Automation: Once custom reports are set up in GA4, they are automatically updated with the latest data, ensuring you always have up-to-date information.

The flexibility of GA4 custom reports allows for quick adjustments. You can also combine these reports with your PPC dashboard or other reports for detailed ad analysis and faster decision making.

Challenges of custom reporting in GA4
Aside from the benefits, creating custom reports in Google Analytics 4 can come with some challenges.

Transition from Universal Analytics: Google Analytics 4 operates on a different data model than Universal Analytics (UA). Instead of being based on sessions and page views, GA4's measurement model is based exclusively on events. This change can be confusing.

Learning Curve – Let’s face it: we all felt frustrated at first because GA4 seemed complex, and some common functions are handled very differently than in UA. Even for tech-savvy users, the platform can be difficult to navigate and understand. Therefore, even the most experienced PPC specialists need some time to adapt to its functionality and customize the first reports.

Integration Limitations: Advertisers use many tools to manage campaigns, and having a set of useful connectors can be a lifesaver. GA4 has native connectors with Google products, such as exporting to BigQuery or integrating with Looker Studio for data visualization . However, there are currently very few third-party integrations available for GA4. This can limit the functionality of the platform.

Missing or changed metrics – Some well-known UA metrics and reports are not available in GA4. For example, bounce rate was missing for some time. Now, it is back, but the concept of bounce rate has been completely changed. Today, GA4 bounce rate is the inverse of engaged session rate. To be considered engaged, a user must stay on the website for more than 10 seconds, trigger a conversion, or view more than 2 pages. The same applies to historical data – GA4 has limitations when it comes to viewing historical campaign data, which affects long-term analysis and identifying trends.

Remember, while GA4 presents challenges that make creating custom reports more difficult, it also offers many new features and capabilities. That’s why it’s time to start customizing PPC reports in GA4.