Howdy, Moz fans. I'm Dana DiTomaso, I'm president and partner at Kick Point, and I'm also the founder and lead instructor of KP Playbook, which is a new marketing training site we've launched.
What I'm gonna be talking to you today about is common analytics assumptions. And I'm sure that some of you have used analytics for a very long time. Some of you may not have used analytics for very long at all. You've all heard about GA4, and you've thought, what is this garbage? Why do I have to deal with it?
Well, I mean, as my button says, I Heart GA4, I do. I promise it is a good product. It's just the user interface, eh? But one of the things that I find the most difficult with GA4 is it exposes the issues that we've had over time where analytics has never actually been all that accurate. Just now, we know it's not that accurate.
So if you've been presenting data to, say, clients or your boss as absolutes and now you realize it isn't actually true, you might be struggling with some of these assumptions, which is what I'm gonna walk you through today.
So the first assumption we're gonna talk about is I can track everyone. Maybe at some point in ye olden internet days, you could actually track everyone, but now people have ad blockers. I use one, you might use one too.
The problem is that ad blockers stop people from, say, running your analytics scripts. That's what happens. The other thing to think about is intelligent tracking prevention which is a tool used by Safari and Firefox browsers. It removes cookies after seven days. So if I come on your website on day one and I come back again on day eight, I am a brand new person as far as my analytics is concerned. What are you gonna do about that? Literally nothing. That is gonna get reduced soon to 24 hours. And then you're really not gonna know if people are coming back or not.
Then the third thing, humans are weird, right? Like sometimes, if I see a really great ad and I'm gonna buy that thing, I'll do it right away in that same session with my ad blocker turned off to reward that paid marketer for doing a great job with that ad. Now, you're not always doing that. Sometimes you might send a link to say your spouse and say, hey, can we buy this? And then they click the link in the message, and then they buy it through there, and it shows up as direct, and you have no idea what actually happened. People use the internet in weird ways. Watch your family use the internet, watch your friends use the internet. You will see the strange things that they do because they approach the internet, not like a marketer, unlike the rest of us.
So really keep that in mind, and especially if you're having trouble explaining things to your clients about this, ask them to use the internet, show you what they do, and you'll really start to see where these issues can crop up and how people use internet in weird, and odd ways. Like my father-in-law, bless his heart, he used to Google Google, and then he would Google what he was gonna Google. Like those kinds of people still use the internet.
Next thing we're gonna talk about is this is how many users we had. People will present this as an absolute number. This is the number of users. In Universal Analytics, you probably had the number of unique users, number of new users, number of returning users.
Again, if we think back to what I just talked about with intelligent tracking prevention, everything else, that was kind of a lie probably. So first thing, you don't actually get to track users unless you have logins on your website. For example, the site that you're on right now watching this video, Moz, they have logins. They can track you if you come back if you're logged in. If you never logged in, they probably don't know who you are if you're using Safari and you're coming back eight days later. But if you are logged in, we can track you across multiple sessions.
Most websites do not have logins. Many business-to-business websites don't have logins. SaaS products do, good for them, but most of us don't have the luxury of logins. And so that means that we don't actually know who a user is for some of the reasons that I just talked about. But also other stuff, like people use different computers, right? Like people come back years after they first came back. We don't really know how many users you have.
And also, have you actually tracked users because some people might say, oh, we have user logins, but unless you've informed GA4 of who these users are, unless you've gone through the configuration steps to actually send that user data off to GA4, Google doesn't actually know who users are. Just having the login isn't enough. You need to set up extra stuff in order to get those users reporting. To do that, I would recommend searching for GA4 user reporting, and there's step-by-step instructions there from Google on how to set that up.