While Google Analytics 4 (GA4) offers a robust set of features to enhance your analytics capabilities, certain functionalities might not be suitable for every scenario. Understanding these features and when to avoid them can contribute to a more accurate and meaningful analysis. Here are some features to consider steering clear of in GA4:
- Automatic form tracking
In GA4 when you turn on the Enhanced measurement tracking on your website, there are lots of things that are automatically tracked by the GA4 such as;
– Pageview
– Scroll
– Outbound click
– Site search
– Video Engagement
– Form Interaction
One of the automatic tracking is Form interaction or form tracking
To turn on the Enhanced Measurement you have to;
Go to admin
Then Data Streams
Click on your website
And toggle ON the enhanced measurement
To do more configuration you have to click on the gear icon
So, what is the problem?
One of the main problems in form tracking in GA4 is that it will track all the form submit interactions even if the form is not submitted properly or incorrectly. As seen in the example, you can see that, we have not submitted our form properly but in the second image of the debug mode, you can see that the form submission has been recorded.
You can see the form submitted has been recorded by the GA4
- Collecting Universal Analytics events in GA4
In GA4 you can see an option of turning on a feature called Collect Universal Analytics Event. The main reason for the option is to easily migrate the universal analytic data to Google Analytics 4. Google made the feature to send the data from the old UA to the GA4 but using the same code snippet that we had to insert into our website when we were using Universal Analytics.
While you turn on this feature in GA4, you will also track some of the data from UA which are not useful or inaccurate for GA4 to use.
If you turn on this feature GA4 will try to take the data from the event of UA and transfer it to GA4.
This feature will only work if you have the old Analytics.js code snippet on your website
So it is best to use the gtag.js or google tag manager to control your tags
- Feature to import goals from UA to GA4
When you first migrate your analytics from UA to GA4, you will get many options that can be configured and recommended features that you can configure in GA4
One of the features is to Set up Conversion which can be imported from UA
When you import from Universal Google Analytics, you will see certain goals that are set in Universal Google Analytics which can be transferred to Google Analytics 4.
Only the Destination and event goals can be transferred to GA4 because GA4 does not have a feature to migrate other goals.
Even in the destination goal, GA4 will not migrate regular expression (regex).
Max limit of 30 conversions of property
So you need to configure the conversion as which is more important and which is less important.
