When you know how to use GA4 to optimize your holiday strategy, you can reach your full Q4 potential. But how are you supposed to get around the platform’s 72-hour latency during peak times like Cyber Week? Watch the video to learn how to use GA4 to take your brand where it’s meant to go this holiday season.
Using GA4 to Optimize Your Holiday Strategy
Today we’re talking about a topic that’s very top of mind for us at ROI Revolution and hopefully a lot of you, and that’s Q4.
We’ve got holiday shopping coming up and it’s going to be a very different year, especially when we look at reviewing the data and the platforms we’re using.
GA4 has been around since 2022, and we no longer have Universal Analytics. To monitor performance and evaluate strategy for Q4, we’re using a lot of different tools.
Specifically, we have to deal with latency this year.
Often, on Black Friday, we’re glued to our computers and refreshing. But with GA4, there’s a lot of latency. It can take up to 72 hours for the conversion to even be reported after the fact.
Realistically, we’re using app platform data and a combination of benchmarking and Universal Analytics to get an idea of where we should be throughout the day.
Unfortunately, the latency we see in GA4 can be up to 2-3 days, or worse during heavy traffic times like Cyber 5. The real-time report in GA4 only shows data from the last 30 minutes, not your full data set, and it leaves a lot to be desired.
But there IS one way you can get access to data that’s updated in real-time, and that’s to turn on your GA4 streaming exports to BigQuery. When you set up those exports, make sure to check off the streaming option, which will give you the ability to query data within the last hour or even the last minute.
Interacting with the exported data will require someone at your organization who is capable of writing SQL queries to extract the data and shape it into meaningful results.
Once you have your data stored in BigQuery, you’ve now opened up a world of possibilities for joining that data with other data sources to transform and enhance your data by joining it with other data sources, running machine learning models, gaining multi-channel visibility, and building out impactful reports that aren’t possible within the GA4 user interface.
Book a Meeting to Discover Opportunities for GA4 Holiday Success
Are you able to reach your full potential with your current GA4 setup? What if you had GA4-certified experts to show you the way? To discover what it means to have a guide to help you navigate the path to profitable growth, book a meeting with our team today.
