Actually, what I’m going to tell you here isn’t something exclusive to GA4; it’s something you need to know if you work in digital marketing.
Because lots of platforms use feeds containing our product and service catalogs. And GA4 is just one of them.
So take a look at this and then check your feed. And if you’ve got it wrong, fix it so you don’t end up having to validate every affiliate conversion, for example.
Problem
The first thing is to understand what a product feed:
If that’s already clear, the next thing is to understand how difficult it can be to generate one when you use attributes for your products or services, because each product URL will look like this:
Don’t think this is exclusive to ecommerce: it happens to us at Yo pongo el hielo and also at Lowi –selling services– with the different plan combinations.
Being able to link to a specific combination on a page that allows different combinations and attributes comes with this kind of complication.
These URLs, with attributes defined by “#” parameters, aren’t bad in themselves, but they make them harder to combine with standard campaign tracking, because most advertising platforms append that tracking after the parameter, like this:
https://www.yopongoelhielo.com/es/whisky/91-johnnie-walker-black-label.html#/volumen-1l?utm_source=blue&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=whisky
Instead of doing it correctly, which would be like this:
https://www.yopongoelhielo.com/es/whisky/91-johnnie-walker-black-label.html?utm_source=blue&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=whisky#/volumen-1l
Leaving the attribute parameter (#/volumen-1l) at the end.
And the result is that GA4 CANNOT interpret that structure correctly, so it will come in as direct traffic instead of through the (poorly) implemented tagging.
So the transactions reported by the advertising platforms won’t match what GA4 tells you.
And you’ll have to analyze the sales one by one by analyzing the user journey in GA4.
If you work with feeds, check this, because it happens more often than you think. Here’s a real error example taken from the log file:
Solution
We have several options, but none is perfect. They all have pros and cons.
Let’s look at each one.
Option 1: trust what the advertising platforms tell you
Yes, it’s an option. But not the best one if what you want is to optimize your ad budget properly.
As you’ll have seen, each platform uses an attribution model in which any click –or even view– of its ads is claimed as its own conversion if the user eventually pulls out their wallet.
What’s more, if you add up the conversions from all advertising platforms plus SEO and email, the total number of conversions will very likely be higher than the real figure.
So this solution is easy, but it isn’t optimal.
Option 2: get the advertising platform to build the link correctly
This would be the ideal solution.
Ask the platform to add the tracking where it belongs.
Sounds logical, right?
Well, no. On most platforms it’s impossible.
They tell you their systems can’t do it.
So that’s another invalid option.
Option 3: include the tracking in the feed
Of all of them, this is the best.
It means doing all the work for the advertising platforms and including the URLs in the feed already tracked correctly:
The problem?
There are two:
- It will require development work on your side.
- You won’t be able to reuse one feed for several advertising partners.
If you don’t have a development team, you can try a middleware such as Lengow to build your feed. But it costs money, of course.
Option 4: don’t pass the product attribute
In this case we include only the “parent” product in the feed, that is, the combination we have by default.
This way, because there are no “#” parameters in the URL, the tracking added by the platform is created correctly.
And Google Analytics records it properly.
It’s a suboptimal solution, but it’s quick and requires almost nothing from us. It’s the second best, in my view.
Option 5: enable auto-tagging in Google Ads
This only works for Google’s platform, but if you have it enabled, you won’t have to rack your brain adding the tagging yourself. Google’s products understand each other, and GA4 knows whether a click comes from Google Ads.
However, the new iOS privacy rules mean that the tracking Google uses today (February 2024) is lost if you use some native apps on your iPhone, so you’ll lose data too.
Result
So, if you choose either of these last two options, the data collected in GA4 is correct and so is its processing, so the source, medium and campaign of the conversion are properly identified:
If you liked this (non-)trick, here are a few more GA4 tricks.
And if what you need is for us to review your project’s analytics, let me know.
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