Of course, last but not least, you may have seen this little bonus I’m offering here. GA4 is not set. This is a big problem people are seeing in GA4. They’re like, “I’m looking at my landing pages and a lot of them aren’t set up, or I’m looking at my acquisitions and a lot of them aren’t set up. What’s going on?”
This is how GA4 works and how it differs from Universal Analytics. GA4 is measuring a series of events that happen on your website, page views, scrolls, someone clicking the call-to-action button (if you’ve set it up to track those events). Let’s say, if I open a tab on the website, maybe you’re opening this tab now, maybe you clicked on it from the newsletter, and then you decide that I want to watch that video later. Then you come back later, click play on the video, and the page doesn’t reload. There are no more page view events. But because you clicked play on the video you’re currently watching, there is a video play event.
The problem is, since there is no page view, we don’t know how you landed on the site, because the page view event, session start event happens with the initial page view. So if you come back to this tab, hit reload and then hit play, we’ll know where you’re coming from. But since you don’t, you just hit play, maybe go back and reload, and then hit play, so we know where you’re coming from; the problem is it will show up as unset.
So if you see a lot of unspecified stuff in GA4, a small percentage of them are bugs that Google may or may not fix. But the other part is people hoarding labels. How many tabs do you have open right now? I bet it’s not just this. So you’re definitely going to see a lot of unset stuff in your reports. The unset number you see will depend on how many people hoard your tag.
Hoarding tags isn’t necessarily a bad thing. People like to read things later. One might say, I will consider this product for a week before buying it. So that tells you how many people are doing these things. But it’s something to consider when you’re giving a presentation. Should you include unspecified data? Maybe report it in a slightly different way.
So don’t worry if you find it’s not set. This is what is happening. You may or may not want to include this in your analysis. I’ve found that when you’re reporting to people who don’t do what we do, like your company’s leadership or your customers, sometimes it’s better to get rid of it because it just confuses people other than us. But of course, you know, depending on the type of unset data that you’re capturing, you may want to report it or not report it.
So I find that most of these common analytical assumptions people make are wrong. I hope this helps you on your analytics journey, and I guarantee that eventually, over time, we’ll all come to love GA4 as we’re kind of stuck with it now. Thank you for watching.
