Dana DiTomaso- Using GA4 to Surface Technical SEO Issues In Real-Time

Transcript

1. Using GA4 to Surface Technical SEO Issues in Real-Time
 Dana DiTomaso
 Founder, Analytics Playbook
 

2. I don’t want to look for issues.
3. I want issues to come to me.
4. Use your website visitor experience as intel.
5. I’m using Google Tag Manager & GA4 but you can use anything.
6. We’ll be creating events for common technical issues.
7. Events show trends.
8. Obviously something was added to the site at the end of October!

9. Events unlock count metrics.
10. These drop down selections can’t be saved and don’t exist outside of GA4.

11. Now I can see how often something happened and create calculated metrics using my events.

12. Add the _count event parameter to the GA4 tag in GTM.

13. Then register your parameter in GA4 as a custom metric.

14. Let’s track some stuff!
15. There are many ways to track a 404 error.

16. To capture the body class, we’ll use a DOM Element variable.

17. Then our trigger can use that body class to send an event.
 
 page_view_404 

18. Why page_view_404 and not 404_page_view?
19. How about 404 errors specifically from links?
 

20. Then we’ll use exactly the same trigger again.

21. Use the lookup as part of the event name.
 
 internal_link_404
 external_link_404

22. URLs with encoding
 
 Example:
 site.com/about%20us/
 
 page_encoded

23. You might need to revise this if your site has legitimate encoded characters.
 /notre-équipe/ /notre-%C3%A9quipe/
24. Try an exclusion trigger to create an “allowed” encoding list.

25. To capture URLs with UPPERCASE, use a regex trigger condition.
 
 page_uppercase

26. Is your team adding UTMs to internal links?
 (Please don’t.)
 
 internal_link_utm 

27. Are your URLs always supposed to have a trailing slash or not?

28. Use the trigger that matches your website configuration
 
 page_view_noslash
 page_view_slash

29. Were there redirects?
 
 Use this JavaScript Variable.

30. I recommend adding this to your page_view tag as a parameter.

31. Is the hostname the correct one?

32. Now create a trigger when the hostname is external.
 
 page_view_external

33. We can do better than this for Core Web Vitals.

34. This tag template from Simo Ahava gives you real-world CWV values from your visitors.

35. The tag template generates a dataLayer push that you use as the trigger for your event.

37. If you’re capturing too many CWV values, try restricting the trigger to only capture problem values.
38. There’s actually a built-in trigger for JavaScript error capture.
 
 js_error

39. Use the built in variables for the parts of the error that you want to capture for diagnostics.

40. What’s the user agent?
 
 Use this JavaScript Variable.

41. I attach this to the configuration tag.

42. You can use the configuration tag for parameters that don’t change during the session.
43. You might hit the 100 character limit with the User Agent.
44. You might want to use a separate GA4.
45. Questions? Get in touch: linktr.ee/danaditomaso