Hi, Adrian here. I’ve been working on Google Analytics 4. I originally created this post as a proof of concept to explore GA4 custom events. Let’s take a look…
A custom menu_click event
The tracking is on the link in this sentence:
Let’s imagine that we have an About menu link (like this one) in the sidebar.
This event is called menu_click and it collects a few things:
- a numerical menu level,
- a name for the menu, and
- a menu item, which is the label for the clicked element.
I’ll probably change this but for now I want to see how the data appears in GA4 so I can figure out what’s needed to ensure the kind of reporting that would be familiar to someone who used Universal Analytics. GA4 needs a lot more initial setup for basic reporting than UA ever did. For GA4 custom events to be usable in reports, you need to make sure you create a custom dimension for it.
When you do this it takes time for the data to appear in the new dimension (24–48 hours) so you really need to plan ahead when you’re building custom events.
Update: I didn’t find menu level to be helpful, but menu subhead was, so I added that instead.
SEO digression
Months after I first wrote this post I’ve come back to use it for testing SEO plugins. I want to see what kind of UI feedback and written advice they provide. I’m noticing a lot of variability in the user-friendliness, speed, and wordiness of popular SEO plugins for WordPress. This one keeps nagging me to add more words, so if you’re still reading, that’s why.
It’s been a (interesting: the SEO score just went from orange to green)… while since I looked at SEO plugins and the last time I tried any—maybe 2–3 years ago—I wasn’t too thrilled with them. But they seem to have improved since then.
This one feels like it’s making me work pretty hard though, and I’m not sure how practical that is. Maybe it’s what you need if you’re min/maxing your posts instead of just trying to have decent SEO. Apparently there’s 10.3% passive voice but the algo likes 10%, so getting rid of that last orange dot is taking forever. Eyeroll.
Still, I’m trying to give it the benefit of the doubt. The good news is, I’m five words away from making (there it is) another check switch from orange to green. Finally, it’s pretty unhappy I haven’t associated an image with this post, lol.