Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, I'm going to complain, just a little bit.

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"I followed the steps in the support docs and we don't see any donation data in GA4 ..."

I'm working with several clients at the moment on improving the data available in Google Analytics. In particular, we're looking at getting online donations to show up as "ecommerce purchases" in Google Analytics (GA4).

And man, it is not easy!

I've done this work with many different giving platforms, and the GA4 integration documentation they provide is almost always BAD.

There are a few notable exceptions, sure.

And I'm not going to name names here.

But here are a couple of examples of what I've seen recently:

Extensive documentation, that's just wrong 😑

One client uses a big, prominent (and expensive) giving platform, and they have extensive documentation about their GA4 integration, spread across four or five different support URLs. At first I was pleased to see all these details.

Problem is, the documentation was just wrong.

Presumably it worked at some point in the past, but we set everything up carefully, ran multiple test transactions, and the data pushed to GA4 was malformed and broken.

Eventually I send a long video report to their support team, with recommendations for fixing the issue by aligning their code with GA4's official data model. A few days later, they quietly updated their support documentation and then suggested I try again 🙄 Would have been nice if they had acknowledged the error, but I'm glad they fixed the docs.

Docs that are two years out of date 📆 and forms with missing code ⛓️‍💥

Another client is working with a much newer giving platform, that touts their GA4 integration as a feature. Unfortunately, the documentation claims to work with "either Universal Analytics or GA4" ... 🚩 red flag here, since UA was retired in July 2023.

And in testing their donation forms, it appears they load multiple, outdated Universal Analytics scripts per form, and do not load the modern GA4 script the client provided 🤯

I'm emailing with their support team currently to see what they can do to address this situation. I'm hopeful I can pull off another update from this company as well...

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Action item for you?

Overall, this is a caution that just because a platform says they integrate with Google Analytics, don't assume that data is flowing perfectly (or even at all). Often platforms ask that you paste your GA4 measurement ID into a settings field, and don't provide any further instructions.

If you work with an online giving platform or email marketing platform that offers this kind of GA4 integration, please take a look in your analytics reports to make sure the integration is actually working!!

And in the meantime, I'll keep nudging companies to improve their integrations wherever I can! It's not my job, but I'm hopeful these improvements will help plenty of other orgs struggling with the same issues.

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Need a Google Analytics audit but don't have time to dig in yourself?

Check out my Google Analytics review service. More information here.​

Want to improve your own GA4 skills?

I highly recommend Dana DiTomaso's Practical GA4 Course. It's accessible and easy to follow. Check out the full course here, or use this link to preview 4 free lessons.

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