It’s easy to make some common errors when configuring your GA4 account. Make sure you take these 7 early actions:

1. Extend your data retention period. Data from your custom reports will be automatically deleted after two months, which will screw up your YoY reporting. Change the setting to save data for up to 14 months by navigating to Data Settings > Data Retention.
2. Mitigate the impact of high cardinality dimensions. These are dimensions that more than 500 unique values within a single day, which can negatively affect your data. For example, if you’re using word count as a custom dimension, bucket your values into ranges (<500, 500–1000, 1001–1500, and so on).
3. Link to a BigQuery account. Set this up right away to begin collecting historical data. Unlike GA4 custom reports, BigQuery data is never sampled, even if there are more than 10M events in the exploration report.
4. Set up custom audiences. Create target audiences—like engaged users, subscribed users, or users who made a purchase in the last 30 days—to get valuable insights from specific segments. Audience dates are not retroactive, so do this early on.
5. Don’t auto-migrate from UA. You’re better off rethinking your analytics and event collection architecture than trying to retrofit your system into a totally different data model.
6. Exclude unwanted referrals. Ecomm sites often have third-party processors hosted under different domains, but redirects from these domains shouldn’t be counted as new sessions. Add these to your exclusion list to avoid distorting your data.
7. Choose the correct reporting identity. If you don’t have login and user IDs on your site, 99% of cases should go with “device-based” over the other options, “Blended” and “Observed.”

Take a closer look at Search Engine Journal.

Gamma is a good place to start if you need to make a deck or a doc or webpage on the fly. Dynamic AI templates help you revise and polish the look and feel without any of the tedium of formatting little boxes for hours. You can easily embed media, share in presentation mode, or publish your final product online. Plus, there is built-in analytics and commenting for easy collaboration.

Register for GA4 Like a Pro: Build Confidence in The New Age of Analytics on Wednesday, September 20, 1:00 p.m. EST.

Steve Lamar, GA4 specialist and founder of Really Good Data, has been helping companies make sense of their digital marketing performance for the past 15 years. Most recently he’s been helping folks get set up on GA4 and learn the nuances of the new platform.

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