Web traffic digital analytics by Google Analytics - GA4 (key words: Web Traffic, Google Analytics, HTTP, Cookies, Consent, Looker Studio)

I don’t have sufficient data to quantify the difference, but based on my experience, digital marketing can often be more measurable and cost-efficient than conventional marketing channels such as TV advertising. Imagine that I have a website, which I actually do, or an online store. With the help of web traffic analytics, I can answer three fundamental questions:

1. Who are my visitors (and how many)? (Acquisition)
2. What do they do on my website (and how many)? (Behaviour)
3. Who became my customers eventually (and the ratio)? (Conversion)

In other words, web analytics allows me to follow the customer journey from acquisition to behaviour and ultimately conversion, while measuring each stage with data.

In this project, I created a funnel model with GA4 where the user data is collected from a personal website. The process can be transferable to most organization or company websites.

My steps are:
1. Build up a website (to plant the GA tags to collect user data)
2. Create a Google Analytic account on https://analytics.google.com
3. Create a property under this account
4. Create a data stream under each property
5. Plant the tags (gtag.js) into the web pages
6. Configure the consent settings
7. Collect users' data and analyze in GA4
8. Output to Looker Studio for better user visualization & interaction

For a better user interaction, I exported the generated data from GA4 to Google Looker Studio, and created a customized report. GA4 collects the web traffic data in near realtime, but the GA4 connector in Looker doesn't support real time data import. So the delay of data shown below can be up to 24 hours, refresh this web page to update:

All is hosted on my GitHub

Furthermore, for most schools’ admission processes, even though they might have established funnel models for the analytics of application – admission – registration cycle, all of that happened to the users' data we’ve already acquired. However, what happened before that, the visitor events happened on the website of an orginization still seems a black hole to most people. For example, who are the visitors of my website and how many (acquisition), what do they do on my website and how many (behaviour), who became an applicant (customer) eventually (conversion). This analysis can solve this problem. Orgs. can optimize their schemes by targeting at some certain user channels or locations. It is especially important for schools who want to increase their enrolments.