GA4 Mastery

Question 1

What is HTTP? and HTTPS?

Answer 1

Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Web browsers and servers use it to communicate with each other. HTTPS is secure version.

Question 2

What is an HTTP request?

Answer 2

When the web browser requests resources from the web server it’s called an HTTP request.
An HTTP request can be HTML document, image file, CSS file, JS , etc

Question 3

What happens in GA4 when a referrer is not passed to your website?

Answer 3

GA4 cannot determine the traffic’s source, thus reported as direct traffic in GA4 reports.

Question 4

What is referral traffic?

Answer 4

Traffic from any other website to your website is referral traffic. (traffic from search engines and ads is not referral traffic)

Question 5

When is it appropriate to use ‘List unwanted referrals’ in GA4?

Answer 5

1. Self-referral traffic, you don’t want your own domain showing up as referral traffic. GA4 is capable of auto-detecting self-referrals, however it’s a best practice to add.
2. Payment Gateway, for example Paypal traffic.
3. Other 3rd party sites used to manage website user interactions.

Question 6

True of False: When you add a new domain to the ‘List Unwanted Referrals’ list it impacts the data retroactively.

Answer 6

False

Question 7

What is Direct Traffic?

Answer 7

When a GA4 session starts without a referrer being passed by a user’s web browser. Basically when GA4 doesn’t know where the traffic came from it can be classified as Direct. It doesn’t mean all sessions from Direct Traffic were the domain typed into the browser.

Question 8

What is Cardinality?
What is the cardinality of this data set (10, 20, 30)
What is the cardinality of this data set (10, 20, 20)

Answer 8

Cardinality refers to the number of unique values in a data set.
(10, 20, 30) > 3.
(10, 20, 20) > 2.

Question 9

What are 3 types of Cardinality in GA4?

Answer 9

Dimension (gender, age, item name, etc)
Data Table
Underlying Data Table

Question 10

What are high cardinality dimensions?

Answer 10

These are dimensions with more than 500 unique values in one day.

Question 11

What is the cardinality of the data table?

Answer 11

Refers to the total number of rows reported. So, if you see 200 rows, its cardinality is 200.

Question 12

What is cardinality of the underlying data table?

Answer 12

Refers to the total number of rows that will be processed to produce the data table you see in the reports.
The number of rows it takes to produce a data table could be greatly different than the number of rows actually present in your data table.

Question 13

Is there a cardinality limit on dimensions in GA4?

Answer 13

No, there can be any number of unique values.

Question 14

Is there a cardinality limit on data table in GA4?

Answer 14

No, there can be any number of rows.

Question 15

Is there a cardinality limit on the underlying data table in GA4?

Answer 15

Yes, there is an unspecified cardinality limit. This limit is in place to reduce data processing costs.

Question 16

What causes (Other) in GA4?

Answer 16

When a high cardinality dimension is used it increase the number of rows that are processed for a data table. And when the underlying data table hits the unspecified row limit, any data past the row limit is reported as (other).

Question 17

Where won’t you find (other) in GA4?

Answer 17

When a standard GA4 report has one dimension. However, if you add secondary dimensions, filters or comparisons the (other) row can appear in the data table.
(Other) won’t appear in exploration report because they have access to the raw event and user-level data.
(Other) won’t appear in BigQuery export data tables.
Some standard reports like “pages and dimensions” have high cardinality limits.

Question 18

What are some ways to remove (Other) in GA4?

Answer 18

• Exclude all unwanted URL query parameters
• Avoid high cardinality dimensions (custom dimensions that reports on user ids)
• Avoid creating complex reports
• For very large websites, it’s advised to use GA4 360 to minimize cardinality
• Use Exploration reports

Question 19

What is (not set) in GA4?

Answer 19

GA4 uses (not set) whenever it does not receive any info for a particular dimension. You can minimize (not set), but unlikely to minimize it completely.

Question 20

What is the #1 reason for (not set) in GA4 reports?

Answer 20

1. Ad URLs aren’t tagged, or tagging is incorrect or incomplete.
2. Measurement Protocol is being used to send data.
3. Issues with Server-Side tracking

Question 21

Why would Source/Medium be (not set)?

Answer 21

GA4 may be unable to determine the source or medium for a session because of:
- missing or incorrect UTM parameters
- Missing ‘session_start’ event
- Adblockers and privacy extensions
- Measurement Protocol
- Audience Triggers

Question 22

Issues with ‘session_start’ event could cause (not set) to appear in your Source/Medium data. What is one way to prevent this?

Answer 22

Changing the maximum session timeout allowed by GA4 to 7 hours 55 minutes will stop sessions from expiring early