I’ve probably clocked about 100 hours on figuring out GA4 and getting it set up for my site. It seems like an easy question to answer: “Where did this customer come from?” but it’s so overly complicated.
Included in the mix is wordpress, plugins, elementor, bookeo, google analytics, and of course, the referring site.
The current fixes include things on my blog (where I think I’m actually getting many of my customers, but not able to track well):
- Making absolutely sure I am using https instead of http (this was explained in a previous post). I used the plugin Better Search Replace to verify this.
- Making sure the utm parameters were appended to the links to eurekaroom.com. This was tricky since I needed to do some regex. I used the plugin regex replace for this.
- Replaced “noopener” with “noopener” using regex replace.
- Replaced target=”_blank” with ” ” so that the page didn’t open in new tab. When you open something in a new tab, it drops the tracking info. Best practice is to open in the same tab (and with so many on mobile now, it appears generally the same to people).
With these changes, I hope I can further reduce the attribution of sales to “direct” in GA4. We’ll see how it goes.