Mastering Funnels | GTM and G4: Conversion Event Mapping

Learn more about the 7 Steps to Scale Your Digital Marketing Acquisition. Watch our recent Livestream on YouTube or you may also listen to our podcast on Spotify.

In this live, we covered a few important and timely topics, including:

1) Google Tag Manager

2) G4 and Universal Analytics

3) Facebook Events

4) Conversion Mapping Resource

5) Your Questions

Listen to Mastering Funnels on Spotify Now

[TRANSCRIPTION]

"Welcome to the Hacktics mastering funnels podcast. My name is Jason Wilmot. I'm a growth marketing and growth hacking coach and consultant. The following audio is from a recent livestream, which at the time of this recording takes place every Tuesday at around 12:15 PM Central Standard Time. If you'd like to watch the livestream, feel free to join us on the major social platform forms that can be found somewhere in the Show notes below. If you find this content useful or if you have your own feedback or questions that you'd like to be answered, drop a comment somewhere on our socials and we'll try to address the topic on the next live Last. If you're ready to scale up your own offer or business, then I'd encourage you to check out our Mastering Funnels Masterclass found at hacktics.com that's hacktics.com. Hope you enjoy the following recording. 

All right, and we are live. Hey, folks, Jason Wilmot here. This is the Mastering Funnels Podcast, and today we are doing episode 17, and we're going to dive right into this today's, November 15. I hope everybody's doing well. Thank you to those who are listening and thank you to those who are watching. Excited to be diving into this today. So the title of today's podcast is Conversion Event Mapping with Google Tag Manager, G4, and Facebook Events. Now, let me give you a little bit of context before we type into this because this is probably going to be one of those episodes that it's probably easier to watch than it is to listen. Hey, guys. So it's going to get a little bit technical here, and we're going to get into the weeds of this because what I want to show you is really where the thinking is going as far as creating conversions and event mapping. Now, this might not be everybody's cup of tea understood completely on that side, but here's where it makes sense. Right? At the end of the day, if you are running an Internet marketing presence, whether you're running ads or whether you're doing content marketing, we're trying to get people to the desired endpoint.

And that endpoint is somebody who buys, somebody who downloads, somebody who books a phone call, or somebody who requests a demo, something like that. And a lot of you may know that Google Analytics is Sunsetting, its current universal analytics. It's going to be gone next summer. And so what I've been doing is sort of digging into G4 and how to really utilize that and prepare myself and our team and our clients for when that sunsetting actually occurs. Now, who knows if it's actually going to occur? As Google says, that is all to be determined. But today, what I want to do is I want to dive in and show you how to create these events. Right? The first time that I got into G4, it was completely overwhelming. That was probably every time, I should say just the first time it's been overwhelming. But what I want to do in this podcast or this live stream is to walk you through how to think about this. Because I think once you understand how to think about this, then a lot of it starts making sense. So the key to, I think, running conversions and I'm just going to be speaking to the people who understand what a conversion is, right? 

Conversion is the endpoint. That's what we're trying to do. And just as a reminder, there are two main reasons why we have conversions. One, it is to understand our ROI. So if we're spending time, money, and energy, we know what energy and what time and what money is actually moving the needle for us. And then two, we need conversions to train the ad platforms what we want to do. So it's going to enable this machine learning. So that's really the context for what we're diving into today. But a lot of people might not know where to start when it comes to events and sending in events. So as far as G4 is concerned, it's really not going to allow you to have page-view conversions anymore. And what I mean by that is when you're inside of your G4, if you're looking at your conversions, you can really only see that the only conversions that can be enabled in there actually start out as events. So that means that we need to be able to send in events into G4. Now, you can do that through somebody being on a specific page.

And that's what I'm going to show you how to do today. And you can do that through native integrations. It can just listen for these G4 can listen to these conversions if there's a direct G4 integration on something like Calendly or something like Drift. But for those of you who are out there working with your typical website where somebody has a thank you page, I'm going to show you how to set that up today. Now, more importantly, I'm not going to just show you how to set it up. I'm going to show you how to think about it right so that you have a little bit more ability to kind of be more choosy. So what I want to do is I'm going to spend a little bit of time in Google Tag Manager first, because Google Tag Manager is really where we initiate the process of identifying what events we want to send in. And I want to give you a couple of different ideas about what we can send in. Then what we're going to do is we're going to send that into G4 and we're going to test that because there's a real-time debug mode.

And then at the same time, what I want to do is I want to set up something called a JSON event in Facebook. So JSON event is something that we can take that Google tag managers listening for this event that we're going to pre-program into this, and the event that we're going to pre-program is a thank you page view. So how do we take that and then send it back to Facebook? Well, there are two main reasons why we want to do that. We want to send it back to Facebook as an event for two reasons. The first is if you want to create a custom conversion from it, so if you want to create a custom conversion and you want to build it off of a specific event, then this is the way to do it. Then, more importantly, let's say that you have an event on Facebook, in your Facebook event manager, you can also go in and create an audience from it. So this is really cool. So the idea here would be if you want to create an exclusion audience, so if the event is a purchase or somebody who opts in and you want to remove them from all future advertising, you can do that.

Or if you want to create a look-like audience from the people who fire that event, then this is going to give you the ability to do it. So I know this might be over the heads of some folks, but if you're anything like me, you've been just bombarded with this information lately that we have to be moving into G4. And I think the very fundamental thing that I just want to convey is it all starts with your thinking. That's what I preach in mastering funnels, it all starts with your thinking. It starts with knowing where to begin. And I think that typically only comes with experience or through mistakes. So hopefully I will help you avoid these mistakes and I can really expedite your ability to kind of think through the process of this. So let me kill this. I'm going to be sharing my screen a lot today, and if you have any questions, go ahead and throw those in. We got a lot to talk about. So I don't know if we'll have a ton of time for questions, but regardless, throw them into the mix if you so choose. So one of the things that I like to do is I like to document my thinking, and I'm going to share my screen here in a second and I'm going to show you where I start my thinking when it comes to conversions.

I've called it, it's an amazing name too, the Conversion mapping document. So let me share my screen here and then we will hop into this. Okay? So the conversion mapping document is something that kind of was born out of frustration, to be honest. It was born out of this lack of communication between myself and our team and our clients. And everybody needs to get on the same page. So when we onboard a client now or a partner now, we really just talk about, well, what are the main KPIs? What are we actually trying to do for you? Because that's inevitably what we're trying to get done. That's what we're measuring. That's what we're reporting on. That's what we're building our ad campaigns off of. Really. It's the metric to tell us if we are moving the needle in the right direction or not. And so what I have in front of you, for those of you listening, what I have is this spreadsheet where I've got columns where I can identify what are the main things that we're trying to do here. And I'm going to give you kind of two examples here. So one would be a typical thank you page. 

And that's really what today's podcast is going to be all about. We're going to dive into how to set this up. So thank you page. In this case, if somebody buys, somebody downloads, somebody signs up for a free trial, somebody books a phone call with you. If they're redirected to this endpoint, that is sort of the end of the funnel, if you will. But then there's other things in here as well, like a calendar. So Calendly has direct integration with Google and Facebook and well, G4 as well. So we're really not going to play around with this too much today. But I think it serves as a good example. When Calendly is sitting there on a website, what it's doing? Is it's listening for engagement with it? Does somebody select a time? Did somebody select a date? Did somebody actually book a phone call? And when somebody does actually book that phone call, there's something inside of the calendar that sends an event this binary thing of yes or no, right? And typically it's yes if something occurred. So did this event occur? Did somebody actually book something? And from there it sends an event to Google Analytics.

Specifically, G4, or Universal Analytics. And so what Google Analytics is doing, in this case, is it has a direct integration. So it's actively listening for events coming from Calendly. But when you get in and you start digging around a G4, what you're going to find is it doesn't just pick up Page View events at all. It'll pick up Page View as an overall category, but you're not sure of what Page was actually viewed. So in order for us to send this event in of somebody hitting a specific thank you page, we have to go in and actually create the trigger ourselves. And that's what we're going to do. So what I want to show you is kind of how I think about this, how I start my process, and then we'll dive into actually building the trigger. So let's say that somebody came and they purchased Mastering Funnels. I know the guy who puts this out. I would recommend him. He's a decent guy. But Mastering Funnels is a process of showing you how to think through funnels. It's something that I've developed over the last few years and really try to make it an evergreen process of how to think about funnels and start, so that regardless of the platform, whether it's Facebook or TikTok or YouTube or whatever you're running, you have this mental framework to work through. 

And I think that is the most important thing in all of this. Yet underneath all of the ad platforms, there's this underpinning of data and conversions. We have to train the system. We have to know our why. We have to know how we're spending our money. And so this is where we're going to start. We have to start with what we're actually trying to do, and then we can kind of graduate up to filling the funnel. So we've got the thank you page. I just made the standalone thank you page. And this is my URL. So in my conversion mapping document, I've noted that this is a thank you page, and the action is a URL Page view. Now, this is mostly for the old analytics, because now everything is going to be moved to an event. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this conversion redirect URL. So basically, what would happen here, this is an example. If somebody buys the coach or the coaching course, they're redirected to a Thinky page. At this Think You page, then I know where these people came from if I'm using things like UTM.

So I want to send this information back to the ad platforms. I want to send this into Google Analytics. So I have this universal idea of all of my traffic, but this is really where it starts. So I've got a URL next. What I need to do is I need to go into Google Tag Manager, and I need to send that event in to G4. I'm going to show you how to do that right now. So in Google Tag Manager, I need to create two things. One is a tag and one is a trigger. So I'm going to go to triggers and I'm going to push new. What I'm going to do here is I'm just going to write what sort of trigger this is. This is a page view trigger. And this is going to be MF thank you. MF standing for Masterclass thank you. And then I'm just going to write example because this is going to be an example trigger. Once I'm inside of the trigger configuration, I need to open it up. And this is a page view. So you know that I'm sending in an event, but the event actually occurs with the Page View.

Now, before I get too into the next steps, what I want to do is just pause and show you all of the things that we can actually do with Google Tag Manager so that we can send in an event. I was working with a partner yesterday. And they want to really understand their organic traffic and the behavior of their organic traffic on things like their blog pages. So they're not really looking for the main conversion of somebody signing up for their software. They want to sort of measure these micro-conversions. And so a couple options that we could do here is we could do something like a timer. We could build a timer for a time on Page. Did they spend 30 seconds on this page? There could be a scroll event. So if somebody is scrolling down the page, this is a scroll depth. Do we want to send that event in? So if they scroll 50% of the blog page or something like that, we can capture that event and we can send it to Google Analytics. Now why we're building this again, I should say one more reason why we're building this in Google Tag Manager is we can send this as an event to Google Analytics or Facebook at the same time. 

Because I'm going to show you how to set up this thing called a JSON event so that we can send us to Facebook at the same time. But ideally what we're trying to do is we're trying to create this platform where we can really unify all of our events and send our events to the correct spots. And in this case, we're going to use Google Tag Manager to do that. So if we created a Page view, then here we could send it then to Facebook. We could also send it to G4. So we could do a Page view. We could do scrolled up. We could do somebody submitting a form, although I would probably stay away from this and redirect the form to a thank you page. I think that's the better thing. There's a specific timer. We could say a specific amount of time on Page. If somebody hits the 32nd mark, we're going to fire an event and that will send that event into G4. This YouTube video is if you have an embedded YouTube video on your website, if somebody plays that, that can be sent in as well. But we're going to keep things simple and we're just going to do the Page view.

So when I'm in here, the trigger fires on all Page views. That's not what we want. What we want is some Page views. And I'm going to pick the page URL, and then I'm going to select Contains. Now this is where things could get a little bit fuzzy, and I'm not going to get into too many things, but you could see that Contains might catch more if we send this in with UTMs. If we send this in with something else. What we want to make sure of is we use Contains rather than equals, because equals might filter out some of the additional click information that comes in with that. So in order to start wide and broad, I would just select Contains. And so the Page URL, the rule that we're creating says if the URL contains this hacktics.com/Mfthankyou one, then it's going to fire this trigger. And that's exactly what we want. So I'm going to just click save. Now that is not a tag. So we've identified the sort of listening device. So Google is now going to be, Google Tag Manager is now going to be listening for this event if somebody hits that page. 

Now if somebody hits that page, what we need to do is next. That is the tag. What do we need to do with this if this trigger is actually being sent? So first I'm going to create a G for the event, and then we'll actually go in and then we'll do this as a Facebook JSON event as well. So I'm going to go to Tags and then I'll select New and we will call this a G4 event. At least that's the way that I like to name this G4 event. And this is a page view. So I'm kind of denoting what this is. It's a G4 event. This is a Page View and this is the MF thank you example. So when I'm in this tag configuration, well, let me select Trigger first because this is a trigger that we just created. You'll see that I have quite a few triggers in here because I've been using this GTM account for quite some time. I cannot find my Page view yet. There it is. Page view. So that was the trigger that we just created. What do we want to do when somebody actually triggers that or fires that trigger?

Well, I'm going to first create this Google Analytics G4 event. And you'll see that I need to have had already created my G4 Analytics, and I've got two in here. So hopefully this is the right one. I might duplicate this just to see. So you do have to set up G4 first if you don't know how to do that. I do have a video on that. So let's go to Tags and let's go to G4. Okay, let's see this. There's my G4 configuration. And let's go into I think that is the right one. So G4. Google Analytics. So if it's not, we'll find out. So there's our trigger. So what we want to do though is we want to identify this event name. This is where I would go back to my conversion mapping document and I would type in, let's just say MF and thank you. And I'll just say example MF. Thank you, for example. So that is the name of my event. I'm going to copy that. I'm going to go back in and just paste that. So from here, what I can do is click Save, and that is essentially it.

So what I'm going to do next is I'm going to preview this and see if this actually works. It might not work because I might have that Google G4 tag incorrectly in there. But the way that I do this is I just go to preview and then there's this thing called Preview and Debug Mode. So I'm going to want to take this URL because this is where I'm testing it. I'm back on the thank you page that I just created. And then in this preview and Debug Mode, this will show me whether this is going to send in the proper event. So here's where we send it. So that is thank you. That's the page loading. Go back over here and I'm going to look for my G4 event tag. There it is. Event page view. MF thank you for example. So that is where we check the inside Google Tag Manager. But now I want to show you how to actually check in G4. So what we're going to do is Universal Analytics. This is G4. Inside of our Google Analytics G4. I'm going to go down to my configure and then I'm going to go over to Debug Mode. 

Now what Debug Mode should do is it should be there it is already. It should listen to whatever you're trying to debug in GTM. So this is a good way in order to test your event so we can see that this event was set up perfectly. And then what we will do is we will just use this to make sure that the event is actually being sent in. So the nice thing about this is this is happening in real-time. It was fired roughly 26 seconds ago. That's when we pressed the button. And then only then when you have debugged and you have made sure that it is actually working, that's when you can go ahead and submit this for an actual publish. We don't want to publish our GTM without first testing it. We want to make sure that it's debugged fully and then we can go in and submit it. But I'm not ready to submit it yet because there are two parts to this podcast. We are sending this event first into G4, but then we're also going to be creating a JSON event and sending us to Facebook at the same time. 

Now you could make the argument that we could just set up the custom conversion inside of Facebook in order to fire on a specific URL. That is totally doable. That's probably a route that I would go. But what I want to do here is I want to show you how to send in a JSON event because this is actually a really useful skill. And again, backing up this all starts how with how you think about this. We want to create all of our triggers inside of Google Tag Manager and send them out that way. So our trigger is built. So that means what we need is we need a new tag. So I'm going to create a new tag. But I'm not going to create a new one. I'm just going to clone one because it is way easier and I'm going to show you why. So let's go to this FB event. This is something that's paused. I'm going to let me make sure that this is a good one to grab. Yeah, this is so let me just duplicate this. So I'm going to go in and copy this. And so what you're going to see here, what I'm going to name it, is the same thing that I need to name it in here. 

So I'm going to name it this exact same from my conversion mapping document. The reason being again, and this again is born out of just examples of things going the wrong way. This is all born out of communication. So if we're talking about the same event, if we're talking about a conversion with a client, with our team, with ourselves, we need to be using the same language. So if we're naming a conversion something on one site, we need to name it the same on the other so that we know what we're talking about. And there's a universal language going on. So back in my Google tag manager, what we're going to do is update this. Okay, so what I have in here, this is very easy. And if you don't know code, that's fine. I don't, so that's fine. What this is, is a paid view. And I said all that stuff about making sure that everything is the same. I named the other one example. So everything that I just said, no hot take, I guess. So there we are. So let me dive into what this is exactly what's going on. So what we're doing is we are sending a tracking bit of JSON code back to Facebook and it's going to get captured as an event.

And so what you need in there is not much at all. And in this video, what I think I can do is I can drop this below in the description or something like that. This is all that you need to copy. And then this is the part that you update. So this is the event name. And so whatever we name right in here, when we go to the Facebook page, this will actually get picked up. So like I said earlier, you should name everything the same. But because I'm doing a podcast and I wasn't probably prepared as I should have been, well, then this is what we get. So let's click save first of all. And then let's preview this one more time because we can actually preview this event whether it's going to fire on this page or not. So this is going to pull open the same URL. This is our thank you page. I'm going to go back to our tag assistant, and I could use this tool let's see. I don't see it firing there, but I can go in here. So I'm looking for a Facebook FB event. Let's see. And I'm not seeing it. 

FB event. This is always a fun part when you're doing this live. Something not working. So let's go FB event. So FB event. FB event. Success. That's my old one. Let's see. What did I name this thing again? Feeling sloppy here. So mastering funnels. Maybe this is in our old tag manager. There we go. Thank you. Let's name that. Thank you. Success. Maybe I launched it from the wrong tag manager. So let me try that again. All right, so let's go up to preview and debug mode. I'm going to make sure that we have this right here. There it is. So let's hit preview. We'll try this one more time. If it doesn't work, well, then we did something different. We did something the wrong way. Tags. Okay. So continue. FB event. Do we see it anywhere? Let's click find there. It didn't fire. So something's not firing, which is no good. No Bueno. I don't think we have oh, it's because we didn't put the right trigger on it. That would make sense. So computers don't mess up. We do. So this is a page view. And there's the example. So now we have that saved.

Let's go back and preview this again. And now it should work. And then now after it does work, what I'm going to do is I'm going to publish this, and we'll send all of that into Facebook as a real event. And it might capture it with the time in this podcast, or it might not. So let's go back. Let's find our event. There it is. It is working. We just forgot to add the right trigger. So now that we've tested this on Facebook, we know that this event is going to fire. We also know that the G4 event is properly firing. So what we're going to do is we're going to go in and publish this. So I'm going to go publish my GTM and GTM example. Typically when you submit changes, you should note in here what you've done, what you've made. That way if other teammates are in here, you have that record. But when you're just playing around, that's all I'm going to do. So I'm going to click GT and publish. And I'm going to go in probably right after this and remove this. Or I can revert my version back to 69 rather than 70. 

So now it is live. So if I go to this real page, if I go to this real page view, these events will be firing. Now, here is the problem, though, with some of this. Gforce is not going to pick up this event probably for a few hours, unfortunately. So when you're inside of your G4, well, I picked it up here. Let me explain what I mean here. This might. Have been from the debug. When we're going into our events up here in G4, sometimes it will take up to 24 hours before this event pushes through. So if you make an event today, you might have to come back tomorrow and check to see if it's listed here. Then when it is listed, what you need to do is you need to toggle it on as a conversion. Then when you go into your ports and your acquisition, you can toggle it according to or you can sort your table according to that new conversion. So let me say this again. First, you have to create all of the events, and you have to send that in via Google Tag Manager, and Google Analytics.

G4 is going to capture this event, but it's not going to pull it into these existing events for up to 24 hours. Then once that event actually occurs, then you can go ahead and then you can mark it as a conversion. And then you are off to the races because then you can sort your data. So hopefully that is clear. I know that a lot of this is a little bit confusing, but if you just get in here and mess around doing the exact same thing that I showed you, just do it with a page view. I think that's really the easiest way to go. Next, let's go ahead and go into our Events Manager and Facebook to see if we can capture this event. And I'm going to show you how to test for that. And like I said earlier, I don't know if this is going to send right away. We saw that the tag was working, but we'll just see if this is actually going to pick up this event because sometimes it takes a while to do that. So again, what we need to do is we need to publish this. 

If things aren't working right away. Let me say this. If you're debugging it and everything is detected there and it's firing, then you're good to go. You might have to wait a little bit of time for it to actually get pulled in by the platform. So I'm going to go into my Events Manager, and now I'm going, first of all, I'm going to refresh this just because we created a new event. I don't know if refreshing it works, but I'm going to grab this URL because this is a URL that we've been working with. It's the same URL right here. And I'm going to go into my Events Manager and then I'm going to go to test events. So once I'm in test events, it's already working. Let's see the overview, test events, waiting-for activity. I don't know why I can't get into this to test it. Typically what we can do is this will open up a little bit of a spot where we can throw our URL in. Let's just see if I go into my demo account. I go back to this account if I can go to test events. We almost made it all the way through this podcast with things running smoothly.

I did do a little bit of a mess up on the trigger, and that's fine. We salted in real-time. But now this is what I wanted to show here at the end. Now you see that this custom event is already pushing through. So that's really good to see. So this is actually working. So what we can do from here is we can see where this is coming from. We can see that this came in actually when we were debugging this. That's when the first event was fired. But typically what you would have right here, and I'm not sure why we can't go in and test this. Eventually, that event that we just saw will show up down here and from there, and from there, you can create a custom conversion from it. So if you go to create a custom conversion, that is where you'll be able to pull that event from. But in order to kind of test normally what there is, there is a URL box right here that we can put in our URL. And then let's just see if we can clear activity, if that would solve there we are. Okay, so we're going to grab this, we're going to go into our test browser events, and open a website. 

Once you do that, let's go back to the previous tab and you'll see these page views right here. And this is where our event should fire. And if it doesn't fire right away, again, that's probably okay. Something, I'm not sure which tab I just closed. We saw it earlier so we know it's being sent in. But if it doesn't detect it right away, I wouldn't worry. I would wait a little bit of time and then send it again and try it again. Because ultimately, what this is trying to do is we're trying to capture this event. We know that it's working. We saw it working in debugging, but sometimes we might just need to take some time here. So I'm not sure when it will populate. I'm not sure what will it require. It's not going to show the event here. By the way, these are all custom events or custom conversions. So when we actually go in and we take this event, we turn it into a custom conversion. We should see that syntax right there. It should say that mastering funnels, thank you, success, or example, or whatever we name it.

So that is the way that we leverage this Facebook event. All right, once again, though, what it does is it really comes down to understanding where to start. And that is why I always start with that conversion mapping document. And let me stop sharing my screen here. That's where I start everything. It always starts in your brain, like your brain is the most powerful tool for all of digital marketing. And you shouldn't take that. You know, you shouldn't hop into some course, you shouldn't hop into some YouTube thing. What you should do, in my opinion, is fundamentally understand what you're trying to do and then build your understanding around that. In the land of Internet marketing, it is very easy in my opinion. It is this binary event that you're trying to achieve. Did they opt-in or did they not? Did they buy or did they not? Did they add it to the Cart or did they not? Did they book a phone call or did they not? And once you understand that endpoint, and once you understand how to then lay around the tracking elements around it, then it really doesn't matter what platform you want to use in order to achieve that.

If you're selling something to 50-year-old moms, they're going to be on Facebook. If you're selling something to 15-year-old teenagers, that's redundant. Then it's going then you're going to do it on TikTok. But as soon as they come to your website, all of your systems and your data have to work in a unified way. I don't care if you're hosting on Shopify if it's on WebFlow if it's on Squarespace. All of these events need to actually occur. And once you understand how to think about this correctly, it's not going to matter which app platform you're using. It's not going to matter which website you're using. At the end of the day, what you are using is you're using data and you're creating these patterns of data so that you can make a decision based on it. Once you have these endpoints, once you have these conversions built on, this is the foundational principle. So once you start running traffic, what you're going to do is you're going to use your UTMs in your inbound clicks and they are going to show up in your Google Analytics and you're going to sort according to this event.

So that Page view event, you're going to say that that is the event that you're trying to sort through. And then over to your left, you're looking through all of the sources. Did it come from Facebook? Did it come from email marketing? Did it come from referrals? Did it come from TikTok? You're going to be able to see the conversion rate. And the conversion rate is sort of the holy metric of your success. It's a good indicator, I should say, of your success. So got a little carried away there, but I don't know. I do think and again, plug for mastering funnels, it always comes down to how you think about things. If you can understand the funnel that you're going to build when you're pitching a client, when you're just listening to them, or when you're working with a team and you understand like, okay, no, wait, before we talk about traffic, we need to think about how we're measuring the success of the traffic. It's not about spinning up campaigns. It's not about this one Facebook hack. It's not about TikTok ads. It's about understanding this data. And if you don't have this data, none of the ad platforms are going to help you find that. 

All right, end of a hot take. I'm running out of time here. Let's do this. Chris asked a question. Let me finish with this question. So is it set up the same? I've been stuck in setting up Shopify so many URLs, and I see people using regular expressions and funnel steps and ga, making it harder. Shopify is a different beast. Shopify does have a direct integration wiki Four, so I would leverage that as much as possible. So in order to get events in Shopify, what you're really looking for is page view content. If they look at a product, did they add it to Cart? Did they initiate checkout, did they add credit card information? And then ultimately, the main event that you're looking for is a purchase. So those are the main events. So if I'm in something like my conversion mapping document, that's what I'm tracking. But Shopify should push all of that into G4 automatically. The same thing happens with Facebook. If you want to use GTM to send specific events into your G4, if it's hosted on Shopify, you can definitely do that. If you want to create a JSON event and send it to Facebook for your Shopify, you can definitely do that.

But I think if you are running on Shopify, a lot of the leg work is done for you. So if you have a deeper question on that, Chris, go ahead, send it my way, and I can try to answer that on the next live. But yeah, this whole G4 thing is sort of an I should say this, I'll kind of finish with this. G4 is not perfect by any means. I'm not trying to be negative about the people who have made it, but it is severely lacking in some degree. Right. There are some layers of UTM information that don't get sent through. You can only send in three layers rather than five. So it kind of cuts off the legs or the knees there. So there are definitely some things missing in G4 at the moment. If you're doing some reverse path exploration, you really can't see the URLs, you can only see the page titles. It doesn't always capture all of the events there. So I still feel like it's a young product, but at the same time, I want to be learning it. One, because I want to be the best, but two, because I also want to understand what's going on.

I can clearly communicate that with our team and our clients and our partners, but at the end of the day, if this is the direction where I need to go, then I'm comfortable with moving in that direction. But really, it all starts with understanding how to leverage before. And I think it's just understanding that it's all about events. It's all about events. Everything is going to be about events moving forward. That's what your conversion API is all about. It's capturing what information do you want to capture and then what you want to send back. And then we can do I mean, we can do an episode on conversion API when I have a better, more thorough understanding, I guess, of how to kind of dispel kind of the mysteries behind it. But that's going to be another time. Okay. I know that we covered a lot in this, and the main goal is not to confuse you. The main goal is actually to try to encourage you to start thinking about events again. I've said this multiple times in this podcast. It all starts with how you think about funnels, and how you think about digital marketing.

A lot of the stuff that we can get caught up in is, yeah, like I said earlier, this one weird Facebook ad hack. It's all about YouTube ads. It's all about TikTok ads. And at the end of the day, what it is, is about it's about data. That's it. It's about data. Did it work or did it not? And so if we learn how to think about the data first, we learn how to think about a framework in the context of a funnel. Whether it's something coming to click funnels, whether it's something that goes to a landing page, whether it's something coming to an eCommerce store, whether it's something coming to a regular local business website. Fundamentally, they're all the same. They have to work on data. They have to work on this proof. And so if you can understand how to set up that element of proof, then you're really going to be able to start stacking different ad platforms or different marketing strategies on top of it. So really, at the end of the day, it really starts on that. So let's see. Do you erase the code for G? Ford? That's a good question.

So, Chris, last question. So you have a code on your website for UA. Do I need to erase the code for Ga four? Let me get back to you on that. I do not know the answer to that question. In things like Calendly, they have integrations for both. Shout out to Calendly for doing it the right way. They will send events to both your Universal Analytics and your Google G4 Analytics at the same time. That's what I think businesses should be doing. So that's what I think SAS partners should be doing. But there's a lot of SaaS partners right now who only let you choose one. So it's either G4 or UA. It is not both. The answer that I would have to you is this. Chris, I don't know if you should migrate away from universal analytics yet, right? G4 might be a good spot to just test for a little bit. At the end of the day where I am going in and I'm looking at the majority of my data is still in universal analytics. So I'm prepping myself and I'm prepping our partners for the future when universal analytics gets sunset. 

But until then, I still think it's the best source of truth for us to make decisions on. So don't go, don't hop into G4 just because it's the new thing. If all of your data is sitting there in universal analytics, I would just continue using that as much as possible. And then in adding on the G4 as we go, it's a little bit harder with eCommerce websites, I think because what you could do is you could just nest G4 inside of your Google Tag Manager, and then you could have Shopify connected to your Universal Analytics, and then you could also have G4 connected to your website via GTM. So that might be one way to do it or vice versa if you would rather do that. The one thing that you have to remember with Shopify is if there's a direct integration, it is going to be sending those events and that we talked about, that page view, that view content that add to Cart, all of those things you might have to go in. So if you're currently integrated with universal analytics, if you want to hook up G4, you would want to do it through Google Tag Manager, but you would have to manually create all of those triggers or those events that are going to send people.

Like, okay, if it says, add a cart, then I'll send the event, or if it's viewed content or anything like that, you might have to do a manual setup and that might get you into the weeds. So yeah, let me do a little bit of research and I will show you I can get back to you or keep them both. Ideally, it would be both. That's what I'm doing for all of our clients. What we're doing is we are using universal analytics and G4 at the same time. We're setting up conversions in both at the same time. But at the end of the day, when there are decisions to be made, we are using universal analytics for the majority of our clients. Why? It's because we can send in better data. We have those five new team layers where we can get down to the ad level. It's just a lot cleaner. So yeah, ideally that's a great question. Should I use universal analytics or should I use G4? Ideally it is installed. Both of them, send data to both of them. Use universal analytics as your main data hub for now. And then while you're learning this, G4 continue to learn this.

And so in July of next year, 2023, when Universal Analytics has sunset it and there's no more data being sent to it, hopefully you have your G4 sort of optimized and set up with historical data too, so that it's not starting from scratch. So that's a really good question. Really good question on that. So ideally, yes, keep them both. All right, folks. Well, that was kind of fun. I hope you enjoyed watching that. Again. I know most of the folks watch us after the fact on YouTube, and folks listen to this on the podcast as well, on Spotify. So I do appreciate you guys turning into Date. Chris, thank you for the great questions on that. I think there are many more questions that are probably going to come from this. Again, a lot of this is technical, but I would say, really, where to start with this is in Google Tag Manager. Understand what you can send into G4. If you can understand Google Tag Manager and just kind of start your thinking there, it's going to make a lot of these downstream things a whole lot easier. And you're going to be able to think about your website.

You're going to be thinking about, okay, what triggers do I need to send in and how do I capture them? Right? The G4 and Facebook and all that, are the capture devices. They're capturing the event. It all starts with how you send the events in the first place. So really what you're trying to do in GTM is unlock your ability to think of new events and what you can track. And hopefully that this podcast or this episode was a little helpful in you just thinking in the right way. So the last thing I'll say is this. If you want to learn how to think about this the right way, in my opinion, you can check out our Mastering Funnels. Let me put this up. You can check out our Mastering Funnels course. I do think it really helps. Again, when I went to go develop this Mastering Funnels course, really, it came from this. It came from a frustration of looking outside and looking all around and seeing either coaches or courses and all of this, like focusing on a specific platform. Nothing wrong with that. Makes total sense. I get it. But there are very few people out there teaching how to think about funnels, how to have this fundamental framework of how do I go and approach any funnel, whether it's ecommerce, whether it's legion, whatever it is, it all starts in your brain.

And that is the most powerful part of where you can start. So what I did is I developed an evergreen process of how to think this through. It starts with this architecture, how to think about your architecture, and what that would look like. Then it goes to conversions. What do you think about events and conversions? Right? And then it starts to understand. Okay, well, how do I send in traffic that can connect to these conversions that are built off of this architecture? And those are called UTMs. And then after that, it's like, okay, well, how do I set up this retargeting so that if people do click through, I'm not letting them set up go out the back door? And then it starts with and then it finishes with how to think about inbound traffic and how to use split testing and data and all of this. And it's really platforming agnostic at the end of the day because you'll be using these methods across all the different platforms, whether it's Google or whether it's TikTok or whether it's Facebook or anything. So quick look for that. I think it works. I think it's helpful. And again, it's sort of an evergreen process where the Facebook UI is going to update the TikTok UI is going to update Google Ads. 

I mean, there's updates in there all the time. What I didn't want to do is make a course that is always, I've done that. And by the time you publish it, it's sort of outdated. And so mastering funnels is really and truly a process of how to think about this from the get-go. So you have good backing. So, all right, guys, I am over time and I am, I don't know, five of them. This is kind of fun. I really do enjoy talking about this. Thanks for the questions. Thank you for those people who commented on our posts that were now posted everywhere all the time. It's fun to see that going out. It's fun to see it working. It's fun to see our content marketing machine come alive. There is more to talk about that in 2023. We've got some good stuff in development. I should say so, yeah, I do. Thank you. Thank you for the questions. Thank you for watching. Thank you for the listenership. I do truly enjoy it. Hey, we're 17 podcasts in. This is doing all right. So if you do have a question, if you're watching this after the fact, go ahead and drop it down below somewhere in the comments, wherever you're watching this.

And then I can address it on the next podcast. In the meantime, and until and have a great rest of your week, be kind of one another and I'll see you in the next one. Sorry. Peace."