GA4 - and Search Queries

Has that bird actually flown?

[chewy]

Great thread here about yet another disappointment from Google. GA4 still seems pretty awful more than a year later.

[webmasterworld.com ]

Where I'm at today was I was just asked by a long - time colleague, client and partner about GA4.

I basically said whatever this product was today, it does not appear ready for prime time - and you all in that last thread said it pretty good too.

So - the question was then asked "what about key words / phrases etc?

I said - no longer available - what was once a gold-mine is now down to 10% or less.

My friend said - what about old-fashioned log-file analysis?

I said - nope - not much there - anything you see there from Google is highly restricted to what Google wants you to see and what the big G bounces back to your webserver. Lots of goodies stripped out. And yes, no trove of missing keywords, at least not this decade. So zippo for KWs, KPs, Organic Search Queries or whatever they are actually called these days. Zippo. Nothing more. Maybe some other keywords from a handful of other SE's - but not much.

Am I right? Is there any reason to dust off my FTP client and go digging around with multi-gig size "referer" files - (remember that) ?

Almost 20 years and who needs KWs anyway?

I do. My clients do. Oh well.

[NickMNS]

So I'm not sure about GA4, so far I'm only using it on a website that is still in development so no traffic comes from search. But if I had to guess, keywords would be buried in the "Aquisitions" tab, where exactly and if at all, I couldn't say.

I do have a keyword hack to share. On some Apple iOS 14 devices when users are using the Google search app the search queries are appended to the url as params, and params include the search query, un-edited and un-biased. In regular analytics this traffic appears as direct traffic, but you should be able to filter it out of your raw logs very easily.

The data is sparse, I get only about 1% of my total traffic that includes these params, but given sufficiently large amount of traffic, or taking traffic over an extended period you can get a good amount of keyword data. But the most important part is that this data is not filtered or biased by Google and it will provide a really good and representative sample of your overall traffic. Google's kw data is biased to show the widest possible breadth of keywords used. This can be good for discovery, but it over represents in-frequently used keywords and under represents the most frequently used ones and in the end the kw data is not really usable for much.

There is more info in this thread I posted when I first discovered the hack:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[jpalmer]

Gidday Chewy

As far as I can tell, GA4 doesn't have keywords. You'll need to flip over to Search Console for those, and they are limited to 1000. But at least you can download a csv / excel sheet from there.

Depending on how much traffic you're getting, that might be enough to d/l each month to have the basic data.

Having watched GA4 for the last 12 months, it's definitely a "BETA" product imo. But I have a feeling that given the way I keep getting Data Studio spruiks popping up in my existing UA analytics; that Google is trying to get GA4, search console, data studio, Big Data and other Google reportings tools integrated for reporting/presentation purposes.

While they say GA4 evolution is because of EU and other jurisdictional privacy provisions, and the changing nature of site visitation from desktop to omni channel; it wouldn't surprise me if the "free" products/services are phased out, and a subscription is introduced down the track, as they recently did with Google Sites/Workspace.

FWIW, the more I use GA4 the less enraged I feel. If I can get a handle on the "events" trigger report side, it might even be more useful to me for some types of more complex reports I just haven't been able to winkle out in a single UA view/report. (e.g. age range + device type + TOD + landing page/group + repeat visitor etc.) But we shall see.

Hope this is useful

Cheers
JP