Do we need GA on every page to track user engagement?

[Skips]

Hello All!

We recently rolled out new functionality on our platform, which seems to be resonating very well with users: new registrations have nearly quadrupled, registered users are adding almost twice as much content, and return visits have significantly increased. We're seeing all this directly from the raw database data, not through any analytics tools.

Despite this spike in activity starting overnight after the release (about a week ago), Google Analytics shows no trace of it. Absolutely nothing. This makes me question whether GA is even useful in our case.

Currently, we only have GA tracking on pages where organic traffic lands, but not on member pages. With all that JavaScript, I'd assume GA could still capture increased user activity, right? We’re hesitant to add GA to every page until we understand what we get out of it.

I've been looking at engagement metrics like average engagement time and engaged sessions per user. Perhaps, I'm looking in the wrong places?

Any thoughts on this?..

[lucy24]

If you want to track everything that happens on your site, you need to put analytics code on every page. Javascript is page-specific; what happens on {page} stays on {page}.

Whether you want, specifically, GA or some other analytics package--in particular, something that lives on your own site as opposed to somewhere else--is a whole nother question.

[Skips]

Thanks for the feedback. Tracking user engagement with JS is pretty straightforward - at least for basic metrics like how long users stay on the page and whether they interact with content. We have GA set up on all main pages, but despite noticeable changes in user engagement over the past week, none of that seems to be reflected in GA. It makes me wonder: what is all that GA code doing if it’s not capturing these elementary things and do we need it?

[londrum]

Been a while since I last used GA but in the past im sure it used to estimate some numbers based on a sample of your traffic to speed up the reports

[Skips]

Thanks. I'm just wondering if it really provides any value... Another thing, we have simultaneously implemented email notifications, which, we know, is drawing visits from older and recent users - but that's not anyhow related in the GA4. ...or I'm looking in the wrong places, but the user aquisition graph shows zero changes for the past 6 months... I think we're going to be ditching the GA and simply go by actual usage stats. No reason feeding G with all user data and getting zero valuable insights into user trends...

[NickMNS]

GA4 is completely different than the old UA version. If you want to track user action it needs to be explicitly added. For example if you want to track whether users are signing up to a news-letter you need to add the code to the sign-up button to trigger the a "sign-up" event. From one respect its annoying because you need to add sprinkles of GA code throughout your pages, but on the other hand it give you the ability to track with fine grained detail where needed and leave it out when it isn't needed. I think, that they offer some no-code or low-code options that allow you to setup events from the GA dashboard, but I haven't ever really used it.

With respect to email notifications, you can add GA4 tracking code to the links in your emails to track things like which links were clicked.

GA4 offers a lot more features and functionalities than UA did, but it isn't as simple and user friendly as the previous version was. They have also intentionally #*$!ified the service in a attempt to get users to pay for upgrades, most notably the lack of same day data. Sure, there is real-time data, for last 30 minutes, but after that you need to wait 24 to 48 hours to get reliable and accurate data. Like WTF?

[Skips]

oh wow, didn't know all that. Thanks for that insight, Nick. So, basically, unless I want to dive deep into learning the ins and outs and properly setting up GA4 the only thing it's good for is very basic info, not much more beyond total number of visitors and their geography... With that I guess, it makes no sense having GA4 for our use case. Also makes easier dealing with all that cookie notification craziness... thanks again!

[tangor]

Also bear in mind that a fair number of users have JS disabled by default. You won't get everything if that is your tool of choice. Meanwhile, don't forget raw site log analytics, third party or hand-rolled. There's a lot of information there just waiting to be found.

[Skips]

As much as websites of all sorts rely on JS, I can't imagine a lot of users having js disabled, but a valid point to take into consideration - thanks. We've recently experimented with Yandex Metrica for analytics, and so far, it seems to be the optimal tool for our needs. Its interface is intuitive, making it easy to find what we need. Plus, it offers some invaluable features that Google Analytics doesn’t have, such as session recording (fantastic for improving UX) and heatmaps.

[NickMNS]

Also bear in mind that a fair number of users have JS disabled by default.

That is simply not true. The best stat I could find was fewer than 0.1% had js disabled, but it wasn't from the most reliable source. To me that number seems like an over estimation, ie: someone stating a number to mean a very small amount. Today, most of the web is broken to user without JS. Facebook, Instagram, X-#*$!ter, Youtube, Tiktok and even Google search now requires JS.

As for raw server logs, sure you could code an endpoint(s) that could be requested for each and every user interaction you wish to track. Then you'll need a server side script to filter your logs so that you can make sense of all those requests. You'll probably want to store the data so that it can be easily queried, so add a database instance to the stack. Don't forget to create whole separate front-end UI dashboard so you can read your stats easily on a regular basis.

Personally, I prefer to focus my energy on creating content and leaving things like user analytics to 3rd parties. Don't get me wrong, server logs are important even critical, but they are not solution for tracking users and user interactions with your site.

[Skips]

Yeah, frankly, I lean towards NickMNS' suggestion. But thanks everyone for their input.