Every Retailer and B2B business needs to plan how replicate GA Universal's "Page Value" metrics in GA4.
What is "Page Value" and why is it important?
Page Value metrics allow businesses to see the pages on a site that contribute to a consumer completing an action that is of commercial benefit: buying a product or service.
This method of measurement enables a business to determine which pages are of both high and low "value". While this will be represented in a monetary value (in the data), the actual translation is the value these pages deliver to consumer buying journeys.
The pages that are (and are not) adding value to consumer needs.
Many retailers and their eCommerce teams gravitate to heat mapping tools and videos capturing consumer behaviours. But there are inherent issues with both.
Heat Mapping:
While this tool can provide some insight, it only looks at a single page. Consumer journeys comprise many pages, many steps and (commonly) multiple sessions. To focus on a single page delivers partial value.
Heat Mapping becomes valuable when Page Value data identifies poor performing pages first. In this scenario, heat mapping can focus on the poor performer and potentially find specific issues with that page to improve journeys.
Video of Consumer Journeys:
The issue here is, businesses should never make decisions off the analysis of a small volume of journeys. Watching 20 to 30 consumer video's is not enough trending data to definitively conclude there are issues with certain journeys.
Page Value data enables a business to analyse thousands of journeys and tens of thousands of data sets in a single report which can accurately call out issues with journeys and specific sections of a journey.
This is the type of insight which forms the foundation to define change that matters. Businesses can better leverage the pages with high Page Values and fix the ones with low Page Values.
The Issue:
Now that GA Universal is no longer available, the access to this data has disappeared: it's not available in GA4. This issue has been compounded by the fact that GA Agencies, while they are gifted, are data geeks.
Having these Geeks are an important part to setting up GA4, but they are not behavioural specialists, they are data specialists.
The Solution:
The Geeks need to collaborate with an Online Behavioural Specialist who can guide them as to what to measure. This Online Behavioural Specialist should be first working with the business to define the journeys that are important to monitor. Then produce a "Behavioral Measurement Brief" which the Data Geeks must follow.
Only when the above process is followed, will the business have data and insights that will add value and inform future decision making.
Conclusion:
Look at GA4 as a powerful weapon that no one has ever used before and has never been trained to use. In the wrong hands, this can do more harm than good.
GA Universal was the most powerful and underutilized business tool in the world. And because GA4 is harder to configure to access the right data and insights, the risk is, this will follow the same pattern of underutilization.
BUT if a business can work with the right people and get this tool/weapon working strategically, it becomes competitive advantage.
I have been leveraging Page Value data for over 10 years and have seen firsthand, the power these insights deliver in activating change that take the performance of online channels to entirely new levels.
This article was as tagged as Data Driven Decision Making , Data Gathering