Integrate Google Analytics with Conductor (GA4)
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Important Note: These instructions describe the process for integrating Google Analytics' current GA4 properties. Integrations with Google's Universal Analytics (UA) properties are no longer available in Conductor in advance of Google's planned deprecation of UA.
The Google Analytics integration is a page- and site-level integration for Conductor with your corresponding Google Analytics profile. With this API-based integration, organizations can use Conductor to:
- Manage and measure the performance of their content for their most important pages.
- Identify and improve poor-performing content.
- Identify and protect existing high-performing content.
- Prove ROI and show the importance of organic search to the rest of the organization.
Review the content below to learn how to setup and modify the integration and to review frequently asked questions about best practices and about how the data appears in the Conductor platform.
Integrate Google Analytics with Conductor
This document includes the technical requirements and instructions for integrating content-level analytics with Google Analytics. After completing these instructions, Conductor will begin to collect data from the selected Google profile and show it in Conductor.
Technical Information
Permissions
To configure this integration, users may have any permission level in Google Analytics—as long as they have access to the Google Analytics account and property you want to integrate.
However, any changes in your Google account needed to accommodate this integration must be made by a user with Editor permissions on the account. Conductor recommends identifying an Editor or Administrator in your Google Analytics account to provide any necessary support or guidance.
Data Delivery
After completing this integration, Conductor publishes up to 24 months of the most recent data for your chosen metrics. The amount of data published depends on how far back data exists in your integrated Google Analytics account.
Then, Conductor begins making daily requests for your metric data from the Google Analytics profile you specify. Each Monday, data for the previous seven days (Monday-Sunday) Conductor aggregates and publishes your data to correspond with Conductor's search and rank data publication.
Limitation of Google Analytics API
Because of limitations of Google Analytics, authorizing more than ten Conductor integrations with a single Google user profile might cause all ten integrations to fail. To avoid this issue, authorize or create an additional Google user profile for each set of ten integrations you authenticate.
Data Sampling
Depending on your Google Analytics account, the Google Analytics API may send Conductor a sample of your data to represent the full activity occurring on your site—rather than the entire data set Google Analytics gathers.
Conductor will always use all the data sent through the Google Analytics API so that we can publish as much data as we can for you.
However, this may mean that the data does not match exactly between what you see in Google Analytics and what you see in Conductor. Even if you can see the entire, un-sampled data set in your Google Analytics account, Google Analytics might still send only sampled data through its API, and Conductor can publish only that data. This is a universal limitation of the Google Analytics API. Any other platform that integrates with it will also have the same limitation.
Read more from Google about data sampling in GA4 in this article.
BEFORE YOU START
Data Stream Protocol Setting
For Conductor to crawl the HTML on your site’s pages and for rank data to appear on your domain’s Page Details reports, you must ensure that the protocol set with the property you configured with your GA4 data stream matches the actual protocol your site uses (either http:// or https://).
Confirm the protocol your site uses and then make sure this matches the protocol set in you GA4 data stream:
- Log into your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin section.
- Under the Property section, click Data Streams.
- Locate and click the data stream you are using for this integration with Conductor.
- In the Stream URL field, review the setting to see if it is set to the same protocol your website uses.
- If it is, no changes are needed, and you can continue with these integration instructions.
- If it is not, click the Edit icon for the Stream details section and choose by clicking the protocol to toggle between http:// and https://. Note that, to make changes to this setting, you must have Edit permissions. When you confirm that the selected protocol matches the protocol your site uses, click Save.
Consider Configuration Options Carefully
How you configure your integration or integrations should reflect your reporting needs and the way your web analytics profiles are configured. Consult Conductor if you have questions.
Instructions
Note that you can click Save Progress at the bottom to save you integration until you want to return and finish the process.
Before beginning, ensure your browser is logged out of any Google accounts (such as Gmail, YouTube, etc.). Doing so prevents you from accidentally attempting to integrate a personal or other non-relevant Google Analytics account with Conductor,
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Go to Web analytics ↗️ in Conductor or:
- In Conductor, open the Settings menu.
- Select the web property group to which you want to associate your new integration.
- Click Web Analytics.
- Click Add a New Integration. If you have no available integrations, contact Conductor Support.
- From the Analytics Provider menu, select Google Analytics - 4.
- Click the Authorize Access to your Google Analytics account button. Alternatively, you can select a Google account from an existing integration.
- Enter the email and password associated with your organization’s Google Analytics account and click Sign In. Note that, as a best practice, Conductor suggests using email aliases for integration purposes rather than your work email address. Review this FAQ on Google refresh tokens to learn more.
- Allow access to Conductor. The New Google Analytics Integration screen appears.
- In the Integration Details section, select the Account and Property from your Google Analytics account that you want to integrate.
Note that:
- You cannot choose a specific data stream from your GA4 property: Conductor will publish organic data from the entire integrated property you select here.
- Users integrating a Google Analytics 360 Account will see any configured subproperties in the Property menu. Because unpaid GA4 Accounts do not have access to subproperties, they can integrate data only full an entire Property.
- In the Display Settings section:
- In the Integration Display Name field, enter a name for the integration.
- From the Related Search Engine menu, select the search engine or engines for which Conductor will display data through this integration.
- In the Integration Display Name field, enter a name for the integration.
- In the Metrics section, choose up to nine metrics or key events (formerly "conversion events") from your Google Analytics property to import into Conductor. Note that Sessions is selected by default. You can edit a display name for each metric. The values that appear by default are taken from your Google Account.
- Before completing the integration—if you have not already—confirm that your protocol setting (either http:// or https://) in the GA4 data stream you are integrating is set to report on the protocol that your site uses. Review the BEFORE YOU START: Data Stream Protocol Setting section above for instructions.
- Click Save and Complete.
Note that all data from this integration will appear no later than two weeks after integrating.
Modify Your Google Analytics Integration
You can modify the settings of a Google Analytics integration with Conductor. You might need to do this to:
- Update the integration with different admin credentials after the previous admin user leaves your team.
- Other instances where you want to maintain the historical data retained in the integration, but need to make changes to the integration going forward.
Permissions
To configure this integration, users may have any permission level in Google Analytics. However, any changes in your Google account needed to accommodate this integration must be made by a user with Edit permissions on the account.
Instructions
- From the Connections section in the Settings menu, select the web property group with the Google Analytics integration you want to modify.
- Click Web Analytics.
- From the menu of your integrations, click the View / Modify button for the integration you want to modify.
- Click the Modify Integration link.
At this point, you will need to authorize access to your Google Analytics account. Once authorized, you can modify the setting in this integration.
FAQs
Which metrics from GA4 can I integrate with Conductor?
Conductor lets you integrate any non-calculated metric from Google Analytics 4 that can be applied to the following combination of dimensions: Hostname, Landing page + query string, Session default channel group. This may mean that a metric you track in GA4 is not compatible with Conductor's integration.
Google's pre-built metrics listed below are compatible with Conductor's integration. You can find definitions for these metrics in Google's documentation.
- sessions
- addToCarts
- adUnitExposure
- checkouts
- conversions
- crashAffectedUsers
- ecommercePurchases
- engagedSessions
- eventCount
- firstTimePurchasers
- newUsers
- publisherAdClicks
- publisherAdImpressions
- purchaseRevenue
- screenPageViews
- shippingAmount
- taxAmount
- totalAdRevenue
- totalPurchasers
- totalRevenue
- transactions
In addition to these pre-built metrics in GA4, you can also integrate any custom events or key events (formerly "conversion events") you have configured for your GA4 account.
Metric name limitations
To follow standard naming conventions for analytics metrics, integrated metrics must contain only letters, numbers, and underscores. No spaces should appear in a metric name. Metrics with invalid characters will cause errors in the integration.
However, Google does not prevent you from creating events and metrics with spaces. To prevent errors during integration, you can rename metrics according to Google's instructions and update any metrics that might include invalid characters.
Can I filter the analytics data brought through the GA4 integration based on the part of my site it comes from?
Unlike Google's previous Universal Analytics platform, GA4 does not use Views that you might create for different reporting uses. These were commonly used to report on different localities that you might host on different subdomains or subfolders on your site. Because there are no longer Views with GA4, you cannot integrate a specific View in Conductor—which means when you integrate GA4 you're integrating all your site data.
In Conductor, if you have different web property groups created for subdomains on the same site, the platform automatically filters integrated GA4 data for those subdomains. When you select to see data for that subdomain from the web property selector in a report, your analytics data will reflect only metrics gathered from that subdomain.
However, if you have different web property groups created for subfolders on your site, Conductor cannot filter the data automatically. As a result, when you select to see data for that subfolder from the web property selector in a report, you'll continue to see data from your entire site.
If you use subfolders to report on your data through different web property groups in Conductor, consider creating page groups for each of those subfolders. This will allow you to filter for only data gathered from those subfolders.
Can I filter the analytics data brought through the GA4 integration based on a data stream configured in GA4?
No, Conductor publishes all organic data for the integrated property. There is no configuration for data stream in Conductor.
What are Google refresh tokens and how do they affect my integration strategy?
Google’s API—which sends your data from Google Analytics to Conductor—limits the number of integrations a single user can create to 25. This is accomplished on the backend of their platform with what they call Tokens. Every time a user creates an integration, another Token is used. When the user creates a 26th integration, the very first Token used expires and that first integration fails.
For most organizations using Conductor, you will likely never use all 25 Tokens. However, for large, enterprise organizations, you might need many more than 25 integrations based on your integration strategy.
To address this, Conductor recommends creating different email aliases created specifically to use for integration purposes. If you need to create 75 integrations, you would need at least 3 aliases, based on 25 tokens per alias.
If you need help with your integration strategy, and help to determine how many aliases you need to create to accomplish your integration strategy, please reach out to Conductor’s Customer Success Team.
Why don't my metric values in Conductor match my Google Analytics values?
The most common reason you don't see matching values across Google Analytics and Conductor is that you're not looking at the right data in Google Analytics. This occurs because Conductor collects data from Google Analytics in a specific way that you might not be replicating manually in your Google Analytics account.
Confirm Your Google Analytics Values Match Conductor's Reports
You can create a custom exploration in Google Analytics 4 that reflects the same filtering Conductor uses to determine what data to show in its reports. Configuring the filters in the manner listed below will produce the data in the same configuration you see in Conductor.
- In your Google Analytics 4 property, use the navigation on the left to go to Explore.
- Start a new Blank exploration.
- Configure your exploration in the following manner using the controls on the left. Any controls or field not mentioned below may be left as is:
- Dates: Enter the exact dates this exploration uses to match the dates in Conductor for the data you want to match
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Dimensions: Select and import the following dimensions:
- Hostname
- Landing page + query string
- Session default channel group
- Metrics: Select and import Sessions and any other integrated metrics you want to check
- Rows: Select Landing page + query string
- Values: Select Sessions and any other integrated metrics you want to check
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Filters:
- Select dimension "Session default channel group"
- Select match type: "exactly matches"
- Enter expression: "Organic Search
Why this configuration?
The most important thing to understand is dimensions.
- Hostname. We use the hostname to match your tracked web property—any hostnames that don't match the tracked web properties domain hostname are filtered out.
- Landing page + query string. This is the URL that appears in the SERP and the URL with the content that Google deems relevant to the keyword.
- Session default channel group. We only report on organic data so any traffic that comes from a channel group other than Organic Search is filtered out.
Note that If you report on organic traffic in other ways, the values will be different. Additionally, the values might be different because we specifically collect organic data from Google SERPs—your reports may include other types of organic traffic.
Analytics data still not matching?
Google may be sending a sample of your data. Read more about data sampling in this FAQ.
What is data sampling and how does it affect my integrated Google Analytics data?
Depending on your Google Analytics account, Google may send Conductor a sample of your data to represent the full activity occurring on your site. As a result, there may be differences between sampled data that appears in Conductor and the data you see in Google's interface.