Applying for a mortgage is a means to an end. Whether the “end” is a new home, funding for a home remodel or investment property, or saving a few hundred dollars a month with a lower mortgage payment, and the application is simply a step towards the prize.
The trouble is that for many consumers, the mortgage application isn’t “a step.” It’s a hurdle.
With seemingly endless intimate financial questions, unfamiliar terms, cumbersome process of requesting and submitting documentation, and a mishmash of paper docs and online apps for completing the process are frustrating, to say the least.
So frustrating that most consumers abandon their 1003. One startling statistic revealed that about 78% of consumers back out of transactions solely based on a poor online experience.
So what does it take to create a favorable mortgage experience? A study conducted by McKinsey discovered that there are four factors that mattered the most when it came to creating a pleasant online application experience: reassurance, transparency, simplicity, and speed.
When comparing old school processes with modern mortgage software, which do you think does a better job in those four areas?
Customer Experience is the Real Differentiator, and Mortgage Application Software Delivers
In an industry where competing with numbers is the norm, mortgage pros often forget how vital the experience is in the borrower’s journey. That same Mckinsey study demonstrated that not only were those four factors essential to an exceptional experience, but in regards to what consumers desire, they were nearly as crucial as saving money.
In other words, most mortgage applicants in the study were unwilling to sacrifice an excellent experience for lower interest rates.
So if you’re looking for ways to boost your mortgage application conversion rates, you must provide what consumers desire above all else —a superior mortgage application experience.
Key Areas Where An Online Mortgage Application Boosts Conversion Rates
Optimized For Mobile
Over 50% of all web traffic comes from mobile, and this trend is growing every year. This means that a mobile-optimized mortgage application is foundational to increasing conversion rates.
However, beware of poor-quality ones. Tiny details like too small buttons or awkward navigation placement can make your conversions plummet. So when shopping for a quality mobile-friendly online mortgage application, look for items like drop-down menus, checkboxes, large enough content boxes, and easily accessible buttons and explainers.
Bite-Size Where Possible
The mortgage application can be a lengthy process, and some may even feel it intrusive. Smart online applications reduce intimidation by breaking into smaller steps. This can be accomplished by having fewer questions per screen, pre-populating information where possible, asking more sensitive questions later in the application, and displaying a progress bar to how much more is necessary to complete it.
Details matter!
Features like animated graphics or simulated text messages lighten the mood and encourage the applicant to continue. Applications with a single sign-on feature and the ability to flip from short pre-qual to full 1003 (without having to re-enter data) empower the consumer and boost their confidence, ultimately influencing your conversion rates.
Self-Serve Efficiency
Self-serve efficiency refers not only to the ability of the consumer to DIY it, but also the speed and ease in which they are able to do it.
With key features like real-time notifications of changes or next steps alert and reassure the borrower that things move as swiftly as possible.
Has the loan been approved? Don’t make your enthusiastic borrower wait a minute longer. Use mortgage software that allows borrowers to download their approval letter instantly!
Mortgage Software Transforms Your Conversion Rates
With estimates that over 5.1 billion people are browsing the internet via smart devices, your intake must meet modern online consumer behavior if you want any hope to raise your conversion rate.
LenderHomePages’s digital mortgage tools are precisely the mortgage software to do it with.
Our customizable and brandable software helps originators streamline their workflows, connect with borrowers, expedite funding, strengthen customer relationships, and automate with self-serve efficiency –all of which increase application conversion rates. Plus, online mortgage software like Loanzify POS allows originators to handle a higher volume of loans and be more productive without adding new hires.
Take the first step towards success with a conversation. Schedule a live demo with one of our account executives today!
Do you ever feel like you are wasting time and money on content syndication?
Marketers seem bound to ever-increasing and hard to achieve lead goals. As a result, they are being forced to work with a disparate mix of publishers to reach buyers with their latest content.
Join Matt Mullin, Sr. Director of Growth Marketing at Tenable, and Stephanie Swinyer, Head of Revenue Marketing at Integrate, and learn how you can streamline content campaigns across publishers and enforce a 100% marketable lead data guarantee.
The latest edition of Google Ads Editor has been announced and includes many new features and views:
What’s new?
Overview page: A new view has been created in Google Ads Editor, “Overview”, which is similar to the Overview page in the online Google Ads Editor interface.
Auto-apply view for Recommendation: Auto-apply, a new view under Recommendations, allows you to enable or disable automatic application of certain recommendation types.
Support for asset-based call extensions: Google Ads Editor now fully supports asset-based call extensions, also known as “Call extensions (upgraded)”.
Support for asset-based price extensions: Google Ads Editor now fully supports asset-based price extensions, also known as “Price extensions (upgraded)”.
Target CPA recommendations for Display, VAC, Discovery: For some accounts, Google may provide Target CPA bid recommendations for new Display, Video Action (also known as “Video – Drive conversions”), and Discovery campaigns.
Why we care. Make sure to go through the list and determine which new features will best serve your accounts and clients when you use Google Ads Editor. These features should make it easier for you to manage campaigns and advertising strategies for all your accounts when you’re not online.
The European Union’s General Court has rejected an appeal by Google and upheld a $2.8 billion fine against the company, originally levied in 2017 for favoring its own content in shopping search results. Separately, the UK Supreme Court ruled in Google’s favor in a 2017 class action-style lawsuit in which the company was accused of illegally collecting data on iPhone users.
The EU’s General Court upholds $2.8B fine. In 2017, the European Commission levied the largest antitrust penalty in its history up to that point — 2.4 billion euro ($2.8 billion) — against Google for allegedly favoring its own comparison shopping service. Google appealed the fine but, on Wednesday, the EU’s General Court upheld the European Commission’s 2017 decision, stating, “The General Court concludes its analysis by finding that the amount of the pecuniary penalty imposed on Google must be confirmed.”
“The General Court finds that, by favoring its own comparison shopping service on its general results pages through more favorable display and positioning, while relegating the results from competing comparison services in those pages by means of ranking algorithms, Google departed from competition on the merits,” the court said in a press release.
Google can file another appeal with the European Union’s highest court, the EU Court of Justice, but the company has yet to state what course of action it intends to pursue.
UK Supreme Court dismisses lawsuit over alleged tracking of iPhone users. Although Google lost its appeal in the EU, the UK Supreme Court ruled in its favor in a class action-style lawsuit which also dates back to 2017. The lawsuit claimed that Google bypassed the privacy settings of 4.4 million iPhone users in the UK between 2011 and 2012. The claimant, Richard Lloyd, former director of consumer rights group Which?, alleged that Google cookies gathered user data on race, health, sexuality, ethnicity and finance, regardless of users’ “do not track” privacy settings in the Safari browser. The damages could have cost Google up to three billion pounds.
“The claimant seeks damages … for each individual member of the represented class without attempting to show that any wrongful use was made by Google of personal data relating to that individual or that the individual suffered any material damage or distress as a result of a breach,” the UK Supreme Court said in its judgement.
Why we care. In the EU, the General Court’s ruling may strengthen the European Commission’s drive to regulate big tech, which doesn’t bode well for other platforms — like Amazon, Apple and Facebook — that are also currently under investigation. This also adds momentum to the proposed Digital Markets Act, which threatens to end self-preferencing in app search results. In addition, the tighter regulations may ultimately work in favor of Google’s competitors in the shopping vertical.
Google would have suffered another substantial blow if the UK Supreme Court ruled against it, since the decision could have paved the way for more class action-style lawsuits. In the UK, such lawsuits currently require people to opt-in, which can draw out the process. This also carries implications for other platforms, such as TikTok, which is being sued over the use of children’s data.
It’s no secret that it’s a job seeker’s market right now. While the pandemic may have initially hampered companies’ investment in SEO and PPC, as the lockdowns continued and more people took their lives online search marketing became paramount. Even anecdotally, I noticed an uptick in businesses interested in SEO services as they realized that they needed to be found online now more than ever.
Employees are getting antsy for career development and advancement. This shift means that search marketers have the power to set the tone for what’s next in their careers, but we’re not the only ones. According to Prudential Financial’s Pulse of the American Worker survey, 26% of workers planning to switch jobs post-COVID, 80% are doing so because they’re concerned about career advancement. The pandemic has led to a “very real experience that employees have had around a lack of career progression and a concern around skills development,” says Rob Falzon, vice chair at Prudential. People feel that they have been working hard but have not been given opportunities to advance professionally in their current company, wrote Caroline Castrillon for Forbes.
Shifting search landscapes mean shifting career skills. In search marketing, we’re seeing a move toward the larger players taking away our individual controls and levers. To advance we have to rewrite the old search marketing playbook. Problem-solving has always been our forte, but we have to be even more creative now as data is taken away, more of our processes are being automated, and we have to expand beyond our own siloes to get things done. Leveling up your career — regardless of how you decide to advance it, is all about becoming a strategic leader.
In my opening keynote at SMX Next today, I’m going to go through these nine key tips for becoming a search marketing leader in your area. It’s about more than just your spreadsheet skills (though that’s important too).
A caveat. Before we dive in it’s important to remember that career progression is not always linear. Especially with the fluctuating nature of work over the past two years, you may have found yourself having to take a break to help with homeschooling or taking care of a sick family member. Or perhaps your work increased dramatically faster than you anticipated and you’re still reeling. Whenever you are right now, just remember: You’re exactly where you need to be. And these are the steps to take to get to where you want to go.
1. Tech skill are important.
The foundation of SEO and PPC are technical skills. Search engines are giving us the numbers behind user experience, and we need the quantitative and specialized skills to be able to make those changes a reality. A while ago, someone asked Barry Schwartz what he thought would be a differentiator in SERPs in the coming years, and he replied, “Content.” His reasoning was that technical SEO and PPC skills will become table stakes. We will all need to have them just to get by.
We’re seeing a huge wave of more technical skills in both emerging as practitioners are finding new ways to automate their own processes, pull and analyze data to create reports that matter for each target audience, and manage the more specific back-end details of website accessibility. We’ve always been a technical field, and those skills aren’t going anywhere.
2. People skills are important-er.
While tech skills are table stakes in search marketing, the “softer” skills are often more varied and sometimes harder to come by. There’s, of course, an element of search marketing that’s just, sort of, intuition. Once you’ve been working in the field for a while, you can just tell what searcher intent is with specific queries. You learn your target marketing and your industry so well that you truly understand the people you’re serving.
The other key people skill in SEO and PPC is empathy. Microsoft regularly promotes their Marketing with Purpose Playbook which talks about expressing to your customers that your products and services are for them: “85% of consumers say they’ll only consider a brand if they trust the brand,” said MJ DePalma at Microsoft Advertising. “Authenticity is the most important attribute to brand performance.” Being able to convey authenticity in your search marketing isn’t easy! It’s a skill we have to work to build and hone, but it’s one worth investing in.
3. Not everyone wants to be a manager.
Many times when people move to the next level of their careers, they think it means they have to become a manager. The fact is not everyone wants to manage people. Some people really love the individual contributor work that they do and don’t want to give that up! In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott talks about two types of employees: rock stars and superstars.
Rock stars are the steady rock of a department. They know how to do what they do really well, and they get exceptional results. Their growth trajectory may be more steady, but they love their jobs and don’t really want their boss’s job.
Superstars, on the other hand, are the type of people who absolutely cannot stand the thought of doing the same job two years from now. They have a much steeper growth trajectory and are excited at the thought of taking their boss’s job someday (someday soon, preferably).
The path that I think Radical Candor leaves out is for people who want to go out on their own. They don’t want their boss’s job because they don’t want a boss at all! Any of these career paths are great. And, honestly, you may want to partake in any of them at any time given what’s going on in your life.
4. It’s ok if you don’t have a 5-year plan.
Someone told me once that when she asked for a raise at her job her boss countered by asking for her five-year career plan with the company. She asked my advice, and I honestly didn’t have anything good because 5 years is a long time! Sure, having an idea of where you want to go is great! But no one needs a detailed career map with an accompanying timeline.
So much can happen in 5 years. I bet 5 years ago no one could have predicted COVID-19 and how it would affect the workforce. If a career map makes you feel better, then don’t let me sway you from achieving your goals, but also remember to be flexible in your timelines and trajectories. You may get there a little slower or a lot faster than you anticipated.
5. Work on negotiation.
Regardless of whether you want to be a manager, an individual contributor, or an entrepreneur, almost everyone can benefit from leveling up their negotiation skills. While it can help you increase your salary and get better benefits at work, it’s also a beneficial skill in general. Negotiations are truly just conversations where two sides are coming together to discuss their interests and come to an agreement.
Negotiation skills can benefit you when you’re working with vendors, problem-solving with colleagues, determining scope of work with clients, or even determining whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher at home. Many people are nervous about negotiating, but the most you practice it in everyday life, the easier it gets. If you can work on negotiating in these smaller conversations, the bigger negotiations (like salary!) will come a lot easier.
6. Pursue your strengths.
In his book The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferris talks about relentlessly pursuing your strengths and not worrying too much about your weaknesses. “By improving your strengths over your weaknesses, you focus on multiplying the results as opposed to incrementally fixing your flaws,” summarized Elle McFarlane for Oberlo. In business, this is called, “niching down.” The idea is that YOU know where you are the absolute expert and pursuing that arena would benefit you more than trying to learn everything about search marketing.
For example, I found out about Kristie Plantinga from iPullRank’s People Supporting SEOs list. I found her site really beautiful and asked her how she decided to niche down into SEO specifically for therapists: “I work with therapists because I was going to become a therapist [but] pursued my love of writing instead. Before working with therapists, I worked with lawyers. [I found out that some] lawyers are really aggressive, so I decided to niche with professionals I knew would be kinder and more patient. I didn’t end up working directly in mental health, but now I can support people who do,” she told me on Twitter. She pursued her strengths and area of expertise and serves the therapy community.
Instead of trying to fix all your areas of weakness, find ways to amplify your strengths like Plantinga!
7. Start a win list.
Along with helping in potential job negotiations, starting a win list gives you a tool to help kick imposter syndrome when you’re feeling it sneak up on you. Start by creating a folder on your desktop or Google drive and any time someone says anything remotely nice about you, your work, or working with you, take a screenshot. Put the screenshot in the folder for when you need it later.
This is also a great place to keep a running document of your achievements and projects. Keep track of the quantitative and qualitative wins you achieved (and things you said yes to outside your scope of work). That way, when it does come time to ask for a salary bump, you have the metrics and testimonials to prove you earned it. Plus, you can look at all your win list screenshots and organize them by themes. This will tell you what your superpowers are so you can continue to pursue them (see tip 6 above!).
8. Ask for what you need at work.
As I mentioned in the intro, it’s a search marketer’s job market right now. Not only has the pandemic accelerated the need for SEO and PPC, but it’s also dramatically changed the way we work. We’re working from home more, and it’s been nice to give up commuting and save money on lunches out. But it also means we are balancing more than ever, and there’s often no real differentiator between work time and home time since they all occur at the same place now.
There is a viral TikTok video going around now talking about the 8-hour workday. The premise is that the way our workweeks were originally built catered to those doing assembly-line-type jobs. Nowadays we can work from anywhere and get our work done at any time, so the way companies think about a workday should shift to accommodate that.
All this is to say that you have the power as the employee to advocate for what you need to make yourself a successful search marketer. Ask for what you need and don’t be afraid to ask your coworkers if they’d like to join in the negotiations with you. Now is a great time to consider what you need to do your best work and to talk with your leadership about making it happen.
9. Give back to the search community.
Finally, once you’ve worked relentlessly to become the best, next-level search marketer in your industry, make sure you consider giving back to the SEO and PPC communities. Even if you don’t want to become a manager, you could always give back by becoming a mentor.
I did an informal Twitter poll a while back asking how people learned search marketing. Only 10% of search marketers had a mentor guide them along the way:
Mentorship is one way to help accelerate the careers of others in SEO and PPC. Plus, there are some benefits to you as a mentor:
Improve your communication and personal skills.
Develop leadership and management qualities.
Reinforce your own study skills and knowledge of your subject.
Increase your confidence and motivation.
Increase your network.
The Search Engine Land mentorship program, for example, hosted three mentorship matches each in both SEO and PPC. These mentorships varied in topics from technical SEO skills to how to manage a team all the way to getting your dream job in search. It doesn’t have to be a formal commitment like our program, but any way you can take your career advancements and offer a hand in search will grow the community as a whole.
Career progression isn’t always linear. Whether you’re entry-level or the CEO of a thousand-person organization, there are always areas to continue to develop to improve your career and its effect on those around you. These nine tips are a good starting point to continue to cultivate your career path and keep growing as a human and a search marketer.
New features announced in the Bing Shopping roadmap have just gone live to help shoppers find what they’re looking for at the best prices and to help retailers showcase their inventories in new places.
What’s new? “Deal-conscious shoppers will now see ‘sales’ and ‘price drops’ marked on applicable items, alongside deal rankings that are ‘good’, ‘great’, or ‘epic’. Additionally, shoppers can choose to compare prices across stores or find a product’s price history over time, in just one click,” said Microsoft Bing’s Blog. We first announced this in our coverage last week, as Microsoft works to become more of a recommendation engine for shoppers online: “Using privacy-focused shopper data, the shopping experience will eventually become ‘query-less’ says Chatterjee. Being able to make ‘for you’ recommendations will ‘add another dimension for users.’ Bing will be able to customize shopping suggestions based on these shopper types and the overall retail landscape trends it’s seeing.”
Checkout directly in Edge browser. Along with these deal indicators for price-conscious shoppers, Microsoft Bing is making checkout as easy as possible to smooth any barriers to conversion for shoppers: “When a shopper is ready to buy, they can easily see if their item is available for ‘curbside pickup,’ or can try our new ‘Buy Now’ feature for Amazon products that directly adds the item to Amazon’s cart. We’ve also begun rolling out express checkout on Edge to make purchase just a few clicks on any seller website!”
Why we care. These new features enhance the experience for shoppers who want to be able to compare prices, get the best deals, and know what’s trending — all in a single interface. For retailers, it’s easy to participate in with feed-based Merchant Center integrations, like Shopify. While there is some disadvantage to not being able to make the case why your product may cost more (commoditization of products), having them all in a single view for shoppers can reduce barriers to conversion and easy checkout could improve those conversions. It’s worth trying and monitoring.
Google has is testing adding a few new columns of metrics to the Google Keyword Planner Tool. The new columns we’ve seen on the Google Keyword Planner Tool include year-over-year change, three-month change and trend type.
New in Keyword planner tool. You can access the keyword planner tool over here if you have a Google Ads account. When you run a new report, Google may pop up a message saying “Keyword trends: Now you can compare recent and past keyword trends.”
Google’s Keyword Planner tool helps you research keywords for your Google Search campaigns. You can use this free tool to discover new keywords related to your business and see estimates of the searches they receive and the cost to target them.
New columns. Google has added new keyword trends data including:
YoY Change – The year over year change compares the monthly search volume of the latest month with the same month the previous year.
Three month change – The three month change shows a three month change in search trends by comparing the latest month’s data, with the data from two months prior. For example, if the latest month is July, the July data would be compared to May to show change in search volume over three months.
Three month trending type – This shows you if the trend is going up or down or remaining flat for the keyword. I no longer see this but Google was testing this.
What it looks like. Here are screenshots of these new columns; one from Patrick Garde on Twitter and the other from Arbab Usmani’s on Twitter:
New YoY Change ColumnThree Month Trend Type Column
Google statement. “This is a small experiment. We’re always testing new ways to improve our experience for our advertisers and users, but don’t have anything specific to announce right now,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land.
“This is a small experiment. We’re always testing new ways to improve our experience for our advertisers and users, but don’t have anything specific to announce right now,” a spokesperson told @sengineland. #PPCChathttps://t.co/FEY50fbw37
It looks like Google has continued to experiment with new keyword planner columns.
Why we care. Having more data, be it trending figures for the past three months or year-over-year, can be useful for marketers to see trends and plan their campaigns with more insight. Check out the keyword planner tool and utilize as much of the data Google is giving you to benefit your customers and your own campaigns.
Now is the perfect time for marketers to build on what we’ve collectively learned over the past 18 months and prepare for a comeback by embracing marketing agility.
In this webinar, experts from Adobe share three different ways to increase marketing velocity by focusing on optimizing and becoming more agile in your approach.
“Google is using the new Business Profile to solicit small business support for Google’s opposition to pending anti-trust legislation,” wrote Mike Blumenthal, previous founder of LocalU and GatherUp, for Near Media. After the rebrand from Google My Business to Google Business Profile, many business owners received notification of the name change along with prompts to learn more about “new laws [that] may impact my business.”
Google appeals to SMBs to lobby for the tech giant’s case. While we could not replicate the in-SERP dashboard prompt, Blumenthal included screenshots of his Business Profile where Google tells listing managers, “Proposed legislation could make it harder to find your business online.”
Source: Mike Blumenthal, Near Media
On Twitter, Blumenthal also shared an email sent to Darren Shaw of Whitespark, a Canadian local SEO company, prompting them to “take action” on Google’s behalf to advocate for Google’s position to legislators. The idea is that changes to laws will make it hard for Google to offer the same support to small businesses and therefore will hurt SMBs in the long run.
This is not the first time. When in legislative trouble before, Google has previously tried to appeal to users to make its case when laws change. In 2013, they made the case for cookies by telling searchers in the SERP, “Cookies help us deliver our services.” This was a prompt in response to European privacy laws.
When European laws changed to allow people to request removals from the search index, Google emailed individual page owners to tell them, “We regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google.”
The same happened when French laws required that Google “remove snippets from their search results for European press publications,” wrote Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable. When the EU told Google to stop notifying searchers of removals on individual searches, they followed the request by adding the removal notification to all search pages, said Sam Schechner in the Wall Street Journal:
Google has appeared to bend to regulators’ desire that the company refrain from indicating in search results when something had been removed. Google had earlier indicated it might highlight the removals, something it does when it removes links to pirated content. But EU regulators told Google in recent weeks that such a move would undermine the spirit of the decision by making it clear some individuals had wanted information about them suppressed, one regulator said.
Instead, Google on Thursday added a blanket notification that appears at the bottom of most results for individual name searches conducted on Google’s European search websites, according to an explanation the company posted to its website. The notification – “Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe” – is added algorithmically to searches that appear to be for a name, a person familiar with the matter said.
Why we care. Google’s go-to seems to be to appeal to searchers and businesses who use their services when lawsuits affect how they will run their business. “This effort to manipulate small business folks with astroturfing is a whole new level of deception. It lays bare Google’s intentions to protect their monopoly at all costs. Their attempt to buttress arguments with manufactured alliances, for legitimacy, adds fuel to an obvious fire,” wrote Blumenthal in his oped on the matter. If you work with SMBs and they received the notification, there’s a chance they may be worried about how laws and resulting changes will affect their businesses. While marketers are often more skeptical of the search giant’s methods and motives, it may be worth being proactive to your local SEO clients to let them know what this prompt means.
Google Analytics 4 (or GA4) is a completely new version of Google Analytics. The goal of this post is to share the key differences between Google Analytics 4 and the previous version of Google Analytics that you are probably familiar with and highlight the key features that you should be aware of as a Digital Marketer.
What makes Google Analytics 4 unique
If you were around back in 2013 you might remember when the last version of Google Analytics was launched, called “Universal Analytics”. At that time, you needed to update your tracking code to migrate to the new version, but everything else stayed pretty much the same.
Unfortunately, this is not true about the upgrade to Google Analytics 4. Data is collected differently, stored differently, and even visualized differently. All of this change can be frustrating, but GA4 is quite a bit more advanced than the previous version. Those Digital Marketers who migrate to the new version will be rewarded with an Analytics tool that provides a better representation of user behavior, respects user privacy preferences, and allows you to spend less time collecting and aggregating data.
This is possible because of three technologies that Google has been working on for the past few years:
Firebase Analytics
The first is Firebase Analytics. Firebase is a suite of products for developing mobile apps that Google acquired back in 2014. Firebase Analytics uses something called the “event-driven data model” to better describe behavior and measure user engagement. I will speak more about this in a moment, but the important thing to know about Firebase Analytics is that it is the backend for Google Analytics 4. This means that data captured across both websites and native apps now share a single format.
Google Signals
The second technology that GA4 is built on top of is Google Signals. You’ve probably heard about Google Signals before because this is the identity software that uses Google accounts to recognize logged-in users. It is the same method that Google uses behind the scenes to create audiences, and Google Analytics 4 can now use this feature to recognize users instead of relying on first-party cookies.
The Global Site Tag
Finally, Google Analytics 4 is also built on top of the global site tag. The benefit of this technology is that it allows you to make changes in the user interface that actually change the code that is deployed to your website. As an example, with GA4 you can flip on a feature to track when users play a YouTube video, and the code to do this will be automatically deployed to your site without a change in the tag manager.
So that’s a pretty high level overview, and there’s a lot we can talk about next. But I’d like to dig a little bit deeper into what I see as the most important of these features: the event-driven data model.
The Event-Driven Data Model
First of all, let’s remember what the home screen looks like when you log into Universal Analytics today.
As you’ll notice, sessions are undeniably the most important metrics in legacy Google Analytics reports. When someone asks the question: “How much traffic did our campaign drive?”, the answer is usually given in the number of sessions. When someone asks the question: “Are users engaged with the site?”, then the answer is usually bounce rate (a subset of sessions), session duration, or pages per session. When someone asks the question: “How well are we converting against a goal?”, the answer is usually the Ecommerce or goal conversion rate (both of which are calculated with sessions).
The problem with sessions
The problem with this is that the concept of a session can be difficult to apply to mobile and single-page apps, because the fact is that apps are more variable than traditional websites, and the assumptions that we make about how users experience the web do not always hold true for how users experience an application.
As an example, if you’re a runner you might open a mobile app to track your speed and let it run in the background for hours. How many sessions should that create? Are bounce rate and pages per session really useful measures of engagement in this situation?
How the event-driven data model solves this problem
The solution to these problems is the event-driven data model, because it eliminates the concept of a hit type (social, pageview, transaction, etc), and replaces it with three simple components: events, event parameters, and user properties.
This may seem like a small change, but it strips away all of the assumptions that we previously made about the data. When something happens, it is tracked with an event (ex. link_clicked). Parameters are just pieces of information that describe the event (link_text). And user properties are simply pieces of information that describe the user who initiated the event (current_customer). That’s it.
Google did not invent the event-driven data model (numerous products have been applying it to mobile apps for years), but with Google’s market share, GA4 will be the first time it has been applied on such a large scale. So it’s a new concept to most marketers.
The impact of these changes is that page views and sessions are no longer the fundamental building blocks that they once were. They still exist, but you are not required to use them where they don’t make sense because the focus has shifted to users and events. As you can see in the new Home screen for GA4 below, the most important metric in the Google Analytics 4 reports has changed from sessions to users.
Google has been talking about emphasizing users over sessions for years, but GA4 really forces this change.
The event-driven data model also enables a series of new dimensions and metrics that can be generated without relying on the concept of a session. There are several examples of this, but the first one I want to share is the move from “goals” to “conversion events”.
From goals to conversion events
As you may recall, a user completes a goal in Google Analytics when they take some action during their session. If the action is taken multiple times during the session, we would still only count that as a single goal completion.
GA4 has eliminated the concept of a goal, and replaced it with conversion events.
A conversion event is simply any event that you’ve marked as important to your business. So this could be an event to indicate a lead form has been submitted, a video has been completed, an element has been clicked on, or anything else. As you send data to Google Analytics 4, the “Configure > Events” report will populate with all of the event names that have been received. You can send up to 500 unique events, and you simply flip the radio button to mark any event as a conversion from here. Once you do that, you will be able to import these conversions into Google Ads just like you would import a goal.
Acquisition vs. re-engagement
When you are evaluating how well your traffic channels are driving conversions, you now have to decide if you are evaluating how well you are acquiring new customers or re-engaging existing customers. If you choose the “User acquisition” report, your conversions will use first-touch attribution. But if you choose the “Traffic acquisition” report your conversions will use last-touch attribution.
There are three important things that Paid Search Managers should know about conversion events:
The user can complete multiple conversions within a session
Each conversion event must have a unique name so that it can be marked as a conversion with the radio buttons I showed a moment ago
Qualifying for an audience can trigger a conversion event
This brings us to our next topic: audiences.
Audiences
You might remember that the old version of Google Analytics allowed you to create user segments (for example: all users who added an item to the shopping cart but did not make a purchase). Then, you could promote that segment to an Audience, and share it with Google Ads for remarketing and identifying look-alikeslook-a-likes.
In Google Analytics 4, the concept of a segment has been merged with the concept of an audience. Instead, you simply create audiences. Audiences can be applied to any report, and they can also be shared with Google Ads.
Another thing that is different about audiences is that once you’ve created one, it is automatically shared with everyone else who uses Google Analytics 4. So you do not need to pass links around to your coworkers so that they can download the audience you are using.
Predictive Audiences
And, lastly, Google has launched a series of predictive audiences that can be automatically generated for you (which are similar to the Smart audiences you might be familiar with). These audiences use Google’s machine learning to score the probability that a user will make a purchase or churn within the next 28 days so that you can invest your remarketing budget in reaching the customers who will have the greatest impact.
Ok, so that’s audiences. Let’s talk about engagement metrics.
New Engagement Metrics
A moment ago I mentioned that all of the metrics that were previously calculated based on sessions have changed.
This is important to Digital Marketers because these include all three of the tools that we previously had for measuring the quality of a click: bounce rate, pages/session, and average session duration.
These have been replaced by a new and very important metric that is automatically recorded in GA4 called “engagement time”, which is the amount of time that the user actively viewed your content. If the user is on a mobile app, this is the time that the app was in the foreground. And on a website, this would be the time that the browser tab was active.
Google Analytics 4 then uses this metric to calculate: engaged sessions.
Engaged Sessions & Engagement Rate
An engaged session is a session with greater than 10 seconds of engagement time. You can divide the number of engaged sessions that you had during a time period by the total number of sessions to calculate another new metric “engagement rate”. This is the metric that you will use instead of bounce rate in GA4 (read more about engagement rate here).
Engagement Rate is a much more useful metric for measuring user engagement, especially with sites like blogs and news outlets where a successful session may only include a single pageview.
Active Users
Now I do want to point out that engaged sessions and engagement rate are both session-based metrics. Sessions have not gone away with GA4, despite the greater emphasis on users. But, we also have a new metric called Active Users.
An active user is someone who has had at least 1 engaged session during the date range that you’ve selected.
If you pull up either of the Acquisition reports you can see how these new metrics are front and center. I expect that a lot of Paid Search Managers are going to struggle to let go of the old metrics, but I actually think that this is a big step forward, and I hope that you’ll find these tools to be useful once you become familiar with them.
Before we move on, there’s one more thing that I want to point out about these new engagement metrics.
Improved data import
None of these are impacted when you import external data. The details on this are a bit technical, but this solves a really big problem with Universal Analytics. If you ever tried to upload offline transactions, for example, you created a bunch of single hit sessions in Google Analytics, which drove up your bounce rate and reduced your pages/session and avg. session duration.
This was very frustrating for a lot of analysts, but since those events do not contribute to engagement time in GA4, they do not have any impact on your engagement metrics. This makes the integrations with Salesforce or call tracking tools much more seamless than they were before.
Okay, I have three more items to discuss, and all of them circle around User Privacy.
New privacy controls
First of all, Google Analytics 4 provides a long list of new privacy controls that marketers can use to ensure they are compliant with the latest regulations.
Disable ads personalization
The first is the option to disable Ads Personalization. This is useful for marketers who would like to use Google Analytics to understand user behavior, but who do not plan to build audiences for remarketing. In this case, a user with “Edit” permissions can completely disable audiences for remarketing so that no one in the company can flip it on.
However, Digital Marketers (such as yourself) also have the freedom to flip this on only within specific geographies. So, for example, it’s now possible to disable Ads Personalization within the EU, but continue to use this feature for all other users.
Not for personalization
But even within a geographical region where you are using Ads Personalization, you can exclude specific events that may be private in nature so that they cannot be used to generate audiences.
Websites and apps that collect medical information are a good use case for this. If you have an event that identifies that the user has generated an appointment with a doctor, you may choose to mark this event as “NPA” (not for personalization) so that no one on your team can create an audience that considers this data point.
So those are the most important new privacy controls that Digital Marketers should be aware of, but I should mention that there are also several others.
How Google Analytics 4 is embracing user privacy
I think that it is important to point out that enabling many of these privacy controls will create gaps in your data. And historically, most Analytics tools have worked very hard to eliminate data gaps like this (for example: we use to write code to detect when users are running an ad blocker, we’ve deployed tricks to help recognize users across domains, or when they log in with a different device, etc.). These new privacy features in Google Analytics 4 actually move in the other direction — they give you more controls to embrace privacy when the user requests it.
And the reason is that Google is taking the first steps to transition us into a world of incomplete data, where we do not rely so strongly on cookies.
Over the past 3 years or so, Safari and Firefox have taken large steps to limit how long a cookie can exist, and eliminate cookies that are used for tracking users across sites. Most marketers don’t realize that the impact of this is already showing up in your data.
For example, most websites are right now showing a higher number of users in Safari than they two years ago. This isn’t because you’re driving more traffic, it’s because the cookies that we use to identify a person are being deleted between sessions if those sessions are more than 7 days apart.
So, Google Analytics has to help marketers prepare for regulatory restrictions that are coming from GDPR and CCPA, but they also have the new burden of helping marketers prepare for technical restrictions that are being imposed by browsers.
In response, Google has announced two features that are coming soon to GA4: Reporting Identity and Conversion Modeling. So I’d like to wrap up with a quick overview of what we know about these features and how they will work once they are released.
Reporting identity
Traditionally, Google Analytics has identified a user on the web by setting a cookie (called the Client ID), or by using something called the App Instance ID in a mobile app.
If you’re lucky enough to have logged-in users on your site, you have the ability to set your own unique identifier for users (called the User ID). The benefit of doing this is that you could see how frequently users log in to your site from different devices.
Right now, if you go to your property settings and click on “Reporting Identity” you’ll see two options: “By device only” (which means that you are only using the Client ID and do not have Logged-in users), or “By User-ID, Google Signals, and then device”.
As I mentioned before, this feature will be available for users who are logged in to a Google account on their device and have opted-in to ads personalization (so not everyone). If you enable this feature, GA4 will still use the user ID if it is available since it is the most accurate way to identify a user. But, if the user ID is not available and Google Signals is, then GA4 will use Google Signals to identify the user.
As a result, you will be able to identify a portion of your users across devices, even if they are not logged in. This is important because it means that you will generate very complete data for the small subset of your users who are logged in to Google, using Chrome, and have enabled ads personalization.
Having good information about this small subset of your users will help you fill the data gaps that exist in the rest of the user population. And this is called “Conversion Modeling”.
Conversion modeling
Conversion modeling is different from Attribution modeling. The idea is that Google uses machine learning to fill the gaps that we know exist in our data. So, for example, if we know that Safari is reporting 100 users on the site last month, we could estimate that you probably only had 80 because 20 of those were the same user with deleted cookies.
The downside of this approach is that we are going to become more reliant on black-box algorithms and estimated data. But the benefit is that we can respect a user’s privacy request without the concern that it will cause our data to be less useful for making marketing decisions.
How to get started with Google Analytics 4
If you’ve made it this far, then hopefully I’ve convinced you to get started with Google Analytics 4. My recommendation is to start today, but take it slow. If you’re running an old version of Google Analytics, you can add Google Analytics 4 tags to a website without impacting the existing Google Analytics implementation.
My recommendation is to dual-tag your site, so that data is sent to both versions of Google Analytics for 6 months or so. This allows you to continue using the old version of Google Analytics for your day-to-day reporting, and spend an hour or so a week looking at the new metrics and pulling reports from GA4. Plan to fully switch over to GA4 entirely in 2022 by removing those old tags.
