How to analyze Product Guide impact in GA4

This guide describes how to track shopping behavior of guide users when you’re using Google Analytics 4. You can also read more about guide tracking in general.

How to identify guide users

All links from product guide to your product detail are marked with this parameter:

?outfindo_source=guide_results

To see how people behave after they exit the guide and whether they convert or not, we will need to create a segment.

How to see products purchased thru guide

1) Create a new exploration

In the left menu, click Explore and the create a new one.

2) Import metrics and dimensions

Click the plus icon next to Dimensions and Metrics.

You’ll probably need these dimensions:

• Month
• Item category

And these metrics:

• Active users
• Items purchased
• Item revenue

3) Create a segment of Guide Users

1. Click the plus icon next to segments.
2. Select User segment
3. Click Add new condition
4. Search for page_view
5. Click on Add parameter
6. Search for page_location
7. Under condition, enter Contains guide_results

The result should look like this:

4) Add values

Add all metrics into the Values box.

5) Filter item category

Under Filters, add a new filter for Item category and enter the name of the category of the products in the guide. For example “Bikes”.

The name depends on how you send your data into GA, it may be different for each company. If you’re not sure, try to add Item category into Rows and you will see which category names you use in your data. Then you can use the right one as a filter.

6) Report is done

You should have now everything you need.

To make the report look a bit better, you can select First row under the Pivot field and set Cell type to Plain text.

Your report should now look like this:

Compare to products purchased by category visitors

Now that we know how many products did guide users buy, we may want to compare it to the total number of sold products. To make the comparison relevant, we will only want to see products purchased by people who visited the categories where the guide is. Typically, many people buy straight from product detail – and we don’t want those in our data because the guide couldn’t have influenced their behavior.

We will only need to add one more segment, although a bit more complicated one.

1) Create a regular expression for categories

First, we need to capture the URLs where the guide is running using a regular expressions.

The regex should look like this:

.*(category1|category2|category3).*

In place of category1 and other, enter URLs where the guide is running on your website. Just the page path, not the full URL (not https://www.mysite.com/category1, just category1).

2) Create a segment of Category users

1. Create a new User segment
2. Click Add new condition
3. Search for page_view
4. Click on Add parameter
5. Search for page_location
6. Under condition, enter Matches regex
7. Enter your regular expression from the first step

3) And you're done

Now add the segment into your report. The result should look like this:

Now you can see how many products you sold from relevant product categories and how many of them were influenced by the guide.

Need help with setting up the report? Get in touch.

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