A strong connection: Ryte and Google Analytics 4

In this blog post, we will guide you through the process of connecting your GA4 property with Ryte and highlight the benefits of doing so. Regardless of whether you've already connected a Google Analytics account or not, this guide has you covered.

First things first: Connect GA4 and Ryte

In short: to connect a GA4 property to your projects, go to the Settings and find your project in the Project list. Click the GA4 icon next to the project name, in the GA4 column, to open a pop-up window to connect your property. 

Once your connection is established and your property is linked to your project, the GA4 icon in the project list changes its color from grey to orange. 

This was too quick, too brief? Then let’s do it step by step: 

1. Click on the dropdown menu, in the upper menu bar on the right side.

2. Open your Settings by clicking on the settings icon next to your organisation name. 

3. In your Project List find the GA4 icon, in the “GA4” column, on the far right.

4. Click the analytics icon to open up the connector pop-up window.

5. In the pop-up, select your Google Analytics account from the dropdown menu and confirm by clicking the blue “Select account” button. If you have not yet established a connection, click “Add new Google account” instead and follow the instructions.

6. If a connection was established, choose in the next pop-up the property you want to link to the project from the dropdown menu below your project name. Then click the "Link selected property" button to confirm.

7. In the final pop-up window, click “Start a new crawl” to have your Google Analytics data imported to your Ryte account. 

Please note: Only account owners and managers can create the GA4 connections. 

The benefit: Get more data for better insights

If you're looking to get your website on point, connecting your Google Analytics property to your Ryte account is a smart move. By doing so, you can view Google Analytics data as an extra column in certain Ryte reports and filter these with the available Google Analytics metrics described below. These additional data points and filter options make it easy for you to discover great optimization potential, prioritize tasks, and evaluate the implemented measures. Basically, it lets you focus on tasks and pages that bring the most value to your business. As said, a very smart move to save time and resources.

But what kind of data do you get exactly? Let's explore the variety of data available upon connecting Ryte to your Google Analytics.

The data: All available GA4 metrics in the Ryte analyses

• Total Users
  The number of distinct users who have visited a particular page and logged at least one event, regardless of whether the site was ‘in use’ when that event was logged. If you’re interested in only analyzing users who have interacted with your page, consider looking at ‘Active Users’ instead.
  

• Active Users
  Compared to ‘Total Users’, this metric only includes users that were considered as ‘engaged’ during their session. By default, these are users who stay on your website for 10 seconds or longer or had 1 or more conversion events or 2 or more page views. Essentially this excludes ‘bounces’ - users who immediately leave your website without interacting with it at all.
  

• Event Count
  The total count of all GA4 events tracked on that particular page.
  

• Sessions
  The number of sessions during which a particular page was visited. Usually, this number is higher than the amount of Active Users - since if a particular user returns to a page after 30 minutes of inactivity this would be counted as an additional session.

• Views 

  The number of web pages your users viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted. So if the same user accesses a particular page 3 times during the same session - all 3 page views are counted here.
  

• Bounce Rate
  The percentage of sessions during which a particular page was visited, that were not considered as ‘engaged’. By default this is the share of users who didn’t stay on your website for 10 seconds or longer, had 1 or more conversion events, or 2 or more page views. Assuming your website had 100 sessions and during 90 of them, the user stayed for 10 seconds or longer, your bounce rate would be 10%.
  

• Total User Engagement Duration
  The total amount of time (in seconds) your page was in the foreground of users' devices. In practice, this describes the total time that all users spent on a page.
  

• Average User Engagement Duration
  The average amount of time (in seconds) a user spent on that particular page. This is calculated by dividing the ‘Total User Engagement Duration’ by the amount of ‘Active Users’

Please note: Currently, you cannot add custom GA4 metrics to your Ryte reports. If you're missing a specific metric, please contact our support team. If you want to learn more about the new GA4 metrics, here's an awesome article from Google that breaks down the differences between tracking in GA4 and Universal Analytics. 

The analysis: How we present your Google Analytics data

Google Analytics data is included in each Ryte report where it is useful for analytics purposes. Hence in reports like, Slow Pages, Duplicate Page Titles, and Duplicate Descriptions. However, you can also manually add GA metrics to any customizable report. If you are missing your GA data in a particular report, please hit up our support team for assistance. Also, your GA data is elementary for our Sustainability Insights report to evaluate your carbon emissions.

The Google Analytics data presented in the listed Ryte reports are based on the last 30 days. So, for example, if you analyze the data of a crawl that was completed on January 31st, Ryte will add the data of the selected metrics for the previous thirty days: January 1st to January 30th. Currently, you cannot customize this date range. 

The past: What happens with the Universal Analytics data

Your Universal Analytics property will stop collecting new data on the first of July 2023 as announced by Google. Since Ryte imports data for the previous 30 days of an analysis by the end of July 2023, you will practically no longer see any Google Analytics data from Universal Analytics properties in your Ryte reports for any new analysis that you start. We, therefore, decided to no longer support the possibility to connect new Universal Analytics properties to Ryte with the launch of Google Analytics 4.

Existing Universal Analytics connections will be in place until August 21, then we will remove them for good throughout the Ryte Platform. No need to delete them manually from your side.

However, for all past analyses that were at that time connected to Universal Analytics, data will remain available in the Ryte reports. The same is true even if you disconnect Universal Analytics from your Ryte projects.