How does GA4 capture information? - Google Analytics Tutorial

- Understanding the technical details of how Google Analytics works isn't necessarily a requirement of using GA4, but it can help you understand what can and can't be captured, and why there are limitations on what we can track. What I'll cover in this lesson also isn't necessarily just specific to GA4. Most analytics programs work in exactly the same way. When you're adding analytics to a website, you're adding code that will watch what's happening in your visitor's web browsers and then report that back as raw data, which is then processed into something a little bit nicer done by the analytics program than it's displayed to you. The code that the analytics program uses is JavaScript, and that's because it's a programming language that amongst other things, allows you to send and receive information from, for example, a visitor's web browser, and then send that information elsewhere such as to GA4. But you don't need to know how to code in JavaScript or even how it works in order to use Analytics. Instead, you can watch what GA4 is doing as you engage with websites. I'll show you how to watch what GA4 and other analytics programs are doing when you engage with websites, and not just for your own website. You can use this tool on any website at all. The tool I'm using is an extension for Chrome called Omnibug. You can get it on the website, omnibug.io. Once you've added it to your browser, we've navigated to the Wisdom Pets website and then I'm going to open up Developer Tools. There's a few different ways to do this. If you're on a Mac, you would select Option + Command + J or if you're on Windows, Shift + Control + J or the F12 key. Once you've opened up Developer Tools, which is shown over here on the right hand side of the screen, click these arrows here, and then choose Omnibug from this list of dropdowns. If you don't see anything right away, you might need to refresh the browser, but we do already have a page view event showing up here. If I open that up, you can see some details about it, but what I'm going to do first is I'm going to scroll down to the very bottom of this page. And then in a moment we'll see a scroll event show up as well. Note that it does take a little bit of time before events pop in from GA4. They aren't sent immediately. So, you can see there was a small delay between me scrolling to the bottom of the screen and the scroll event actually showing up at Omnibug. Now, let's open up this Page View event and take a look at it. On this General tab, I have some information above the page that I'm on. It has the document location, that's the URL of the page right here. It has the title. It has the screen resolution down here. And then there's the tracking ID. If I scroll down, and then there's this whole other section here, which is where most of the technical pieces of information that gets sent off to GA4 exist with every event. You really don't need to worry too much about those. If you're looking at other websites, you might see another section in between General and Other called Events. Here I am on my own website, and so you can see there's a lot more events that have loaded up. I'm going to open up a Page View event so you can see additional information. Now you can see I've got the Summary tab, the General tab, and then there's whole Event section in here. And you can see the extra information that's being sent off to GA4. These extra pieces of information are called event parameters, and I discuss them further in the lesson using event parameters effectively in GA4. I didn't need any special access to view this extra information. In fact, I can still use this extension on any website at all. I find it really interesting to use in competitors' websites and see what kinds of things they're capturing, which can give me ideas on what we should be tracking. Now that you're a bit more familiar with using Omnibug, I recommend keeping it open over the next few days as you use websites normally, and just see what happens to come up for you. You may not see anything at all. For example, if you go to Google, you won't see anything show up because Google blocks Omnibug from capturing anything. But in other websites you'll see a wealth of information. And of course, it's really helpful to see how your own analytics is set up and what events are already being tracked. That can help you understand your own data in GA4 and how it got there.