Integrating VWO With Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

About This Integration

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the next generation of Google Analytics that enables you to collect visitor data on your websites and apps for analytical purposes. By integrating your VWO account with GA4, you will be able to create GA4 audiences right from VWO and also import your audiences from GA4 to your VWO account.

ATTENTION: Before proceeding, you must first check the installation of the GA4 code present on your website. If it's installed via Google Tag Manager(GTM), please perform the preliminary steps for one-time set-up mentioned in this article. After that, you can perform the steps highlighted in this article to further configure the integration setup as you require.

Enabling GA4 Integration in VWO

In order to enable GA4 integration for your VWO account and apply the integration for your campaigns, perform the following steps: 

1. Log in to your VWO account.
   
   
2. From the left panel of your VWO dashboard, go to Configurations > Integrations page, which provides integrations that can be enabled at the workspace level. By doing so, the integrations are applied to all test campaigns in the future by default.
   
   
3. Click on the Google Analytics 4 integration tile and click Enable Now.
   
   
4. Once done, the Google Analytics 4 screen within the Integrations page looks like this:
   
   If you wish to enable the Google Analytics 4 integration for your existing campaigns, select the campaign, go to Configuration > Integrations, and select Google Analytics 4.

Configuring GA4 Integration

Upon enabling the integration, you can configure the integration to set up GA4 audiences through VWO and also import audiences from your GA4 account into VWO. For this, you will first be required to connect your GA4 account with VWO. To do this, perform the following steps:

1. To connect your GA4 account with VWO, from the main menu, go to Configurations > Integrations > Google Analytics 4 > Config (Optional).
   
   
2. In the Advanced Options section, you can configure the bilateral transport of your campaign audience data between VWO and GA4. To facilitate this, click on the Sign in with Google button to sign in to your GA4 account.
   
   
   NOTE: Before signing in to your Google account, remember to configure your browser to allow popups.
3. Post confirming the Google account to connect with VWO, you need to grant VWO access to the following by clicking on Allow:
   
   
   1. • Edit Google Analytics management entities
      • See and download your Google Analytics data
      • View and manage your Google Analytics data

   

4.  

Setting up VWO Campaign Variations as Audiences in GA4

VWO allows you to create audiences in your GA4 account for your VWO campaign right from your VWO account. It enables you to set up the different variations/combinations that you create in VWO as audiences in GA4. This way, it saves you from having to repeat configuring your filters in GA4 to create audiences.

To set it up, perform the following steps:

1. Select the Enable GA4 audience creation through VWO checkbox and click Save.
   
2. Now, you will be able to set up the visitors of your versions in VWO as audiences in GA4. You can do this either while setting up your campaign or post its creation. While setting up a campaign, on the Others page, under the Integrate with third-party products section, select Google Analytics 4 and click on the Set up Variations as Audiences in GA4 button that appears.
   
3. In the Set up Audiences pop-up that appears, select the GA account and its corresponding property. This will enable the Audiences section and populate all the versions of the campaign whose visitors are to be set up as audiences in GA4.
   
4. Enter the names of the versions in their respective text fields. To remove a version, click on the Delete icon corresponding to it.
   
   
5. Once done, click Save. This will start creating the audiences in GA4.
   
   NOTE: The newly created audience will be added to the Audience dashboard in GA4 within 24 to 48 hours. Post that, you can view the reports corresponding to the audience. If any of your audience reports are missing data, it may be due to the threshold constraint applied by GA4.
6. Once the set-up is done, you cannot modify any existing audience but only remove them. To do so, click on Manage Audiences.
   
7. In the Manage Audiences popup that appears, click on the Delete icon corresponding to the audience that you wish to remove. To remove all, click on Delete all. In the Delete confirmation popup that appears, click Delete.
8. Once done, click Save to apply the changes.

Creating Reports in GA4

After creating your audiences, you can use them in your GA4 account to compare the data relevant to the respective parties. You can create comparisons among the variations and control to view parameters such as bounce rate, average session duration, etc. 

For example, consider that you have run a campaign in VWO to promote a discount offer. For this, you have set multiple variations to offer the same discount in different ways. After creating audiences in GA4 for these variations, you can set up a comparison for these audiences to view their corresponding responses relatively. You can compare successful purchases, cart abandonment, high-value purchases made using this discount, and so on. To do this, perform the following steps:

1. On your GA4 dashboard, go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition. This shows the acquisition overview of all users by default.
   
2. You can add a comparison to it by clicking on Add comparison. On the Build Comparison panel, specify the dimension as Audience name, select the relevant audiences that you want to include for comparison, and click OK. Then, click Apply.
   
3. Now that you have set up all the audiences, you can set up the metrics for which you want to view the performances of the individual audiences. To do this, click Customize report.
   
4. On the Customize report panel, you can add the parameters such as bounce rate and checkouts, etc. For this, go to Metrics > Add metric, select the relevant metric, and click Apply.
   

You can now see the report of the specified audiences for the specified metrics.

Another way to analyze the VWO visitor data in GA4 is to build custom reports in GA4 based on the values pushed from VWO via the integration. To do this, perform the following steps:

1. Under Explorations, click on Blank to create a new exploration from scratch.
   
2. Under Variables > SEGMENTS, click on ‘+’ to create a new segment.
   
3. In the Create a custom segment section, click on User segment.
   
4. In the segment creation popup, click on the Add new con… dropdown and search for Experience - variant ID and click on it.
   
5. Now, you can add filters to the selected condition by clicking on the + Add filter button, specify the condition in this format - VWO-<campaign ID>-<variation or combination ID>, select the At any point in time option, and click Apply.
   
   NOTE: To find your campaign ID, select your campaign and navigate to Settings > Summary > Other Information. The IDs for the control and the variations/combinations are assigned such that the control has an ID value of 1, variation V1 / combination C2 has an ID value of 2, variation V2 / combination C3 has an ID value of 3, and so on.
   
6. Click on SAVE AND APPLY.

Now, you can add metrics and dimensions as required to further drill down your VWO campaign audiences in GA4. You can customize the report by adding more segments to compare. For example, you can track the set of visitors who have viewed a specific product page variation and made the purchase successfully. For this, you can set up the conditions as follows:

1. In the segment creation popup, click on Add sequence and specify the VWO campaign and variation whose visitors you want to track.
   
2. Click on Add step, use Page path as a condition and set the filter to specify the payment acknowledge page that confirms that the visitor has made a successful purchase.
   
3. Click on SAVE AND APPLY to view the corresponding report.

Importing GA4 Audiences Into VWO

Via the VWO<>GA4 integration, you can also import the audiences created in GA4 into your VWO account to target the visitors for your campaigns. For example, you can use the audiences that have abandoned the cart just before checkout and provide them with a variation / combination where they can avail of a special offer that would aid in complementing the purchase.

Perform the following steps to import the audiences into VWO from your GA4 account:

1. Under the Config tab, select the Use GA4 audience to target visitors in VWO campaigns checkbox and click Add audiences from GA4.
   
   
2. In the Add GA4 Audience popup that appears, select your GA4 account and the corresponding GA4 property from which you want to import the audiences.
   
   
3. If the GA4 property you selected has sub-properties, you can select the sub-property from the dropdown menu.
   
   
4. The corresponding audiences will now be populated as a list. Select the ones that you want to import into your VWO account.
   
   
5. Once done, click Add.

The audiences that you have imported will appear as a list as follows:

The imported audiences will need to be synced with your GA4 account. Initially, this occurs as an automatic process, which would consume a maximum of 20 minutes. Later on, you can sync up all the audiences by clicking on Sync all or sync up audiences selectively by clicking on the vertical ellipsis (⋮) > Sync along the respective audiences. You can view the status of the sync under the Sync Status column. The following are the statuses that will be displayed respectively:

• Sync in progress - The audience is being synced.
  
  
• Synced - The audience is synced.
  
  
• Session expired - When your GA4 login session has expired.
  
  
• Permission denied - When signed in to a different GA4 account to which the audiences are not connected.

Targeting VWO Campaigns Using GA4 Audiences

In order to use the imported GA4 audiences to target your VWO campaigns, perform the following steps:

1. Refer to this article to learn how to create an A/B test in VWO.
   
   
2. While creating an A/B test, on URLs (for non-Data360 accounts) / Pages (for Data360 accounts), click More Options > Enable campaign for a specific visitor group > Custom Segment. If you are trying to apply the GA4 audience to an existing campaign, you can access URLs (for non-Data360 accounts) / Pages (for Data360 accounts) by selecting the campaign and going to Settings. 
   
   
3. Click on the first dropdown and select GA4 audience list.
   
   
4. You can choose to include or exclude the visitors belonging to the audience list by selecting either of In list and Not in list options. For example, you may want to run a campaign targeting those visitors who have already purchased a certain product previously. Or, you may run a campaign to issue a discount to the visitors who haven’t availed it.
   
   
5. In the last dropdown, select the required GA4 audience from the list.
   
   NOTE: If you just have only one audience, the field gets auto-populated with it.

Verifying the Integration Setup

Post setting up the integration, you can check if the integration setup is complete by verifying the network calls to identify the data pushed from VWO to GA4. To do so, perform the following steps:

1. Right-click on the page where your test campaign is running and select Inspect Element.
   
   
2. Before checking the network calls for GA4, the respective visitor must be part of the campaign. To verify it, navigate to the Application tab, where you can find the _vis_opt_exp_{CAMPAIGNID}_combi cookie that appears when the visitor has become part of the campaign.
   
   
   
   INFO: To know about the cookies stored by VWO, refer to this article.
3. Under the Network tab, search for “collect” to filter the network calls for GA4.
   
   
4. The network calls get populated as the page loads. You may reload the page to view the network calls.
   
   
5. Select a network call to view further details.
   
   
6. To verify the passing of campaign data from VWO to GA4, under the Payload tab, scroll down to see “en=experience_impression&_ee=1&_ep.exp_variant_string=VWO-<campaign ID>-<variation ID>”, indicating the values pushed by VWO.
   

Troubleshooting Tag Configuration

VWO auto-detects the Google tag on your website. However, if you have installed GA4 in a complex way, you can manually specify the Google tag installation mode details such that VWO identifies the appropriate tag to push the data to. The Having problems with Google tag? section under the Config (Optional) tab allows you to specify the mode through which you have installed the Google tag. To do it, check Select the tag installation mode and select either of the following options:

• • Direct - Select this option if you have installed GA4 on your website directly.
    
    
  • Via Google Tag Manager - Select this option if you have installed GA4 via Google Tag Manager and specify the variable name that is used for the Google tag in case you have customized it. Click here to learn how to configure GTM to integrate GA4 with VWO.