Google Analytics 4 is an analytics service that enables you to measure traffic and engagement across your websites and apps. GA4 was developed to better focus on customer privacy due to the recent implementation of privacy laws, while also being an advanced property allowing privacy-first tracking, AI-driven predictive analytics, and cross-channel data measurement.

It comes as a replacement to the original Google Universal Analytics, which stopped processing data on July 1st 2023.

How to set it up:

If you log in the Freespee Dashboard and access the integrations menu, you should see an option for Google Analytics. In there, a few new settings have been added as optional, to use with GA4.

In the UAid section you need to add your Measurement ID for your GA4 account.

You should see a new field as "API secret (only for GA4) (optional)". To create a new secret, navigate to: Admin > Data Streams > choose your stream > Measurement Protocol > Create - in your Google account. 

More on Secrets here.

Optional Settings:

• GA4: Send as one event regardless of call was answered or missed (optional): By default our integration will send data to Google with each call as an event named after the status of the call, as Freespee_Call_Answered or Freespee_Call_Missed. Ticking this box will ensure all calls are simply sent as an event named Freespee_Call instead. 
• GA4: Custom event name (optional): We send calls as Freespee_Call_Answered or Freespee_Call_Missed as the Event name, or just as Freespee_Calls if you use the option to do so in our Settings. However, you can use this option to decide what the Event name will be in your end if you prefer something else. If you still want the status of the call, using the default settings, you can receive Events as "your_event_name_answered" or "your_event_name_missed".

• "Unique caller time frame" is an optional setting that will ensure that an event is not sent within the selected timeframe if it's from the same origin number calling.

• "When to send data to GA" allows the option to delay sending the data.

• UA/GA4: Don't send static numbers events (optional): if this option is selected, we will prevent static number calls to be sent to Google.
• UA/GA4: Send goal value as event value (optional): This means that if you have defined a campaign and pricing-model in Freespee, or if you have changed the price of a call retrospectively using our API, this setting changes so that the actual value decided for the call is sent instead of the call duration in seconds (i.e. a monetary value).

Note on using GA4 with Google Universal Analytics:

IMPORTANT: Google Universal Analytics stopped processing data on July 1st and we can no longer send data. More on this here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11583528?hl=en 

Legacy:

You can set in the Freespee dashboard the UAid for Google Universal Analytics (the original GA) and add also a measurement ID for GA4 together, comma separated, for example: 
 
"UA-25579283-68,G-ABC123" 
 
In the past, if the UAid field was blank, our system would pick it up automatically from the cookie to communicate with Google Analytics, but if you add a GA4 tracking id in this field in Freespee, you need to add the UAid for GA as well (if you want to track in both), as it won't be automatically picked up; that only works if that field is blank.  

What we send:

Freespee sends an event to GA4 with a label as either “freespee_call_answered” or “freespee_call_missed” by default, depending on the status of the call (or a custom name if you used that option, or without the status in the name if you selected that setting).

Then, for each call we include the following parameters:

currency => Currency setting of the Freespee account (for example EUR or GBP)
value    => Call sale/commission value (if any)
status   => Call status (Can be "answered" or "missed")
duration => Call duration (in seconds)
channel  => Call channel mapping (as set by Freespee)
source   => Call source mapping (as set by Freespee)
medium   => Call medium mapping (as set by Freespee)

To be able to extract and use these parameters in your end in Google, you'll need to create custom dimensions/metrics in Google to take the parameters we send from the event. More details here: 

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10075209?sjid=15459753087278746405-EU 

You can analyse the data from event parameters using dimensions and metrics in GA4. Anytime Google doesn't provide a dimension or metric for an event parameter, you must create a custom dimension or metric in order to see the event parameter value, so you will have to create custom metrics/dimensions for the data we send with each event. 

While we can send every call to Google (including calls to Static numbers for offline conversions), with the new GA4 integration, Google is connecting the events we send to an online session using their own data (the client ID). With Google being in control of this part of the matching, please note that events sent for calls to Static numbers or calls to dynamic numbers where we are unable to obtain a client ID will make it impossible for Google to map these to an online session in their end. 

Any questions about our script loading order, we have an article here. 

And that is it! We hope you can start using this integration, and any questions or feedback at all, feel free to reach out to support@freespee.com