How to Create Custom insights in Google Analytics 4 for Marketing Data Interpretation?

The marketing industry is ever-evolving and there is a heap of data collected every minute of a day. We are surrounded by a ton of information from varied sources but have no idea how to put them into action. This is precisely what GA4 is designed for – to help us gain insights from our data on our conditions relevant to our business. Do not wait and plan your migration and/or set up with us today.

A lot of exceptional features of GA4 have been covered in our blog series, like Data exploration, Subproperties, and Predictive Audiences. Let’s look at another powerful feature of GA4 this time – Custom Insights.

With GA4 custom insights, we can now generate insights and uncover anomalies for those metrics that may otherwise go unnoticed. How does this directly help you? By providing expert recommendations on what to do next based on the insights and eliminating the need to spend hours going through mountains of data yourself. Custom Insights in GA4 lets you utilize the power of machine learning along with your data-driven skills.

Types of GA4 Custom Insights:

1. GA4 Automated Insights:

Automated insights are the built-in Analytics intelligence that detects unusual changes or emerging trends in collected data and notifies you accordingly. The Insights dashboard in the GA4 console visualizes the trends for important metrics based on machine learning.

2. GA4 Custom Insights:

Custom Insights is also based on Analytics Intelligence that detects changes but on conditions that you will define. The insights are visible on the Insights dashboard when the user-defined conditions are triggered. You can optionally receive notification alerts on your email while creating custom insights if your user id has property-level access.

Apart from using Custom Insights for data quality, they can also be used to quickly and accurately answer everyday questions about your data. Like how Organic Search is performing compared to Paid Search and what conversion events are driving the most conversions this week compared to last week. Custom Insights can be informative and can provide early or emergency warnings for anomalies in your data.

The configuration limit for Custom Insights is 50 per property so it becomes important to use these slots strategically. It is not recommended to create Custom Insights for every metric but the ones important to your business.

These insights once automated will be visible on the bottom of the home page and the advertisement snapshot.

To see a full list of insights, manage insights, or create new custom insights, click View all insights. You need Editor or Analyst level access to create or edit custom insights. Follow this link for steps to create custom insight.

The Insights dashboard shows a summarised view of all recent automated and custom insights. Click on the card to see more details for any specific insight. Every time you interact with an insight card, Analytics Intelligence learns which one is important to you and sorts these cards accordingly.

GA4 Custom Insights Used Cases

1.   Let’s say you are running an experiment for Karnataka users and your daily Karnataka revenue is around 3 lakhs which you are now expecting to reach 5 lakhs. You can utilize Custom Insights to receive a notification once your revenue for Karnataka users goes 5 lakhs or beyond.

2.   Consider a scenario where you have launched a campaign and expecting a good number of new users per hour. You could create a Custom Insight for Anomaly Detection for Hourly New users so that the system intimates you as soon as there are 0 users recorded for an hour. This helps you take instant action and rectify any issues that might be causing the drop.

3.   You are running a remarketing campaign on users who have added products to your cart but never purchased. This is a high-intent audience and you are expecting a good number of purchases in the next 15 days.

While you do have an option to create Custom Insight on Conversions, the default setting allows you to configure it for all Conversions and not a specific Conversion event (purchase event in our case).

Quick Hack:

The audience feature in GA4 allows you to segment your users based on the dimensions, metrics, and events. Let’s create one to achieve our case

• Navigate to Configure >> Audiences and click on “New Audience” in the top right corner.
• Click on Create a custom audience

• Create a purchase audience and select the purchase event

• Now head back to your Custom Insight configuration and use this audience as a segment to create purchase event-specific Custom Insight as below:

Conclusive Thoughts

We hope that along with collecting data, you will explore GA4 for its insightful features and use Custom Insights to its full capabilities. The data is here, you just need to create insights and review them to make data-driven decisions. Custom Insights is also very helpful in monitoring positive changes and tracking issues. 

So how are you planning to use this powerful feature of GA4? Let us know in the comments section and reach out for any questions.