Transcript for How to View Button Click Data in Google Analytics 4

[Tiffany Sellwood, Presenter] Hey everybody, this is Tiffany from MetricsEdge. I am going to demonstrate how to locate the button clicks that are happening on your web pages inside of GA4 (Google Analytics 4).

So, GA4 is very different from Universal analytics, as many of you probably already know, and I just want to make sure that everybody knows how to navigate to the important information that is helping drive decisions for your department.

So, let’s dive in.

So, here we are in the Boise State GA4 Global Analytics account.

The first thing we want to do is navigate over to the Report section, which is this little icon here with the bar chart.
And, in the Report section, we will go to Engagement, and then we want to go to Events.

And just a, just a note that the default date range will always be the last 28 days, so if you do want to look back further than that you’ll have to change that here, and if you want to do any kind of comparison you will toggle on Compare and then select what period you want to compare against.

For this demonstration, I think we’ll just keep this turned off…keep the default to 28 days.

So, this report essentially is going to show you every event that GA4 is collecting, whether that be some of the default events that GA4 comes with or the custom events that we have added to be collected. And, by default it will only give you 10 rows, so let’s just open this up to show you all of the events available.

So, as you can see, we’ve got quite a few events filing through. The Event that you will want to select is the Clicks button. If it is that you know if you’re interested in actually what buttons are being clicked on your site, and rather than clicking into it what I’m going to do is just isolate filter down to it by just searching for it.

And now we only have how many clicks on buttons were happening. Now, this is going to, of course, include every single click on every button on all of the Boise State ecosystem website, which is probably not what you want. You’re
probably looking for your specific website or your Page path.

So, to filter this down, we want to add a filter that would only include your unit’s website. So if I click Add filter here, it gives you the opportunity to, you know, filter down to any kind of segmentation you want. So here I’m going to use Page path and Screen class.

Make sure you don’t select this Page path here, that is a custom parameter that goes with a different event. We want
the Page path and Screen class, and then you just create a, basically, a rule.

And for this demonstration, let’s just use the sample of Admissions, and I just want to capture any page that has the
Admissions folder. So I’m going to select all values containing Admission and hit Apply.

Okay, we saw the data change, we can verify up here that we have a filter that includes the Page path, Admission.
I realized that says Admission, maybe I should change that to Admissions, and hit Apply again.

Okay, now we have only the clicks on the Admissions website, but I also want to know, of course, which buttons are being clicked. So in order to see what buttons are being clicked, we have a couple parameters to work with. We can either use the Click text or the Click URL.

So, you’ll want to use this Plus button to add a Secondary dimension to this table, and I am going to go to Custom, and I want Click text.

All right, so now I can see all of the button texts that are being clicked on the Admissions website.

Pretty cool. Maybe I also want to know what these URLs are, so instead of using Click text I could go to Custom again
and select Link URL.

And now I’m actually going to get all the links that people are clicking on.

Now, as you can see, this is somewhat limited because we can’t combine those two things together. We can’t see the Quick text and the Link URL, and another thing I would like to see that I can’t see in this view is what pages these activities are happening on.

So, all of that can still be done in GA4, but you just need to do it inside of an Exploration versus these canned reports.

So, I’m going to actually hop into an Exploration report and show you how to create a report like that. So. if I go to the
Explore tab, this is an area where you can essentially create any kind of custom report or analysis that you want, and it
will always be saved in this view for future reference. Here are a few templates in here that you could use that are kind of handy. In this case we just want, you know, pretty much a free form table, but I’m going to just start here with the blank.

So, I’m going to click on this blank canvas, I’m going to call this Admissions…whoops… Button clicks.

And this is where I now start building out my report, so for the dimensions and metrics we definitely want the things that we just looked at. So, we want the Button text…sorry…Click Text, and we want the Link URL, but I also want to know what page these clicks are happening on, so I’m going to select Page path and Query string right here. I’m going to import all those things, so I just included all those.

Actually, I also want to create…I want to add Event name as a dimension because I want to filter to just this click, this Button click event. So, I’m going to import that as well.

And now my metric is simply Event count because in GA4 that’s the only metric we really have because everything is an event.

Okay, so now that I have what I want to drop into my report, I’m going to add the Page path as a row because that’s going to tell me where the clicks are happening.

I want the Click text as a column and I want to add the Link URL as a column.

And then, of course my value is the Event count.

So I’m now I’m going to see how this table comes together.

Okay, so in this table we can see that on these specific pages we have Click text. My Boise State Link URL is
not actually being captured…actually, we can see here that there’s a lot of zeros and garbage, and that’s because it’s looking for every Event and some of those Events don’t have these Click texting, Link URLs because they’re not Click events, so we actually need to filter to the specific event of the Button click. So I want to filter to…my Event name contains search for a button, and you’ll find Clicks button.

Now hit Apply.

Okay, now I can see that on these specific pages I’m getting…let’s see here, on the Public Safety and Transportation [site] people are clicking on the text ‘Boise State Parking Portal’ and this is the link, and this is the number. I’m not sure I like this view, actually, I’m going to go back to moving these columns into rows and see if that’s easier, so just bear with me.

I just want to show you a couple ways of looking at it.

Okay, so now I know this is all crunched together we can see this is the Page, this is the Click text, this is the link
URL, and how many Button clicks. Now, let’s say again we only want to isolate the Admissions website. I’m going to add another event, or, sorry…another filter.

I’m going to filter the Page path contains Admissions and hit Apply.

All right, now I should only see Events, Button clicks that are happening on the Admissions site. So on the Admissions
Apply page, I can see people are clicking on ‘Start your undergrad application.’ If we want the URL, there it is, and this is the number of Events. Now, this is obviously kind of difficult. I’m going to try to squeeze this over so you can see it a little bit better.

If you wanted to just look at a specific page, you could right-click and include only the selection.

And now, we only have that one line to kind of keep things clean. If you want to get rid of that, just go down here to this filter, because what that actually did was create a filter for us, so I’m going to clear that out and if this is still difficult to work with you can download this information using the Export data function right here.

You can export that to Google Sheets or PDF or CSV. However, you want to manipulate the data and then you can also share out this Exploration. So, if this is a report that you think you’re going to use quite often, and you might want to share that with others in your department, if you click this…Share Expiration… other people will also be able to see it when they move into the Explore tab.

So that is how to look at Button clicks on your website. Not as straightforward as I would hope but once you get the report created and saved, then you will only need to just hop in the next time and it will be all put together for you.