We often find ourselves having to preemptively explain what might come, or not come, from incorporating more data into our scope. Normally that means merging disparate data source, but even something as simple as appending GA4 website analytics data to our paid ad data can bring more questions than answers for a client. Consider that there’s always a difference between Ad Clicks and Website Visits, which isn’t intuitive but is very critical to examine in some circumstances. To the average client, a click on an ad is a visit to a website. That’s not always true, especially from some lower quality placements or in-app placements where users didn’t intend to click the ad.

In Google Ads especially, because of shared and automatically created assets that don’t contain URL parameters that we’d normally use to tag & track our efforts, GA4 data isn’t a true representation of your total advertising efforts. GA4 data is a representation of the site as a whole, inclusive of true organic traffic and traffic that the site deems organic, but was really driven by something else. Still though, bringing session duration, engagements, and particular Key Events back into our paid ad data and reporting can be illuminating. We just need to be sure the client understands what they’re looking at, and why it looks the way that it does.

The same goes for offline data, which we often ingest and house alongside the digital ad data that we normally depict for clients. In this case, it’s more about having a report that shows you all of your paid efforts and results, rather than attempting to make direct associations as to what digital sources are responsible for specific offline conversions or events. On that note though, Google has great tools for using offline data (name and email) to attribute back to ad activity.

We’re always looking for problems to solve, and we’re happy to show you how we do it. Drop us a line here or email us directly at info@whitelabeldigital.co for more info.