mattatnicolebarkerva

Hi @swissspidy !

I just wanted to report back. The GA4 Microplugin is working great. I did notice that all events are now going to the “Event Name” of “Custom”. It’s kind of annoying in GA4 reporting tools because the “Event Action” isn’t available to report on in many instances, so all Custom events get grouped together without the ability to drill into the actual action.

I modified your plugin slightly to change the Event Name to be the same as the Action. So both fields now say “story_click_through” or “story_page_attachment_enter”. It seems to work perfectly in GA4 and all of my reporting for my client dashboard is back online. Not sure if that’s against Google practices, but I wanted to document it here so others have reference, or maybe you would even consider changing yours to do the same.

Thanks as always for the support!

Matt

Thank you @swissspidy ! I will give the custom plugin a shot. I used your micro-plugin in UA and it was great.

Just for feedback to the overall team. To me, the simplest things creators would want to see is

• Story entered
• Pages clicked
• Stories completed (meaning every slide was seen)
• Ad displayed (not sure if this is possible, but it would be awesome to know when the random ads were shown)
• Page attachment clicked
• Link clicked

As far as I can tell, AMP / GA4 by default may support a couple of these things.

Thanks (as always) for your support. The Web Story community appreciates your work greatly!

Thank you for the response @luckynasan , but I don’t understand exactly why you are deferring me to GA4 documentation.

Does the plugin not play a part in the generation of Web Story events? Is there no way for the plugin to create events that make sense and help users accurately track activity?

I was under the impression when you created the micro-plugin for event tracking in UA, that the Web Story plugin team had some responsibility for events being triggered by Web Stories. Is that level of integration with GA4 just not available to your team any longer?

Please help as we currently have very little information from any Google source on how we should accurately track events, click-throughs, and other conversions in web stories.

OK. Thank you for the response. Just to make sure your team understands the gravity of the request (which you probably do…but just to make sure). If there is no resolution in the next 8 weeks there will be a lot of issues as Universal stops collecting completely and everyone is forced to use GA4. I would guess the plugin code will still send all traffic to the Universal collector which will no longer be functional for anyone. Wouldn’t we then lose all reporting capabilities for Web Stories? Even if we can somehow workaround that, sending all data to the same property will create all kinds of issues for your users that display ads and count on segmented data for payment calculations. Hopefully your team is on it already and none of this is news to you. Thanks as always for your amazing support! You guys are great to deal with.

Hi Pascal. Is there any information you can share on general anticipated timing? We have a ton of clients worried about this as Universal approaches its hard cutoff date in 8 weeks. Anything you can share on priority and timing of support for GA4?

• This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by mattatnicolebarkerva.

Adam.

Thank you for the detailed response. I believe I can make the 2nd process work as “compress original images” was on originally. I will give it a shot.

Thanks again for the support.

Matt

Thank you for the response!

There is no specific Google documentation on this topic. We have just found through evaluating many sites that certain image sizes are getting significantly better results in Google Discover traffic.

Unfortunately, I had all the default settings turned on which I believe does not have “Backup original images” turned on. So, my original images are all Smushed already. I can reload them and then I would guess I will have to add the new images again to every page? Can you verify that would be the process…

1. Change default Smush settings to larger sizes
2. Delete existing images
3. Upload full size images again
4. Add images back to all pages they were originally on

Please verify….it would be great if item #4 wasn’t part of this process and once the originals get Smushed again they would automatically replace the ones that are already on pages. Please verify.

Thanks for the help Adam. I will have to consider if and how I can do this. My site has thousands of visitors per day. I’m not sure what would happen to their experience if I changed to a different theme.

I have done the troubleshooting thing before. I’ll have to carve out some time to work through that and get back to you.

Are you seeing the images being called on the page, but they just aren’t populating, or is no image call being inserted into the HTML at all?

Thanks Adam. I submitted the private form for both sites. Please let me know if you need anything additional.

@swissspidy

Amazing! I just tested and everything is working as expected. I really can’t thank you enough.

I’ll keep my eye on future releases, but it’s great to know we have this patch to solve the issue. Amazing level of support!

@swissspidy

Sorry to bother you with one more comment here. I tried the following

Using plugin version 1.19.0
1. Verified the events I wanted were coming through with the legacy settings.
2. “Migrated the DB” using the button on the plugin dashboard
3. Verified the events I wanted were no longer coming through
3. Opened the PHP file you provided and changed the tracking code.
4. Zipped the newly saved file
5. Uploaded, installed, and activated the new custom tracking plugin
6. Cleared browser cache

I tried other minor things as well to try to get the events to fire again, but I’m having no luck. Any ideas on other things I need to do to get the custom events to fire?

Here is the story I am testing on.

Hi Pascal.

Haha…that’s an amazing level of support!!! We have many clients that use your plugin and have created well over 3,000 stories for them using your tools. Many have been around for a while and so it would seem that they can still use the event triggers (until they click the upgrade button?). Going forward though, I will give the small plugin you created a try and let you know if we experience any issues.

Just from a feedback perspective, there is a lot of misinformation out there about click throughs from the web story to the actual article. The analytics would lead people to believe they are receiving thousands of “clicks” to their site, but their ad revenue never goes up because their GA stats aren’t representative of actual traffic to a revenue producing page. It is very confusing with no one really having many answers as to how to track things without creating more complications with UTM parameters. We stumbled on the story_page_attachment_enter event which seemed to be a reliable way.

Just for consideration, if your team could find a simplified way to help users distinguish between clicks on a web story slide and actual traffic the web story brought as a referring page to an article, the community would be very appreciative. Maybe consider placing the story_page_attachment_enter and story_click_through events back into the available events?

Thank you again for your extended support. Your team is very responsive and I certainly appreciate it!

Thank you for the response Luckyna.

So are you saying that there is no way to track click-through rates for web stories with the current release without creating UTM codes to track internal site links?

That seems like a large step backward. I can’t understand why Google would remove the one way we had to track Web Story effectiveness. Web Stories on their own produce so little revenue (like tens of dollars in ad revenue). The only way to get an ROI on them is via a clickthrough rate to an article or sale. It’s fundamental to Stories. Is there no other way to track this than to manually add UTM code to every link I put in a multi-slide story?

Matt

Hi! Thank you for the advice on how to troubleshoot. I did find the conflicting plugin. The plugin https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/pinterest-pin-it-button-for-images/ was causing the issue that rendered the editor useless. It appears this plugin is no longer available because of a copyright issue or something so it’s likely outdated. I switched to a different Pinterest Pin It plugin and the issues all resolved themselves.

I would say their likely isn’t much for the dev team to do here since the conflicting plugin is out of date.

Thanks for your help.
Matt

OK. Thanks for the response. Let me see if I can identify a plugin / theme issue and get back to you with more details shortly.