VMP 247.5 Don't Get Left Behind: The Urgent Need for Veterinary Practices to Switch to GA4

(00:00:02) - Welcome to the Veterinary Marketing Podcast, where it's all about how to attract, engage, and retain clients to your veterinary hospital using digital marketing. My name is Brandon Brashears in episode 247. Today's episode, we're gonna be talking about analytics. This is going to be very, very important for you because number one, uh, there is an update coming to Google Analytics and if you're not aware of it, you're gonna lose all of your data. It's very serious. There's a lot more impacts too when it comes to advertising and anything that you're doing with driving of traffic. So this is very, very important. This is a must listen to episode. If you have a website and you have Google Analytics, you're gonna wanna listen to this. Before we begin, just a couple quick things. Number one, our episode is being sponsored by two websites by Brad Haven. We have used vet equipment.com and new vet equipment.com.

00:00:47) - For over nine years now, used vet equipment.com has been helping vets buy and sell used equipment. You'll be able to save money when you buy used veterinary equipment. Everything from cages, kennels pumps, x-ray equipment, lasers, ultrasounds, dental equipment, surgery equipment, lab equipment from Baxis, IDEX, and Hesca tables, tubs and sinks, vet trucks and vet boxes. What do you have to sell@usedvetequipment.com. They bring the buyer and seller together. There's a lot of really cool stuff on used vet equipment.com, so gone over there. The other thing that I wanna mention is that this is also being sponsored by new vet equipment.com. If you're looking for new veterinary equipment with amazing warranties, check out new vet equipment.com or they'll show you the price upfront. They have digital x-ray equipment, dental x-ray equipment, ultrasound equipment, L E D, surgery, lighting, surgery tables, autoclaves. When you go to new vet equipment.com, you'll clearly see the price on every item for sale.

(00:01:36) - You'll also be able to check out the warranties so that you can buy without regret@newvetequipment.com. They show you the price up front and give you a great warranty. Last thing is, if you are having any kind of openings in your schedule, if you're having trouble filling appointments, be sure to head on over to veterinary marketing podcast.com. Fill out that chat box and say, just say hello and introduce yourself. I can set up a one-on-one ad consult with you to see if driving new clients to your practice might be worth it. If you're open or interested in running ads to your veterinary hospital, head on over to veterinary marketing podcast.com. We'll be able to fill your schedule and get you more of your dream clients. Alright, let's jump into today's episode. So Google Analytics as having major changes. We're switching from Universal Analytics, which is the old version to GA four, which is Google Analytics four.

(00:02:26) - Now, GA four is incredible. I think it is a fantastic product. I've been using it now for actually almost a year, more in depth. Done tons of trainings on it and it is a far better product. I'm really excited because Google is just continually upping what they're doing in terms of data sharing between all of their products. So Google Analytics works really well, or GA four works really, really well with Tag Manager. You set up events and contract conversions at greater detail and this all integrates really well into Google Ads and any of their ad products. Another cool thing too is that it also integrates with their Google business profile. It integrates to shopping, uh, campaigns. You can add shopping listings if you have any physical products or if you want to add your services into shopping listings. But the thing about this is that with old Universal Analytics, this is sun setting and being taken away in July, and so you wanna make sure that your analytics is upgraded to GA four as quickly as possible.

(00:03:30) - What does this mean for you and what kind of steps do you need to take here? So first off, you need to make sure that if you have Google Analytics installed, you're gonna go and if you're managing this yourself, you're gonna log into Google, Google Analytics, and then you're gonna upgrade your analytics. It's very easy. You go into settings and under settings there's an upgrade to GA four button. If you have a web company that handles your analytics for you, you're gonna wanna make sure that they've given you, uh, access to this and that they are gonna go and upgrade it. Usually they'll handle it, um, depending on who your website company is, but it's something that you want to make sure is taken care of. You don't want to let them drive the boat on this one. You wanna make sure that it's getting done, uh, in a timely manner because after July, all of the old data from your website is gonna be gone.

(00:04:19) - And so it's important that you get that new website, I'm sorry, the new analytics data. As much as possible, you're gonna wanna set up events, conversion events, link to your, uh, any web forms that you have, make it so that conversions for clicking phone numbers is recording as events. Um, there's also all kinds of other cool events too. You can do, uh, scroll depth, you can do watching videos. I mean, there's just so many cool new things that you can track and measure on your website. Um, so make sure that you're going out and you're upgrading to Google Analytics for so that you don't miss out on data. If you're running ads and your ads are optimized for conversions as well, if you don't have this new conversion event, data being input into your Google Ads, then you're gonna be in trouble. So it depends again on how your Google Ads are run.

(00:05:09) - It's a lot more nuanced of a conversation, um, for sure. But if you don't have conversions, you're not gonna know what's going on. And I think that's really leads into another point here. Just real quick here as we wrap up in this quick in-between episode, is that if you have analytics on your site, in my opinion, you need to be looking at these reports and have direct access to Google Analytics. I don't think that you should, uh, defer looking at your, your analytics to somebody else, but you need to go through and be looking at your analytics at least once a month. In one of the near episodes, I'm gonna talk about the KPIs that you absolutely need to be measuring and taking a look at and how to automate that so you can automatically see what's going on. So, um, that's just the last note there. Make sure that you're upgraded. Make sure that you have access and make sure you know what's going on. Hope this was helpful. If there's anything that you need help with, don't hesitate to reach out. Head on over to veterinary marketing podcast.com. There's a chat box. You can ask questions and I responded directly. So have a great day and we'll talk to you soon.

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