With Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google’s next generation of Analytics, replacing Universal Analytics (UA)  in July, it’s crucial to learn and analyze how GA4 processes data as well as its time frame.

Why is tracking event-based data in GA4 important for search engine optimization?

With GA4, we can analyze events and conversions in reports. We are also able to view pages on the website that are receiving the most traffic as well as how many events/conversions are being tracked on that page. With this data being tracked, we can report back to clients how landing pages are performing, what internal/external links users are clicking on, how many form submissions are being filled out, etc. The number of events and conversions can help determine what SEO efforts need to be made for an overall improved ranking. 

Analyzing how GA4 tracks new events

To test GA4 event tracking, we created a new page on a sample website as well as added an outside link on that page. We ensured that this website had a GA4 property tagged to accurately track the data. To track this link click event in Analytics, we created a new GA4 Event Tag in Google Tag Manager with a trigger that fired when that specific link was clicked. Once the event is created, it takes around 24 hours for this new event to appear in GA4. 

Google Tag Manager: GA4 Event Tag

Event Names/Counts in GA4

How long does it take for event data to track in GA4?

By using this new event we created, we can test the timeframe for this data to appear in GA4. Over the course of a few weeks, we would click the link a few times and monitor GA4 to see how soon the new data would appear. After several trials, the new data for the event seemed to appear in GA4 around 16 hours after clicking the link twice.

Data from 3/22/2023 4:23 p.m.

Data from 3/23/2023 9:15 a.m.

Why should we monitor data processing time?

Up-to-date data, also known as data freshness, is important to identify trends, patterns, and user behaviors as they occur. This is especially important when using the data for reporting, for example in Google Looker Studio. To see how data updates when used in Looker Studio, we created a new report with a chart of the event data to view how long it takes for the fresh data in GA4 to appear in the report. After testing, the data appears exactly as it does in GA4 as soon as GA4 is up-to-date. This may vary depending on data freshness settings in Looker Studio, but we have an idea of when you can expect to see this data in your report. 

Keeping data freshness in mind, picking the right time frame for the most accurate data is important. For example, since our test calculated new event data won’t process until about 16 hours after it occurred, the data from the previous day is still being processed. To see what your website analytics numbers are looking like, the day before yesterday is the best time frame to view. It will be the freshest and most accurate data on your GA4 property. 

Looker Studio Report Data

Conclusion

Whether you’re reporting data or using data to improve SEO, it is important to ensure that the data is accurate and up to date. Based on our tests, once you’ve created a GA4 property or successfully migrated to GA4, you can expect to see fresh data in less than a day. Migrating from UA to GA4 can be an adjustment when it comes to data collection, so learning how/when data is collected in GA4 is a game changer when it comes to utilizing data for your campaign. 

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to block bad bots and spiders from your website. This is a standard safety measure we implement with our WordPress SEO service. We can save bandwidth and performance for customers, increase security, and prevent scrapers from putting duplicate content around the web.

Quick Start Instructions/Roadmap

For those looking to get started right away (without a lot of chit-chat), here are the steps to blocking bad bots with .htaccess:

• FTP to your website and find your .htaccess file in your root directory
• Create a page in your root directory called 403.html, the content of the page doesn’t matter, our is a text file with just the characters “403”
• Browse to this page on AskApache that has a sample .htaccess snippet complete with bad bots already coded in
• You can add any bots to the sample .htaccess file as long as you follow the .htaccess syntax rules
• Test your .htaccess file with a bot spoofing site like wannabrowser.com

Check Your Server Logs for Bad Bots

If you read your website server logs, you’ll see that bots and crawlers regularly visit your site–these visits can ultimately amount to hundreds of visits a day and plenty of bandwidth. The server log pasted above is from TastyPlacement, and the bot identified in red is discoverybot. This bot was nice enough to identify its website for me, but DiscoveryEngine.com touts itself as the next great search engine, but presently offers nothing except stolen bandwidth. It’s not a bot I want visiting my site. If you check your server logs, you might see bad bots like sitesnagger, reaper, harvest, and others.  Make a note of any suspicious bots you see in your logs.

AskApache’s Bad Bot RewriteRules

AskApache maintains a very brief tutorial but a very comprehensive .htaccess code snippet here. What’ makes that page so great is that the .htaccess snippet already has dozens of bad bots blocked (like reaper, blackwidow, sitesnagger) and you can simply add any new bots you identify.

If we want to block a bot not covered by AskApache’s default text, we just add a line to the “RewriteCond” section, separating each bot with a “|” pipe character. We’ve put “discoverybot” in our file because that’s a visitor we know we don’t want :

# IF THE UA STARTS WITH THESE
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(verybadbot|discoverybot) [NC,OR]

If you are on the WordPress platform be careful not to disrupt existing entries in your .htaccess file. As always, keep a backup of your .htaccess file, it’s quite easy to break your site with one coding error. Also, it’s probably better to put these rewrite rules at the beginning of your .htaccess file so no pages are served before the bots read the rewrite directives. Here’s a simplified version of the complete .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 403 /403.html

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# IF THE UA STARTS WITH THESE
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(black.?hole|blackwidow|discoverybot) [NC,OR]

# ISSUE 403 / SERVE ERRORDOCUMENT
RewriteRule . - [F,L]

Here’s a translation of the .htaccess file above:

• ErrorDocument sets a webpage titled 403.html to serve as our error document when bad bots are encountered; you want to create a page in your root directory called 403.html, the content of the page doesn’t matter, our is a text file with just the characters “403”
• RewriteEngine and RewriteBase simple mean “ready to enforce rewrite rules, and set the base URL to the website root”
• RewriteCond directs the server “if you encounter any of these bot names, enforce the RewriteRule that follows”
• RewriteRule directs all bad bots identified in the text to our ErrorDocument, 403.html

 Testing Our .htaccess File

Once you upload your .htaccess file, you can test it by browsing to your site and pretending to be a bad bot. You do this by going to wannabrowser.com and spoofing a User Agent, in this case, we spoofed “SiteSnagger”:

If you installed properly, you should be directed to your 403 page, and you have successfully blocked most bad bots.

Some Limitations

Now, why don’t we do this with Robots.txt and simply tell bots not to index? Simple: because bots might simply ignore our directive, or they’ll crawl anyway and just not index the content–that’s not a fix. Even with this .htaccess fix, it’ll only block bots that identify themselves. If a bot is spoofing itself as a legitimate User Agent, then this technique won’t work. We’ll post a tutorial soon about how to block traffic based on IP address. But, that said, you’ll block 90% of bad bot traffic with this technique.

Enjoy!

Want to be an awesome SEO or digital marketer? Seek out Those of Epic Awesomeness and learn from them. If you think like a legend in your work life, your work will be legendary. And, after what must be my 5000th listening of A Night at the Opera, I started thinking about what lessons Freddie Mercury can teach internet marketers.

Surround Yourself With Great People

Freddie Mercury had great co-workers. Guitarist Brian May played for a decade on a guitar he built with his father in the family tool shed. The guitar had an advanced tremolo system that wasn’t available at the time. Brian’s guitar fueled millions in record sales for Queen. Today, Brian owns his own guitar company that produces a commercial replica of his homemade guitar.

Queen’s bassist John Deacon began tinkering with piano in the mid-70s. Almost immediately after beginning to learn the new instrument, he crafted the now-iconic song “You’re My Best Friend.” John has said, casually, “basically that’s the song that came out you know when I was learning to play piano.” The song was a major hit, and helped push Queen’s “A Night at the Opera” album to triple-platinum sales.

Great people produce great things. You can’t do everything alone, so partner up or populate a staff with people of great talent and your work product will be great.

Appreciate Your Clients, They’ll Bring You Fame and Fortune

You are nothing without your clients (or your readers and buyers as the case may be). Freddie honored and loved his fans. “You brought me fame and fortune and everything that goes with it; I thank you all,” he insists in “We Are the Champions.” Your clients are gold. Treat them that way and you’ll enjoy riches and be a champion for years to come.

Build on the Past, but Be Original

Queen regularly employed elements of the past in their music. They drew heavily upon the growing heavy metal movement (at the time pioneered by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath) but also included less-expected elements like classical and opera. “It’s unheard of to combine opera with a rock theme, my dear,” Freddie once remarked. He also once said that “the whole point of Queen was to be original.” Queen knew where to ground themselves and where to branch out and be original. The resulting effect was a supernatural but radio-ready rock sound.

You can do the same. Web marketing draws on a foundation of concepts that originate with traditional advertising. Web marketers must honor well-settled advertising concepts like calls to action, customer conversion, branding, etc. After all, the psychology of the buyer hasn’t changed much since the beginning of time. But web marketing presents infinite opportunities to be original. When you blend a solid marketing foundation with creative and innovative ideas, you will excel, and you will succeed. Don’t simply imitate the successes of others, build on the successes of others with your own spin.

Be Fabulous and Think Big

“I always knew I was star, and now, the rest of the world seems to agree with me,” Freddie once mused. No one ever accused Queen or Freddie of thinking small — even before they were famous. In marketing as in rock music, it’s the big ideas that get the most attention. If you are building a website for a client or for one of your own properties, make it the best-in-class for that space. Queen wasn’t done with a song until they had lavished it with operatic 4-part harmonies. Aim high and people will love your product.

If you have an idea for a blog post article, why not go for broke and develop it into a full-scale infographic? We re-learned this lesson recently when our infographic study of social media impact on search signals went viral, earning us thousands of social media mentions and hundreds of links from the SEO and entrepreneurial community. Had we issued that material as a blog post, it might have been lost in the shuffle of thousands of other blog posts. We took the route a champion would take and it paid off.

When web content goes viral, it’s the same as when a band gets famous: when people love something, they tell their friends.