Google Analytics 4 is ready to use in your Folksy shop
Good news! We’ve now got GA4 tags working for Folksy. Although we already provide you with key stats about your item views, shops visits and search clicks in your seller dashboard, as a Folksy seller you also have the option of using Google Analytics to get more detailed data about how your shop is performing.
This option has been available for years, however, Google Analytics recently made changes to how things work and altered the codes they use (ie how you link your shop to the Google Analytics site). The old codes will be turned off in July 2023, which means that if you have previously set up Google Analytics for your Folksy shop you will need to switch to a new GA4 code, and if you have never used it before but want to set it up, you will need to create a GA4 code.
We know Google Analytics can be a bit daunting (even for us) so we’ve put together a step-by-step guide showing how to set up GA4 in your Folksy shop, or upgrade your current Google Analytics set-up.
If you already have the old UA code on your shop
Log in to Google Analytics and you’ll likely see a big warning like this:
Click “Go to Setup Assistant”.
You should then get this page, where you need to click “Get Started”.
Next you will get some pages where you need to make a few choices (apologies, we took the screenshots a few weeks ago and missed this bit out, but hopefully that means it was straightforward).
When you get to this page, click “Go to your GA4 property”.
On the next page, click here to manage data streams.
You then need to select the stream to open it.
Click the copy button next to “Measurement ID”.
Go to your Folksy dashboard > shop settings > under “Google Analytics code” paste your new code > click “update settings”.
You should then be set up.
If you go back to the main Google Analytics page (by clicking the home icon on the left hand side) you should see your analytics page.
It might take a day or two for any information to show on the main graph, but it won’t take as long for the real time data to show. It’s probably best to give it a couple of hours to make sure everything is connected, but if you then visit your shop page, you should see a view show on the real time graph.
After you’ve done this, it may say the set up is not complete along the top.
To make this go away, click “complete setup” and it’ll go back to the page where the data collection option was, and all the options lower down the page will likely say “not started”. If you know what you’re doing with Google Analytics, you may want to set them properly, but if not you can just click on the arrow next to each one and select “mark as complete”.
How to create a new code if you haven’t used Google Analytics yet
The first step is to make sure you have a Google account and to sign in.
Then go to the Google Analytics page.
If you’ve not used Google Analytics at all before, you may need to set up an account.
After set-up, if it doesn’t immediately give you the option to create a property > click the cogwheel icon in the bottom left to go to the admin page > click “Create Property”.
You’ll get a page where you need to select a few details and put in a Property name. This just needs to be something to help you identify what it’s for, like “Folksy Shop”, and then click “next”.
It will then bring up a page with a lot of code, you can just close this because this is for adding the code to your own website.
You should then see this page instead, where you need to click the copy icon next to the “Measurement ID”.
Now go to your Folksy dashboard > shop settings > under “Google Analytics code” paste your new code > click “update settings”.
You should then be set up.
If you go back to the main Google Analytics page (by clicking the home icon on the left hand side) you should see your analytics page.
It might take a day or two for any information to show on the main graph, but it won’t take as long for the real time data to show. It’s probably best to give it a couple of hours to make sure everything is connected, but if you then visit your shop page, you should see a view show on the real time graph.
We hope this is helpful. If you have any problems, let us know in this forum thread or email us at support@folksy.co.uk
