Before you freak out, GA4Helper.com isn’t going anywhere, and Settings Checker is just getting started with its functionality… The “failure” is more in the support that I gave to the “launching” of Settings Checker.
I love to build things, and as soon as I’m happy with where it gets, my interest starts to dip. I KNOW, IT’S AWFUL.
Some examples:
Built a VERY successful TikTok account to 20K followers relatively quickly, used the hell out of it, then… didn’t. (trying to fix this now and it isn’t going well lol)
Built an entire marketing merch brand, bought and held stock, and sold about half of it. Then… gave up on it?
Built a badass GA4SEO course, sold about 10 seats, then stopped talking about it completely.
Built a 2,000-person email list and still can’t get myself to show up for them consistently.
The list goes on, unfortunately.
Now this isn’t exactly what happened here, but it’s a familiar feeling that I’m grappling with.
Most of you lovely folks signed up for beta access to the Settings Checker (thank you, btw, it means a lot), and hopefully you’ve had a chance to try it out!
From what I have been able to track, about a dozen folks have actually run at least one check with Settings Checker. This actually isn’t a bad number, especially considering it’s about 30% of subscribers.
During the beta, I noticed some interesting behaviors via Lucky Orange. Behaviors that actually led to a few changes to the tool.
I updated the GA4 setting workbook.
First, I just updated it to be interactive (there were A LOT of rage clicks on this page lol).
Then, since people would be filling it out on the page, I built a function that allows you to autofill the relevant information from your audit.
The email signup flow looked broken, so I fixed it.
Now you see a confirmation message when you subscribe to a Personalized Fix email flow.
I added a mobile header.
This was truly just overlooked on my end. Oops 😅
Overall, I was feeling good about the tool. It seemed to be working as expected, and people were interacting with the site quite heavily.
So, at the time, this sounded like a really good idea.
I was set to speak at BrightonSEO on 9/23, and I thought why not launch at a conference and get a flood of folks to use the tool right away?
(& let’s be honest, I had put about 4 months of work into this thing, and I NEEDED to validate the product, and the only way I do anything is if I have a deadline)
For one, I couldn’t find a way to work it into my talk, which had already been submitted to the organizers.
And two, I WAS BUSY! Which meant I didn’t have the time to create content and remind everyone that the tool was now available to everyone.
On day one (9/21), I led an all-day training session on GA4. After the first break that day, I showed the attendees the tool as a way to ease their minds about all of the settings requirements (we spent like 2 hours talking about GA4 settings, and I was surprised nobody cried lmfao).
The feedback from this small group was pretty positive, but we quickly returned to work.
The next day, I gave my talk “Your data is worthless (unless you use it).” It was well received, but guess what? I didn’t even link to GA4 Helper from my landing page. 🤦♀️ Not that it really mattered because most people weren’t even able to take a photo or scan the QR code before the final slide was taken down… But alas.
By the time my talk was done, the adrenaline had worn off, and I still needed to network. I didn’t have the energy to create content.
In total, there were 36 sessions in the first full week that Settings Checker was public. And I was on VPN that week, so a few of these were probably me 😭
I felt a bit like a failure when I got back to my desk on Monday, not gonna lie. I felt like I had let myself down. I felt like I had let my wife down. I also oddly felt like I let my therapist down cause she was excited about my launch lolololol, oh god. ANYWAY!
I had told myself I was going to launch, and technically I did. But I didn’t DO a launch like it is meant to be done (think rocket ship folks, we want this to blast off 🚀🚀🚀).
When I first started talking about launching this six weeks ago, my wife told me I needed to do it right. That I was so smart and had put sooooo much effort into this that it deserved to be launched the right way. She’s right, but I think there is just this little part of me that maybe doesn’t believe it? Or that is scared?
I didn’t give the initial launch the attention it deserved. There is a small part of me that doesn’t feel like it’s “good enough,” but watching people use the tool (and seeing that nobody has scored over an 85) has shown me there is a need.
In the past, I would have let this “failure” be the end of the project. I’d be too embarrassed to bring it back up. I’d wallow and just let it go.
BUT NOT THIS TIME! Hopefully 🤞
From what I can see, the need is there. The hard part is that people don’t know what they don’t know.
I spoke with almost 100 people one-on-one at BrightonSEO, and most of them were unaware of the impact the settings in GA4 were having on their data.
And when I walked around and looked at/spoke with the vendors, I became more and more aware of how many of these tools port in GA4 data. Every time someone brought this up, I cringed. Just because you bring GA4 data into the tool doesn’t mean you should trust it.
I’ve worked in GA4 and sold GA4 services for 4.5 years now. And despite what most people tend to think (believe me, people make the comments constantly), I’m not rolling in the dough. I’ve grossed maybe $125,000 a year the past two years, and most of that has come from SET UPS! Still, after 4 years of GA4 being out, I’m doing setups. It’s been driving me mad, honestly.
I have not figured out how to sell my services, and I’m realizing that it’s an education problem. People don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t realize how fragile the data is, what their data can do, and how to actually USE it.
So, I will be continuing to lean into educating others about data (specifically GA4 data) with GA4helper.com. The hope is that this will lead people to use Settings Checker and whatever I build next. My to-do list is long 😉
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