Overview
Your microsite sends two signals to your Google Analytics 4 property that mark a person as someone who visited it. Once you register those signals as custom dimensions, your reports can answer a question a page-based report cannot: how much revenue came from people who used the microsite, including people who booked days or weeks later.Who does this: whoever administers your GA4 property. It takes about five minutes, then 24–48 hours before the data appears in reports.
Why a page filter is not enough
A page-based report can tell you that someone viewed a guide. It cannot connect that view to a booking made on a later visit, because the two sit in different sessions. The signals below are attached to the person rather than the visit. They travel with that person across sessions and devices, so a purchase three weeks later still carries the mark. That is the whole reason this setup exists.What your microsite sends
Both signals are only ever set to
true, and are never set back to false. GA4 keeps the most recent value of a user property, so writing false would erase a mark the visitor had already earned.obvlo_microsite_origin is a subset of obvlo_microsite_visitor. Anyone who arrived on a microsite page has by definition visited one, so the origin figure should never exceed the visitor figure.
Someone who lands on your homepage and then clicks through to a guide is a visitor but not an origin. They found you another way, and the microsite assisted rather than originated the visit.
Before you start
- You have the Editor or Administrator role on the GA4 property.
- Your Obvlo site is configured with a GA4 measurement ID, in the form
G-XXXXXXXXXX. If it is configured with a Google Tag Manager container ID instead, see If you use Google Tag Manager below. - The property has fewer than 25 user-scoped custom dimensions. That is a hard GA4 limit, and these two count toward it.
Register the custom dimensions
Do this twice — once for each property in the table above.1
Open custom definitions
In Google Analytics, click Admin. Under Data display, click Custom definitions.
2
Create the dimension
On the Custom dimensions tab, click Create custom dimension.
3
Set the scope to User
Choose User from the Scope menu. This is the step that matters most — an event-scoped dimension will collect data but will not follow the visitor into a later session, which defeats the purpose.
4
Name it and point it at the user property
Enter a Dimension name you will recognise in reports, such as
Obvlo microsite visitor. In the User property field, enter the exact value from the table above, for example obvlo_microsite_visitor.5
Save, then repeat
Click Save, then repeat for
obvlo_microsite_origin.Check it is working
Registration and reporting happen on different clocks, so check them separately.- Straight away
- After 24-48 hours
Open Reports, then Realtime, and visit one of your microsite pages yourself. Confirm you appear as an active user. This tells you the tag is firing, though it does not yet show the user property.
If you use Google Tag Manager
If your Obvlo site is configured with a Google Tag Manager container ID (GTM-XXXXXXX) rather than a measurement ID, these signals will not reach your GA4 property yet.
A GA4 tag hosted inside a GTM container only reads user properties from fields set on the tag itself. It does not pick up properties sent alongside it on the page, so the two signals stop at the container.
Contact your Obvlo representative with your GA4 measurement ID — the G-XXXXXXXXXX value from Admin, then Data streams, then your web stream. Support for container-based setups is in progress, and the measurement ID is what we need to enable it.
Related
Microsite overview
How the microsite is delivered and where it sits on your domain.
Analytics
Event data from Obvlo delivery channels in your analytics setup.