How to use Regex in GA4 - step by step guide

Hi {NAME}, Himanshu here from OptimizeSmart. I hope you are doing well. I have couple of updates for you... # Get helpful tips on daily basis If you are the type of person who finds it helpful to receive short tips on GA4, improving conversions, fixing attribution issues and learning about analytics in general, then follow me on LinkedIn. I post a few short tips each day. [Click here and follow me on LinkedIn.]( #1 [How to use Regex in GA4](. Regular expression (also called ‘regex’) is used to check for a pattern in a string. Regex performs advanced matching and substitution operations that would be difficult or impossible to achieve using other methods. You can create more sophisticated and accurate reports in GA4 by using regex. You can carry out advanced data analysis. For example, ^Colou?r$ is a regular expression that matches both the string: ‘colour’ and ‘colour’. Google Analytics 4 uses JavaScript regex. The regex engine used by GA4 and Google Tag Manager is JavaScript. So you should always select ‘JavaScript’ as the flavour before testing your regular expressions for GA4/GTM. GA4 regex is made up of characters and metacharacters. Metacharacters are the building blocks of a regex. These are the characters that have special meanings in a regex. For example ^ (caret) is metacharacter. It denotes the beginning of a regular expression. Google Analytics 4 uses fully matched Regex Fully matched regex means the regex fully matches a pattern in a string. Let us suppose you provided the regex ‘car’. This regex fully matches only one pattern in a string: ‘car’. By default, the GA4 property uses fully matched regex. If you want to use partially matched regex in GA4, you would need to use metacharacters. Partially matched regex means the regex partially matches a pattern in a string. Let us suppose you provided the regex ‘car’. This regex partially matches the following patterns in a string: ‘carbohydrates’, ‘carbon’, ‘caramel’, ‘caravan’, ‘cardiac’ etc. By default, the GA3 (Universal Analytics) property uses partially matched regex. Since by default, a GA4 property uses fully matched JavaScript regex, it makes using regular regex pretty difficult. Let us suppose you want to filter out the names of all countries in your GA4 report that begin with ‘Ca’. So, you created the following regex: ‘^Ca’. Normally, this regex would match any string that starts with ‘Ca’. But if you use this regex in GA4, it will not work. Because GA4 supports only fully matched regex, and ‘^Ca’ is a partially matched regex. To make it a fully matched regex, you will need to rewrite this regex like the one below: ^Ca.* This regex would match any string that starts with ‘Ca’ like ‘Canada’, ‘Cameroon’, ‘Camobodia’ etc. One program to rule them all >> Sales & ROI + GA4 + BigQuery + Data, Maths & Stats + Attribution Modelling + Looker Studio. 3k+ students + Enrollment from US and UK universities. I designed this all-in-one training program so that: a) You can understand how they all work together. For example, >> How you can implement digital analytics with GA4. >> How BigQuery works with GA4 and vice versa. >> How looker studio works with BigQuery and GA4. >> How to use the knowledge of maths and stats to interpret analytics data. >> How to set up KPIs and marketing funnels. >> How to optimize and scale ads by leveraging analytics and attribution data. b) You don't have to purchase half a dozen different courses from different course creators, all teaching the same basic stuff. "Click here...and now click there....". You can learn these ‘click here and then click there’ lessons for_free on my blog or YouTube. c) I teach how to use AI tools like chatgpt to automate mundane and low value tasks like manually creating Excel/Google sheets functions and formulas, regex, SQL, JavaScript etc. So that you can spend more time doing data analysis then data extraction. In this training program my objective is not to teach you digital analytics. That's not my end goal. My end goal is to increase sales and ROI by leveraging the knowledge of digital analytics. That's the end goal. So everything you learn is tied to driving sales and ROI. [Learn more about the training.Â]( #2 Set Up Your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Account Correctly And Fast like a pro. [Get the 62 points GA Checklist ebook (43 pages)]( #3 If you are not sure whether your GA4 property is setup correctly or you want expert help migrating from Universal Analytics to GA4 then [contact us](. I hope you find all these updates helpful. Talk soon, Himanshu Sharma Founder, OptimizeSmart.com You got this email because you subscribed to OptimizeSmart.com OptimizeSmart, Alford, Aberdeenshire, UK [Unsubscribe](