What is the method to monitor news topics in GA4?

[John]

Alright, so here’s what we can do, mate:

1. First, we need to get these categories into your GTM. You’ve got two options for this: either parse every article page to grab the categories or ask the front-end to push them to the dataLayer on pageviews. The latter would probably be more robust.

2. Now, once you’ve got the list pulling into GTM, you probably want to sort it, maybe alphabetically? You can then use this in your event property.

3. Don’t forget about Google Analytics! Make sure to register the property in there.

Keep in mind though, when you’re analyzing this, it could get a bit tricky. You’ll mostly need to use ‘contains’ on this dimension. It’s not perfect, but at least it’s something. If you want more options in the future, you could look into doing ETL, or maybe even using a more advanced analytics solution. GA is pretty bare-bones because it’s generally free, right? So, it’s got its limitations.

[Jordan]

In order to include a list of categories within the “article_read” GTM tag, you should consider adding a new key-value pair to this tag. The new key could be named as “article_categories”. The value of this key would be an array or list of the relevant categories for each article. These categories could be strings like “Electricity”, “Refrigeration”, “Sanitation”, “Water & Sewer”, “Ventilation” and “Heat”. So with this addition, when your GTM tag “article_read” is triggered, it would not only contain your standard keys like “news_id” and “article_title” but also an “article_categories” list that contains all the relevant categories of that particular article. This approach would offer the flexibility to associate zero, one or multiple categories with each news article.