Google Analytics 4 and Provide Support Live Chat integration

Note! On June 30, 2023 live chat integration with Google Analytics was updated to support GA4. Please make sure to add the right GA4 tracking ID into your account settings.

Live chat integration with Google Analytics 4 lets you check GA4 reports on a number of your live chat window loads. It also allows you to track a number of initiated chats and a number of sent offline messages as events:

• ps_live_chat_started - this event is pushed when a visitor fills out the pre-chat form and clicks 'Start Chat' button, i.e. when a chat room is loaded
• ps_live_chat_offline_message_sent - this event is pushed when a visitor initiates an offline message sending

Real-time information

Live chat window loads in real-time

Real-time information about your live chat window loads is available in Reports / Realtime. Here you can check the number of chat window loads during last 30 minutes. There are two ways to do this:

• Views by Page title and screen name block - find your online and/or offline window titles here and check the Views counter next to them. Default chat window titles are the following: "Online Chat" for online mode and "Leave a Message" for offline mode. You can change these values in your account settings.
• Event count by Event name block - click page_view event here, then find and click page_location event parameter. Find your chat window URL in the list. In most cases it starts with https://vm.providesupport.com/... Check the Event count counter next to this URL.

Live chat events in real-time

Real-time information about your live chat events is available in Reports / Realtime / Events block. Just look for ps_live_chat_started and ps_live_chat_offline_message_sent events here, click the specific event to check its default parameters.

Historical data

Live chat window loads statistics

Information about live chat window loads for previous days is available at Reports / Life cycle / Engagement / Pages and screens. Look either for your account hash or name (depending on the chat button code used on your website) here.

Live chat events statistics

Information about live chat window loads for previous days is available at Reports / Life cycle / Engagement / Events. Click either ps_live_chat_started or ps_live_chat_offline_message_sent event here to check the detailed event data: geographical distribution, events number per day, demographics data, etc.

To enable the integration, please do the following:

1. Log into your Provide Support account Control Panel and follow there Account Settings / Google Analytics page
2. Enter your GA4 data stream Measurement ID to the 'Google Analytics Measurement ID' field
3. Save your settings

You may also check our detailed instructions on setting up live chat and GA4 direct integration and live chat and GA4 integration via GTM.

You may want to see traffic sources for visitors who initiated chats. This means that you would need to set up cross-domain tracking in your GA property as visitors are moving from your domain to chat window domain providesupport.com and backwards. We've already done everything possible from our side to make this working. But one adjustment can be done from your side only: you need to add your own domain and our domain providesupport.com to referral traffic exclusions in your GA property settings

Please use the following instruction to exclude domains from referral traffic: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2795830?hl=en

If you use direct link to chat, you will need to pass _ga cookie value from your website to chat window. For this just add the cookie name and value to direct chat link as a parameter.