What is Google Analytics 4 and Why It’s So Important
In today's digital age, data is king. Every business, whether small or large, needs to understand their customers' behavior to create a seamless user experience and generate maximum ROI. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google's web analytics platform, and it has taken a huge leap forward from its predecessor, Universal Analytics. GA4 is designed to help businesses get a better understanding of their customers' behavior across various devices and channels.
What’s the Difference Between GA4 and Universal Analytics?
Benefits of Google Analytics 4 Properties
Enhanced Measurement Features
How to Prepare for GA4
What’s the Difference Between GA4 and Universal Analytics?
In order for you to know the key difference between the two, it’s most important to see how far we’ve come with Universal Analytics. When Universal Analytics first came out in November 2005, YouTube was still a month away from being launched, the Nokia 1110 was the best-selling cell phone, the iPhone was two years away, and iPad another 5 years. The way we interact with and use technology has rapidly evolved.
Most consumers now use their phones to do research on the things they intend to buy. Some will start on their laptop, continue on their phone, and might even complete the purchase using a company’s app.
Universal Analytics is incapable of merging all of this data together. UA uses a session-based model, which groups data into sessions. A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. During a session, Analytics collects and stores user interactions, such as page views, events, and eCommerce transactions as hits, depending on how a user interacts with your website.
Google Analytics 4 uses the events-based model. In GA4 properties, you can still see session data, but Analytics collects and stores user information with your website or app as Events. Events provide insight on what’s happening on your website or app, such as page views, button clicks, user actions, or system events. Events can collect and send pieces of information that more fully specify the action the user took or add further context to the event or user. The information could include things like the value of purchase, the title of the page a user visited, or the geographic location of the user.
Benefits of Google Analytics 4 Properties
The next generation of Google Analytics is designed to scale with your business and measure across devices and platforms. This allows your measurement strategy to adapt to a constantly changing digital environment. Enhanced by machine learning, Analytics also provides predictions to help improve your marketing efforts.
Scales with your business: It can measure, unify, de-duplicate all the interactions people have with your company across devices and platforms, giving you a complete, relevant, and timely understanding of the customer journey.
Adapts to a changing environment: It offers responsible, durable measurement that enables business outcomes for the long term while meeting user expectations for privacy.
Reveals intelligent business insights: It automates and facilitates insight discovery with the power of Google’s machine learning, making it frictionless to get the most value from your data.
Helps you achieve your marketing goals: It allows you to more effectively take action on your data and insights to achieve measurable marketing outcomes.
Enhanced Measurement Feature
Many basic interactions with your website or app are automatically collected as events in the latest Analytics property. For example, the first time a user visits your website, the property will log this action as a “first visit” event. You can also enable the enhanced measurement feature, an option that lets you automatically collect more events without having to update your website’s code. Enhanced measurement allows you to measure many common web events like page views, scrolls, file downloads, and video views.
How To Prepare for GA4
Google Analytics 4 will replace Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023. At that time, all standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing data. 360 Universal Analytics properties will stop processing data on July 1, 2024.
For Everyone
Consider account structure (skip this step if you have on website and/or one app).
Create a GA4 property and data stream. (link)
Collect website and app data here. This is only required if the GA4 Setup Assistant couldn’t reuse your tags. Also, if you use Shopify you’ll do that here, or another website builder/CMS.
Turn on Google signals. This is required for enhanced remarketing and reporting.
Set up conversions. Use the tool or set up conversions manually.
Add users. Use the tool here or add users manually.
For Advertisers
Link to Google Ads. Use the tool here or create new Google Ads links.
Migrate audiences or set up new audiences.
Validate your conversions or set up new audiences. (link)
Import conversions into Google Ads for bidding. (link)
Add Analytics audiences to a campaign or ad group for remarketing. (link)