Moving to Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Oct 15, 2022 | Blog

people looking at statistics on tablet and paper

In today’s metrics landscape, businesses need to overcome new challenges to understand their customers across touchpoints all while prioritizing user privacy.

Google Analytics is one of the most widely used web analytics tools. It helps you understand how visitors to your website behave and what factors drive them to spend more time on your site or click away.

For marketing analytic nerds, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) offers more functionality. Plus, the tool is designed to provide unmatched analytics in a third-party-cookieless landscape.

Let’s discuss more about Google Analytics 4 and its importance to your business operation.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that tracks the movement of visitors to your website via Google properties such as search engine results, YouTube videos, and Google ads. Google Analytics uses cookies, tracking pixels, and other technologies to collect data such as visitor IP addresses, referrer URLs, and more.

Google Analytics has various tools to help marketers better understand their traffic and site performance—with the goal being to optimize your website, increase conversions, and improve marketing ROI.

Google Analytics 4

Designed with a business’s key objectives in mind, Google Analytics 4 (GA 4) is a complete revamp of the original Google Analytics. It features a new user interface, a new metric type, and new features. The core features of Google Analytics 4 are listed below:

  • Easy to Understand Metrics
  • The new user interface of Google Analytics makes it easier for users to understand KPIs and glean what actions drive them.
  • New Metric Type – New metrics like Average Visit Duration and Pages/Session is now present. These metrics are helpful in understanding visitor behavior on your website and can help in better targeting.
  • New Reporting Functions – New reporting functions like Revenue and Ecommerce have been introduced. The Revenue function helps in understanding revenue generated through ads, and the Ecommerce function helps understand visitors’ purchase patterns.
  • New Segmentation Function – The new segmentation function allows marketers to segment their traffic and understand the factors that drive them to action.
  • Brand-new Reporting – The reporting feature of Google Analytics 4 has been completely revamped and now includes a data explorer that helps easily explore data.
  • Better Audience Retargeting – The new audience retargeting feature of Google Analytics 4 allows marketers to retarget visitors who leave their site or take action, such as buying something.
  • New Data Visualization – New data visualization like funnel analysis, heatmaps, and timeline charts have been added to make understanding data more straightforward.

When and Why to Switch to GA4

As a marketer, it’s important to understand how your visitors interact with your website. This data is essential for planning future strategies and optimizing current tactics. With the help of Google Analytics, you can understand the motivating factors that drive visitors to your site, their behavior, and their actions.

With the help of data, you can understand how people find and navigate to your site. You can also see how they interact with it, enabling you to adjust future strategies and tactics. Google Analytics is a valuable tool for understanding how your website traffic is performing and which strategies work best.

An SEO company can use Google’s machine learning technology to analyze collected information and develop new insights. Using these tools will help you predict results based on the trends. As a bonus, all accounts will be able to export raw data to Big Query for advanced analysis.

After using Universal Analytics for ten years, SEO specialists have come to understand, love, and perfect their skills on UA. It has been a favorite tool for many. But now, when you open Universal Analytics, there’s a message at the top informing you that UA won’t process new data beginning 1 July 2023. Google made the announcement on March 2022.

Now’s the Time to Shift to A Modern Measurement Solution

As a savvy enterprise with a wide product portfolio, Google analytics 4 (GA4) is a great tool when you need to unlock your marketing teams. This solution allows you to make data-driven decisions, while ensuring you meet the complex data governance requirements with ease and flexibility.