Everyone’s favorite, Google, doesn’t stay the same for long… we love to hate it, right? So when Google announced the release of Google Analytics 4, we prepared for more of the same. What is Google Analytics 4? How is it different? What do I need to do to prepare?
The good news is that you’re getting access to even more customizable data that can help you make better business decisions. Let’s dig in.
Google Analytics 4, which was introduced in October 2022, is the latest iteration of Universal Analytics. There’s a buzz now because Universal Analytics (UA) will sunset on July 1, 2023, and those reports will stop being processed.
GA4 is packed with new reports, enhanced features, and predictive insights. All these updates give you the power to find the data that matters to you and not just the data Google wants you to see.
GA4 (previously known as App + Web) has been around since 2020 but hasn’t been released until recently. After reviewing research from Forrest Consulting, Google learned that today’s analytics solutions weren’t providing a total view of the customer’s journey, which tends to be a cross-platform experience. Without this full view, you have siloed data.
To put it plainly, this version of GA is more about the customer journey across platforms. As SearchEngineJournal put it, in GA4, “everything is built around users and events — not sessions, as we’ve been used to.”
With all its new features, you can create dashboards and reports that include meaningful data rather than loads of unmanageable data.
GA4 tracks the customer journey across multiple platforms and uses AI and machine learning to deliver this data.
According to release notes, you can expect GA4 to:
GA4 also takes user privacy into account by providing more granular controls for collecting, retaining, and analyzing user data. Instead of tracking cookies or other identifiers, GA4 will rely on data modeling to fill in blanks in the customer’s journey.
Even though UA doesn’t sunset until July 1, you should still set up a GA4 property to run parallel to UA. This will allow the machine learning to start… well… learning.
Y’all, this process couldn’t be easier. See the steps below and check out Google's resources linked here.
Even though you’ll still be able to access your UA reports for six months after it sunsets, you should still back up your reports. You’ll also have to create new reports because the structure of GA4 is different from UA.
Getting started with GA4 now will help the machine learning and AI learn more about your customer journeys, giving you meaningful data now and even more meaningful data as it learns.