Our article is a guide to know all about Google’s latest up-gradation to GA4; why the switch from GA to GA4? Why do online retailers need to move to Google Analytics 4? And how to get started with the new platform? Recently Google announced that the 1st of July 2023 will be the end date for Universal Analytics and GA 4’s release date, this means Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will now be the primary web data analytics service offered by Google and will be the only option from July 1, 2023. But if you are wondering “What’s the difference?” & “What improvements it shall bring”, read on. What Is Google Analytics 4? Google Analytics 4 is the most recent and current version of Google Analytics that will replace universal analytics. It will allow marketers to efficiently analyse all-important customer usage metrics, and not just track the traffic. GA4 is a whole new generation of universal analytics platforms with thorough learning that will track the entire 360-degree customer journey across multiple platforms and leverage artificial intelligence AI and machine learning models to provide more comprehensive insights into customers’ complete paths on your website and app. GA4 login will also focus on customer privacy by integrating with the latest privacy laws, such as GDPR and CCPA. So with privacy-first tracking, cross-channel data measurement, and AI-driven projective analytics, GA4 has recently become the most advanced tool by Google. Difference between Google Analytics 4 and Universal Analytics One of the clearest and most noticeable differences between Google Analytics 4 and Universal Analytics is that GA4 facilitates you to report on activities that occur on both websites and applications. GA4 provides much stronger and more reliable cross-device and cross-platform tracking. Other differences include: 1. Google Analytics 4 has an entirely new Dashboard The first change you will notice is the entirely new dashboard that is more streamlined than the earlier one. The navigation bar to the right includes home, reports, explore, advertising, configure, and library buttons. And at the bottom, you’ll find predictive insights based on Google’s AI. 2. All measurements are events in google analytics 4 While page views were the most important metric with Universal Analytics, Google Analytics 4 supports all measurements as enhanced measurement events. Thus instead of just generalised historical data, now you will gain a wider understanding of users’ interaction with your brand, app and website. GA4 training will also include other engagement metrics such as engagement sessions, engagement rate, and engagement time and track dimensions like attribution, demographics, events, and so forth. 3. Google Analytics 4 gives access to Predictive Insights With help of GA4’s powered predictive metrics, you can make data-driven decisions on a great scale. Predictive analytics can significantly impact retargeting campaigns for most businesses as its AI metrics include purchase probability, churn probability, and revenue prediction too. With GA4 you can target audiences by creating a customer journey using Google Ads campaigns or even on social media based on their predicted user behaviours. For example, who will make a purchase in the next 7 days or which user will spend more than $500 in one purchase. 4. GA4 provides Marketers with added Control GA4 allows you to customise the dashboard, enables you to generate the most profitable reports, helps you create custom visualisations of the user data collected, and more accurately tracks customer interactions and their behaviours on the basis of their site search. 5. Cross-Platform Tracking Users are mostly active on more than one platform. The new Google Analytics 4 tracks both web and app data in one space enabling you to see the complete customer touch-points journey, along with its acquisition, engagement, monetisation, and retention. Why move on from Universal Analytics and what are the major benefits of GA4? Learn the best ways in which Google Analytics 4 can support your business to grow. As Google Analytics 4 property has astonishing flexibility to measure various kinds of qualitative data, it can deliver a strong analytics experience to keep up with a changing ecosystem. GA4 improves Google’s ability to forecast user behaviour since all user interactions are automatically tracked and not through the manual implementation of events. · Understand your customers across multiple platforms. Get a complete view of the customer total lifecycle with an event-based measurement model across multiple platforms or organised into many sessions. · Improve ROI with data-driven attribution Use data-driven attribution to analyse the full impact of your marketing across the customer journey. Global site tag gtag allows you to send data to google analytics. Export this analysis to Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform media tools to optimise your next campaigns. · More engagement and conversions You can manage and minimise the collection of file extensions and user-level data like cookies and metadata and preserve key measurement functionality data with google tag manager. · Obtaining greater value from your data Supervised Machine learning generates more predictive insights about user behaviours and conversions that create data of new viewers who are likely to purchase and automatically surface vital insights to help your marketing team. · Optimise your campaigns Integrations with Google products, like Google Ads, work parallel across your web and app data, making it easy to activate your Analytics insights and optimise your campaigns. · Address your business measurement needs Analytics 360 allows you to customise your Google Analytics 4 properties to meet data governance needs. It also offers higher limits to meet increasing demand — up to 125 custom dimensions. · Offers better privacy controls Google Analytics 4 is designed to keep privacy at its core to provide a better experience for both our customers and their users in today’s data privacy landscape, where everyone expects more privacy protections and control over their data. To conclude, There are two separate setup processes since Google Analytics 4 can be used for your website or app. If you already have Universal Google Analytics account running on your website, you will find a GA4 Setup Assistant in the admin section of that app web property. Just click on Create new property option to migrate to GA4. Some of the basic settings from Universal Analytics will be reused and Enhanced Measurement will be automatically enabled. Google Analytics 4 is designed by Google with key objectives in mind like driving sales revenue or app installs, generating leads, better conversion rates or connecting online and offline customer engagement. Google Analytics 4 is the perfect choice for understanding and improving your new eCommerce store business by tracking the user experience from start to finish—and from platform to platform. Reference: Ketchum, R. (2022, March 16). Prepare for the future with google analytics 4. Google. Retrieved June 7, 2022, from https://blog.google/products/marketingplatform/analytics/prepare-for-future-with-google-analytics-4/ An in-depth guide to google analytics 4. Neil Patel. (2022, June 3). Retrieved June 7, 2022, from https://neilpatel.com/blog/google-analytics-4/ Agency, Z. (2022, May 5). Getting ready for google analytics 4: The Zen Agency Blog. www.thezenagency.com. Retrieved June 7, 2022, from https://www.thezenagency.com/latest/getting-ready-for-google-analytics-4/
