Explainer: Everything You Need to Know About Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics has become an indispensable tool in digital marketing. So any changes Google makes to this flagship analytics suite will have a big impact on marketers around the world.
But this latest version, called Google Analytics 4 (GA4), is the most significant since Google released its last major update, Universal Analytics (UA), ten years ago. As a result, GA4 is causing more upheaval than usual.
Many of the changes that come with GA4 are in line with existing trends to protect user privacy, and according to Jaime Nosworthy, CEO of digital marketing services organization The Pistol, they also bring many benefits. bring.
“GA4 brings data integration and privacy to the forefront while championing AI. [artificial intelligence] It’s about giving marketers a more cohesive view of the user journey,” says Nosworthy. CMOs“This evolution towards event-based tracking, as opposed to historical session or device tracking, provides marketers with valuable information about user journeys and customer lifecycles, enabling richer and actionable insights.” to
“Also, because privacy and data protection are key focuses for marketers, GA4 does not collect IP addresses or cookies, allowing users to decide what data is collected and how it is used. Bridging the gap, predictive analytics helps marketers derive meaningful insights and forecast effectively.”
There is a lot to be gained by upgrading, but Google plans to retire UA for free users in July 2023 and UA for enterprise customers in October 2023, so existing analytics users have little choice but to adopt GA4. User retains access to historical data for a period after that date, but may not bring new data into UA.
Google’s head of technology partnerships, Angus Beattie, said the company has been working with customers on a phased rollout program since GA4 was first released in 2020, starting with dual tagging. .
“Different cohorts of advertisers have different implementation efforts,” Beattie said. “If you’re currently using Google Tag Manager or gtag.js, two of your collection frameworks, it’s relatively easy to deploy the Google Analytics 4 tag to collect data alongside your existing Universal Analytics implementation. That’s what we recommend to our customers because it’s a different measurement framework.”
Beattie said Google has already deployed significant educational resources to help marketers and agencies prepare for GA4 and the transition, and will provide additional educational support throughout the remainder of 2022. We are planning to expand.
“The current phase is best called ready-to-go, so we encourage customers to take their existing base Google Analytics 4 implementations and start incorporating the features they use in their existing Universal Analytics. That way we get more of the same kind of experience,” he says.
Early adoption of Suncorp
One organization that has taken an early adopter approach to the arrival of GA4 is Suncorp. Her general manager, brand and marketing executive Mim Haysom, said her team embraced the transition as part of the financial services giant’s marketing transformation roadmap.
GA4 has been in operation across Suncorp’s portfolio of brands for over a year and is fully deployed across its web properties to ensure that all acquisition-focused activity is measured. Haysom’s team is now working to deploy his GA4 across his apps for mass brands mobile, supporting retention, loyalty and digital adoption.
“Our team has been trained on the platform and has started to integrate the platform as a source in our planning process, delivering campaign reports that are now being delivered,” Haysom explains. “By the time UA stops collecting data in 2023, we will have more than two years of data to support our insights and reports. It’s essential to ensure a solid foundation, which will also help us take advantage of our new predictive audience capabilities.”
Not all marketers consider themselves lucky. According to Nosworthy, July 2023 may still seem far away, but the downside is that it won’t move anytime soon.
“Google will retire UA in July 2023, so if you haven’t upgraded to GA4 yet, you’ll see a hole in your year-over-year reporting this time next year,” he warns. . “GA4 is much more sophisticated, accurate and powerful, while giving marketers more flexibility than ever to extract meaningful insights from their data. It can be adjusted, optimized and ready for future measurements.”
Benjamin Mangold, an expert in digital marketing, analytics and optimization and co-founder of Loves Data, agrees, saying that while Google has given people a lot of time to shift, the transition He said it still goes unnoticed by some people.
“There are still people who aren’t where they should be,” says Mangold. “This is not an upgrade to Universal Analytics, it’s something else entirely. So there’s a bit of a learning curve.”
Over time, Mangold said marketers should learn more about other important changes GA4 offers, such as powerful reporting capabilities.
“It’s a completely new product at its core, so there’s definitely a mindset shift,” says Mangold. “For example, while you have complete flexibility in how you name things in your reports, Universal Analytics had very strict parameters for how much information you could send and where it would appear.
“Also, a great many things that previously required more effort in Universal Analytics, such as measuring clicks, scrolls and all other interactions, are done automatically.”
Basic new features
The most significant change could come in the way GA4 forces a rethink of digital marketing strategies, especially when it comes to the use of first-party data. According to Charles Farina, a marketing specialist at Google and head of his Seattle-based innovation division at Adswerve, one of the key changes he made was from device-based identities to user-based identities. migration.
“For marketers to get the most out of user identities, they first and foremost need a robust set of user identities to work with,” says Farina. “This may mean investing in login experiences and other services such as loyalty programs, gated content, and other reward-based programs.”
Farina says it’s not practical or possible for some companies to generate user IDs. Alternatively, Google invests in its own identity graph of consented and logged-in Google users called Signals.
“Moving to first-party data is a top priority for marketers, especially as brands move toward eliminating the use of third-party cookies entirely and growing concerns about data privacy regulations,” said Farina. says. “With these priorities in mind, GA4 makes it easy for marketers to focus entirely on first-party datasets with new updates to the system.
“By deprecating UA, Google will focus on the GA4 platform to make better use of first-party data, allowing brands to think differently about their users and making the transition to first-party data sets easier. With Google Signals and GA4, marketers can leverage Google’s vast user base to better track their users across devices and browsers, providing attribution, reporting and behavioral insights. We can improve.”
According to Farina, GA4 also brings benefits in the form of new measurement tools and features, such as easy integration with BigQuery, Google’s enterprise data warehouse.
“GA4 enables data analysts to build funnels that accurately measure the time between interactions,” says Farina. “These trending her funnels offered in her new GA4 have improved features, including the ability to analyze funnel performance over the past year.”
Rethinking measurement
Nosworthy is most excited about GA4’s expanded measurement capabilities, including scroll tracking, file downloads, site search, and interaction with YouTube videos embedded on sites.
“These additional signals can provide rich insight into interaction quality and inform personalized retargeting strategies,” she says.
For Nosworthy, the move represents an opportunity for marketers to assess the data coming from their account structure and Google Analytics, and audit the integration before mapping key metrics.
“Once you have a clear understanding of your ideal reporting state, keep this in mind as you move to GA4,” she advises. “Then set the GA4 properties, create a data stream, and enable Google Signals and Google Ads. From there, you are ready to map your UA metrics to their GA4 equivalents.
“There is no perfect adjustment. Monitor data over 4-6 weeks and adjust when enough data is ingested on the instance.”
The next step is to start working on building the right dashboards and optimizing them for your business needs.
“Rely on automated reporting, but don’t be lazy. Just because you’re sitting on a treasure trove of data doesn’t mean you don’t need strategic analysis and enablement behind it,” Nosworthy said. increase. “Finally, make continuous optimization a priority and let your reports evolve with your business.”
Latest marketing alignment
For Haysom, Suncorp’s adoption of GA4 is closely aligned with a marketing transformation roadmap aimed at navigating trends and market complexities.
“I don’t want to onboard technology for technology’s sake,” she says. “The starting point was focused on understanding the gaps in current measurement and activation goals across the business and identifying how GA4 can help resolve these. We also identified key changes that we need to make as a business to stay ahead of the environment.
“Adoption is a huge part of any technology program. A lot of education, communication and training continues across our team.”
Suncorp will continue to run UA and GA4 in parallel to test new features in GA4. “GA4 is new and there is always excitement with new technology, but we can’t do it all yet, so we definitely have to adopt a phased migration approach,” he says. “Making sure our team is always results-focused also helps us prioritize our migrations.”
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