Announcement: On July 1, 2023, the standard version of Google Analytics will stop processing new data. In turn, Google Analytics 4 will track website activity from that date onward. The old version might process data for a period of three months, after which it will be rendered redundant.
What is Google Analytics 4?
Formerly called “App + Web”, Google Analytics 4 was in its beta version and came out of testing only in October 2020. The service’s primary goal is to enable traffic measurements and better engagement across apps and websites. The company cites shifts in consumer behaviour and significant changes in internet privacy rules for this upgrade. Some analytics include the customers’ degree of engagement, retention, and monetisation after they have been acquired. Ample instructions are outlined in the documentation and other reference materials for developers.
Google advertises its Analytics 4 services with a next-gen approach inclusive of ‘privacy-first’ tracking, x-channel measurement and AI-based predictive data. It uses cutting-edge machine learning models to fill out statistics for website traffic rather than depending on ‘hits’ on every page. Data is presented in the form of ‘events’. At the same time, ML fills in gaps, especially in portions where businesses need help comprehending their customer base (this happens when users opt out of data collection and cookies).
The need for GA4 is primarily due to the new data protection laws such as GDPR and CCPA. Traditional analytics came with diminished stability, which is why businesses often ran into issues such as missing or inaccurate data due to cookie consent options.
Main Features of GA4
It uses the ‘modelling’ method that draws from historical data and generalises site traffic and user behaviour. Machine Learning is the primary form of data measurement. The new ‘insights’ function is powered by AI and designed to automatically high data beneficial to marketers.
GA4 gives administrators a better understanding of the customer journey and pays more attention to tracking the customer journey rather than simply providing metrics across market groups, pages and devices.
It is intended to be future-proof and function in a world devoid of cookies or personal information. The views and segments in the older Universal Analytics tool have been replaced by ‘data streams’ in GA4.
Traditional analytics contains three levels – accounts, property and view. Unlike classic analytics, GA4 only has account and property. Event tracking in classic analytics required a gtag.js script or modified analytics code. In contrast, GA4 enables fine-tuning, editing and tracking events within the UI (activities such as scrolling, clicking and more).
Some more capabilities of GA4
Marketers can now customise the way they want to track their events. They can fine-tune, edit and correct without using onsite code. In a single property, data import will become possible from non-website and a wide range of other resources, such as apps. Cross-domain tracking will be made simple and can be accomplished within the UI without making any code adjustments. One of the biggest advances in GA4 is the ‘Life Cycle Report’, which primarily emphasises on user journey. Additionally, the ‘templated reports for eCommerce funnels’ offer marketers an avenue to visualise data.
Conclusion
You can use GA4 to your advantage as one of the most effective marketing tools. Once on the site, it helps comprehend website traffic and visitor behaviours. Simply put, greater analytics results in better insights, leading to better decision-making.
