How should marketers get started with the latest Google Analytics (GA4)?
Google Analytics is a very powerful tool because every business owner who has a website or an app can learn about the customer journey of the visitors through analytics and then devise the right marketing strategies to influence purchase decisions.
In Oct 2020, Google announced publicly the launch of the new Google Analytics — Google Analytics 4 properties (GA4) that combines the analytics for web and app together. As we see more commerce moving online and businesses under increased pressure to make every marketing dollar count, accurate insights from a more comprehensive digital analytics tools is very critical.
Differences between UA and GA4
There are many differences between the old GA (Universal Analytics) and the new GA (Google Analytics 4 Properties) (official explanation), but I would like to highlight what I think are the major benefits.
- More complete view of the customer journey
Users often switch devices or profiles as they interact with the website. The latest GA4 can de-duplicate users across data from different devices. This means that GA4 can measure a single user journey across devices more accurately based on the best available user identifiers like signed-in data and more.
Also, GA4 has a unified web and app reporting capability. For businesses that have both web and app, GA4 can provide insights into cross-platform journeys. This experience allows businesses to measure apps and websites together across all reports for the first time in Analytics.
- A customer-centric data collection method
Old GA uses session-based model to illustrate the user journey. However, businesses are often confused and may come up with different questions like how many people actually visited my website or did they arrive my website with different devices? Why is a page view considered a session and how can I change it to be a more relevant action?
The new GA collects and stores user interactions with business as events instead of sessions which is a more customer-centric approach that allows businesses to customize the metrics based on customer’s conversion path and perform better analysis with deduplication.
- Future proofing your business analytics
There are many powerful automated features in GA4 including the predictive audiences and the option to export data to BigQuery. This basically means that advertisers can run faster analysis by building customer models as well as joining with other data sets to target customers more accurately and subsequently drive higher marketing ROI.
Dual tagging approach to adopt GA4
To get started, Google encourages a “dual tagging” approach by setting up the data stream in GA4 alongside existing UA properties. This will allow businesses to start collecting data and take advantage of the new capabilities, while ensuring the implementation is correct (official setup guide).
Exciting stuff you can do with the new GA
One of my favourite new feature is the analysis hub! Business data can be easily visualized with the analysis report and many standard templates like funnel analysis and path analysis are made available so that business owners can analyze the customer journey of site visitors with a single click.
Official Resources:
Google Skillshop: Discover the Next Generation of Google Analytics certificate
Google Tutorials: GA YouTube Channel
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Disclaimer: All of the information provided is from externally available sources. The opinions expressed in this blog post are solely mine and do not necessarily represent those of Google.
