Switch to GA4 — Unlock Audience Insights with GA4 To Drive Media Performances
The BIG announcement today on Universal Analytics deprecation is a great reminder for businesses to migrate their Google Analytics to GA4 as soon as possible! (can refer to previous post: How should marketers get started with GA4?)
In general, I think Google Analytics is powerful because it has actionable insights. I can’t highlight the word actionable enough because Google Analytics can be seamlessly linked with Google Ads to drive direct media actions. GA4 is even more powerful with machine learning capabilities built inside the platform to predict the future behavior of users with predictive metric.
Three Audience Types in GA4
Broadly speaking, there are three audience segments in GA4. They are,
- Audience Builder — segment you users based on different dimensions, metrics and events (i.e. age, language, interests, add to cart shopper)
- Audience Trigger — trigger events when users match the definition of an audience (i.e. clicks this button within this timestamp)
- Predictive Audiences (newly available in GA4!)— availability of audiences after meeting eligibility of predictive metrics(i.e. suggested audiences, purchase probability) (Learn more here)
I don’t want to deep dive into each audience segments but I want to highlight the new predictive audiences available in GA4.
What is GA4 Predictive Audiences?
Anticipate which users are likely to churn and purchase when they use your website and/or app
A predictive audience is an audience with at least one condition based on a predictive metric. It is an off-the-shelve audience segment in GA4. There are five pre-set predictive audiences including “Likely 7-day churning purchasers”, “Likely 7-day churning users”, “Likely 7-day purchasers”, “Likely first-time 7-day purchasers” and “Predicted 28-day top spenders”. (Learn more here)
Off-the-shelf solution
The beauty of predictive audiences is that previously businesses would need to set up Google Cloud Big Query and have a data scientist team to set up the segmentation logic. With GA4 preditivce metric, predictive audience is an off-the-shelf solution, available with a button of a click. Of course, the catch is that the GA4 property needs to meet the prerequisites and that no changes can be made to the definition of the audiences (i.e. cannot change to likely 3-day purchasers).
Learnings
Personally, I have worked with clients to try out this feature and we find that it’s super powerful to adopt this off-the-box predictive solution to drive incremental results in Google Ads. We’ve particularly tried the “likely 7-day purchases” and compared with the existing remarking audiences for 4–8 weeks and we found that predictive audiences drive significantly better results.
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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.
