Universal Analytics isn’t technically gone yet, so many marketers and business owners are asking the same question: “Do I need to switch to GA4 right now?”
Our short answer: yes! We’ll explain.
Deciding when and how to transition to GA4 depends on your specific business needs and objectives. GA4 offers a range of advanced features that provide a deeper and more insightful understanding of user behavior across platforms. If you value a comprehensive view of user interactions, personalized insights powered by AI, and the ability to track users seamlessly across websites and apps, GA4 could be a game-changer for your analytics strategy.
However, if you have an established setup in Universal Analytics and are not ready to invest time and effort into adjusting your tracking codes and learning a new interface, you might consider a gradual transition or testing GA4 alongside your existing setup.
Either way, Google has signaled that GA4 is the future of their analytics platform, so embracing it sooner rather than later could position your business to make the most of its transformative capabilities and stay ahead in the rapidly evolving digital landscape, even if you don’t plan to use it exclusively right away.
Need help switching to and getting acquainted with GA4? Let’s talk.
Alright, now to the meat and potatoes of this whole thing — what’s new?
While the following isn’t an exhaustive list of all that’s new with GA4, it does highlight some of the most prominent updates and features to be aware of as you transition.
The biggest change you’ll notice on GA4 is that the dashboard got a facelift. Some of the reports you used to have might be relocated or deleted. Your navigation will have more options. You’ll also notice a Predictive Insights section (more on that later!).
While the changes can be annoying to accommodate and get used to, you can rest assured knowing Google was acting in good faith with these updates. The dashboard was redesigned to be more user-friendly, intuitive, and customizable, with a focus on providing goal-oriented, actionable insights.
GA4 shifted from a session-based tracking model to an event-driven tracking model. This means that all user interactions are tracked as events, allowing for a more granular understanding of user behavior across multiple sessions.
You can still view session-level reporting, but you’ll also have the ability to break it down by interaction. This is a great thing!
You might also notice a few more metrics, like engaged sessions, engagement rate, and engagement time. The event-based measurements and new metrics are definitely big changes, but we do think they’re changes that will make customer journey tracking better. After all, the more data, the better!
GA4 integrated machine learning to offer Predictive Insights: proactive metrics like purchase probability, predicted revenue, and churn probability. These metrics aim to help you anticipate future user behavior and trends, rather than make assumptions based on past behaviors.
In our opinion, this is one of the coolest features of the new setup. We’ve been experimenting with different use cases of AI for marketing, and this is one of the tools we’re excited to share and experiment with our clients.
That dashboard we talked about? It’s all new and fancy, but you’re also able to customize it to your liking. You’ll have control over which reports you see right away, and you can even connect it with Google Looker (formerly Google Data Studio) to create custom data visualizations.
Aside from the dashboards, GA4 also allows for custom segments based on trigger events. This makes it easier to track specific interactions that are most relevant to your goals.
We love websites and organic traffic, but we’ll be real — not all of your leads will come in that way, or that easily. Lead generation, nurturing, and conversion can happen on all sorts of platforms — just think of all the social media options out there!
GA4 accommodates this by providing a more complete view of user interactions across various platforms and devices, including websites, mobile apps, and other digital platforms. This can help you understand your customer journey a little better.
Last, but certainly not least: Google made efforts to align GA4 with evolving privacy regulations (think GDPR and CCPA). The new iteration focuses on data retention policies and providing features to manage user data more responsibly. New privacy controls include cookieless measurement and behavioral and conversion modeling.
