What you need to know about GA4

In digital marketing, tracking website traffic is imperative. Google Analytics is the tool used to track and measure this data. Giving you insight into what people are doing on your site and how you can improve transactions with their time spent. Google Analytics is now transitioning to GA4, the newest version of Google Analytics  – which completely reimagines data collection and analysis, combining all of Universal Analytics strengths with brand-new features created to take advantage of the opportunities provided by big data and machine learning.

On July 1, 2023, all standard Universal Analytics properties will stop collecting website data. From that date on, website traffic will be recorded only in the new GA4 tool. Now is the time to make sure you are set up on GA4!

What is Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 replaces Google Analytics with a new class of property that offers different reports from those you’re used to seeing in Universal Analytics properties. Google Analytics 4 allows you to track traffic and user engagement across all of your websites and apps. This documentation offers implementation guidelines and reference materials targeted at developers.

What is the difference between GA4 and Universal Analytics?

Universal Analytics was built on the idea of measuring user sessions on your website, while the new GA4 is built with an entirely different architecture aimed at measuring engagement events [how people interact with your website when they are there]. Engagement events can be defined by page views, clicks, form submissions, and even custom events you’re able to set up for any user activity on your site. For example, if XX is an important action to know whether a user is absorbing the information on your website, you can set up an event to track XYZ.

What is new about GA4

The implications this architectural change has on tracking are vast and significant. GA4 is much more data-capable than Universal Analytics. GA4 can provide significantly more information about what users are doing on your website or app and can be used to track a variety of different actions, in addition to simply web traffic.

The tracking of users across platforms and devices is one of GA4’s most efficient features. This enables you to obtain a thorough understanding of how customers engage with your brand whether they are using your website, your mobile app, or both.

A GA4 property can pull in data from more than one source, unifying data from your different domains and mobile applications into one view to better understand the customer journey. For mobile app developers, this allows an easy merge of IOS and Android mobile app analytics.

GA 4 also uses event-based data instead of session-based and includes privacy controls such as cookieless measurement, and behavioral and conversion modeling.

This is enabled through the use of “data streams,” which are essentially different “views” of your data based on specific criteria you’ve set up. You could, for instance, make a stream for all web traffic, one for all app traffic, or one for all traffic coming from a specific acquisition source.

Other new measurable metrics features available:

• Active Users — Number of users that have been active in a 28-day period
• Engaged Sessions — Number of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least 2 views
• Engagement Rate — Percentage of total sessions that were engaged sessions
• Average Engagement Time — Calculated summation of user engagement durations per active user
• Event Count — Count of triggered events or hits

How Google Analytics 4 Will Affect You

If you are not set up with GA4 after July 1, 2023, you will no longer be able to view your current website data.  It is important to transition your account to GA4 NOW to ensure there won’t be a blackout period in tracking from switching platforms. Noisy Trumpet has already transitioned overall current clients GA4. If you are not a current client, we are here to help!

Historical data collected through Universal Analytics will no longer be viewable after July 1, 2024. Should you like to view and access that historical data, we are also able to export the information to ensure it is collected and secured. From there, we can set up custom reporting dashboards you can reference down the road.

Conclusion

Overall, the Noisy Trumpet team has successfully migrated all of our client’s Google Analytics accounts to GA4, and is now in the process of exporting and preserving all of the previous data and analytics from Google Analytics. If you have any questions or want to learn more about GA4 migration and exporting past analytics data, contact us today, and our team will be happy to assist.