Google introduced GA4 in 2020 and announced July 1, 2023, as the date for sunsetting standard UA properties. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest generation of web analytics platforms and replaces the former property type, Universal Analytics (UA). GA 360 customers will now have until July 2024.  What this means is that all standard UA and 360 properties will stop processing new data from these respective dates.

If you haven't already, the time has come (if it has not already) to transition to GA4 and start building up your historical data and getting familiar with this new platform. It is not possible to migrate historical data from the UA to GA4, as both tools are based on different data models. While the technical basis is the same, GA4 is a unique product with numerous features that are best viewed with an open mind and not always compared to UA. 

What makes GA4 Fundamental for Growth-Focused Businesses:

Here is what you need to know about GA4 as far as what GA4 means for your business and why it will be an integral part of growth-focused marketing efforts moving forward.  

1. Track cross-platform user behavior.  GA4s focus on different digital ecosystems, including websites, social media, and apps allowing businesses to get more of a big-picture perspective not only of how customers purchase the products or services your business offers but also of what they focus on in terms of your business once they actually become customers.

2. Improved user understanding: GA4’s ability to track user behavior across multiple touchpoints companies to better understand their users or visitors and target marketing campaigns more effectively.  This allows businesses to optimize their marketing efforts and boost their conversion rates.

3. Improved customer retention: Given the multiple touchpoints that comprise a business sales and marketing funnel or cycle, GA4 assists businesses in improving customer retention by identifying potential churners and targeting them with retention campaigns.

What Are Key Upgrades in GA4

So how is GA4 an improvement on the existing Universal Analytics property? Listed below are some of the key upgrades inherent with GA4.

• GA4 is focused on providing marketers with a more comprehensive understanding of their customer journey across different devices.

• The tool is built with advanced machine learning as its main form of data measurement. It uses modeling that allows it to extrapolate from existing data in order to make assumptions regarding user behavior and site traffic (predictive analytics).

• The new AI-powered “Insights” feature automatically highlights helpful information to make it easier for marketers to find potential insights to create campaigns.

• Google designed GA4 to be future-proof to ensure that it will work even when there are no cookies or any identifying data.

• Instead of the segments and views used by the old Universal Analytics properties (GA3), the new Google Analytics features “data streams”.

• Whereas the traditional Universal Analytics had three levels (Property, Account, and View), GA4 is much more streamlined and only has two levels: Account and Property.

• The final highlight of the new Google Analytics 4 is that the tool enables tracking, editing, and fine-tuning events from within the user interface, which means interactions such as clicks, page scroll, and much more. This is a vast improvement over the “event tracking” in previous versions which could only be done through the use of modified analytics code.

What is New and Unique With GA4

While there is quite a lot to learn about GA4, here are some key elements of interest.

1. GA4 genesis

GA4

• captures data across both web and applications, allowing you to combine and view data across all your platforms.

• enhances data control and privacy - Internet Protocol (IP) addresses are not collected, and cookieless measurement for some metrics.

• uses an event-based data model to deliver user-centric measurement, making it much easier to follow users along their journey.

GA4 is designed for the future of measurement.

2. Explorations

Explorations are perhaps one of the most important and exciting features within the GA4 interface. Explorations is a collection of advanced techniques that go beyond standard reports to help you uncover deeper insights about your customers' behaviour. This is an area worth familiarizing yourself with once your data starts coming in, as it provides more insight and flexibility when exploring your data than UA ever could.

3. DebugView

DebugView allows you to check incoming data at a more granular level. In UA, real-time reports allow you to verify events, conversions, and pageviews as you or a user interact with them on your website. However, you must wait until the data lands in standard reports for things like enhanced eCommerce data. As a result, there is a few hours delay between the event being triggered and when viewing the data is possible.

4. Big Query integration

You can export all your raw events from GA4 properties to Big Query. BigQuery can be accessed to pull data and insight at a more granular level. It allows you to answer the data questions we want to ask and not just be limited by what is available in the GA4 interface. It also allows you to integrate your web analytics data with other sources. A SQL-like syntax is used to query the data, which can be a little overwhelming to non-SQL users.  However, a little investment in training in this area is well worth it, and there are lots of online resources to help you along the way.

5. Sampling

You will be happy to hear that in GA4, you can apply comparisons, secondary dimensions, and filters to standard reports, and they will remain unsampled. Big Query allows you to access and query your data without sampling, another reason to get familiar with this tool.

6. View rather than Views

GA4 does not have Views; instead, you have a single reporting View. You can apply filters to your reporting view in GA4 rather than creating a separate view like in UA. GA4 also introduces the concept of data streams. Data streams are sources like your website, iOS app, or Android app. All of which you can populate into one GA4 property and then filter that property by any of these data streams using filters. In UA, you have a separate View for each of these. 

7. Enhanced and additional measurements

GA4 gives you more out-of-the-box, beyond surface-level metrics, all of which are tracked automatically:

• scrolling below 90% of the page

• site search

• outbound link clicks

• file downloads

• interactions with embedded Youtube video player.

In addition to these out-of-the-box metrics, they have improved other metrics such as engaged sessions and engagement time.

• An engaged session is defined as spending 10 seconds or more on the site/app, viewing 2 or more screens/pages, or having a conversion event. Engagement rate is essentially, the inverse of bounce rate.

• GA4 does a better job tracking engagement time. In UA, the time on page metric could often show '0' if a visitor does not go to another page or you haven't tracked other interactions. GA4 also tracks engagement time when your website is in the browser's active tab. This makes the engagement metric a bit more accurate compared to UA.

8. Audience triggers

Audience triggers let you prompt events when users match the definition of an audience and become members. Using audience triggers in GA4 allows you to create more complex events and conversions. There are limitless examples of how you can create audience triggers, but here are a few examples:

• You can create a 'Premium Customer' audience where for instance, a user is defined as one whose lifetime value is greater than $500. Once they meet this condition, they will become an audience member.

• Users can enter an audience pool once they have viewed 2 or more pages and clicked on a CTA.

These audiences can be used to trigger Google Ads and also experiments within Google Optimize.

9. Predictive metrics

This is a more advanced feature of GA4 and one that leverages GA4's machine-learning capabilities. Your website needs to reach a certain volume of traffic and must have purchase event tracking enabled. GA4 can be used to build audiences such as:

• likely 7-day purchasers

• likely 7-day churning users

• predicted 28-day top spenders

• likely first-time 7-day purchasers

• likely 7-day churning purchasers

10. Integrating Optimize accounts as part of GA4

In January of this year, Google announced it would phase out Optimize and Optimize 360 on September 30th, 2023.  All experiments running through Google Optimize will stop running on this date, so if you use this tool, you will need to find a replacement and should start researching alternatives. 

As well as this, you will need to connect your Optimize account to your new GA4 property before July 1st if you want to continue running experiments between July and September. There are differences between the GA4 and UA integration with Optimize, which you should familiarise yourself with, all of the details of which can be found here. Given how little time you will have to use Optimize once standard UA properties are sunset, it may be worth considering transitioning to your new testing tool closer to July rather than holding out until the September shutdown.

Why GA4 is a Non-Negotiable Part of A Growth Marketing Playbook

We come to the interesting part, which is how you can use the new capabilities of Google Analytics 4 to increase your revenue.

After all, although businesses can set marketing goals for any number of reasons, ultimately, it all comes down to being able to increase your bottom line. Having the analytics at hand that GA4 provides allows businesses to have insights to spur growth via more targeted marketing is key to achieving this.

This is how GA4 can help you do just that:

1. Automatically Collected Events

One of the most frustrating things about events in the previous version of Google Analytics was how you would have to personally set up events in order to track them. This meant creating a tracking code/identifier, defining what this tag was, putting the tag on your website, and keeping track of all of the tags created.

Needless to say, this was laborious and not user-friendly at all. While GA4 doesn’t solve all of the problems related to tags on your website, the entire process of implementing tags is much more simple. 

With GA4, they’ve already created a list of the most common pre-defined tags on the platform. You can certainly add those specific to your business’ growth marketing cycle.  However the existing ones are as follows:

• Language

• Page Location

• Page Referrer

• Page Title

• Screen Resolution

2. Enhanced Tracking for Specific Events

Thanks to GA4’s “enhanced measurement” feature, automatic tracking of certain types of events, such as site search tracking, exit tracking, media tracking, and scroll tracking can be done without any additional coding or tagging.

Having tracking on these events can be extremely useful in terms of helping you improve your overall growth marketing strategy.

 By tracking the way users use these functions, will help your business to optimize the path for your visitors.  This will ultimately lead to higher conversions which generate more revenue.

For instance, if you had a website that offered a number of online courses teaching Photoshop, you could track the events that the users take.  Based on those events, it is logical to deduce they’re likely to want course private label rights (PLR) for what you offer.  Knowing this allows your business to create content as well as design conversion pathways and strategies to capitalize on these potential opportunities.

3. Lose the Cookies, Not the Data

GA4 is planning for the phasing out of third-party cookies and sparse data will in all likelihood become the norm.

In a future without cookies, GA4 intends to fill in the data gaps using machine learning in order to maintain reporting accuracy.  This will in turn allow for clearer insights and highlight patterns that emerge.

In addition to all that, GA4 will also make that information work for you through the use of predictive marketing features that help to give additional and more complete information that help to act on those insights.

3. Customer Lifecycle-Framed Reporting

Customer lifecycle-framed reporting is among the most noticeable differences between the new Google Analytics 4 and the previous Universal Analytics version.

This feature has to do with how reports are organized. The goal of GA4 is to offer marketers a complete view of how their customers engage with their business across various devices and channels.

Furthermore, GA4 allows you to allocate a user with an ID. You can also enable Google signals so you can duplicate users across different devices allowing for better ad targeting and reporting, which, in turn, will help you find qualified leads and generate more revenue for your business. 

This is an especially exciting feature for companies that host high-converting webinars and other high-converting tactics to turn browsers into customers. This allows you to not only see where your traffic is coming from but also analyze the engagement metrics with that traffic source and understand what actions those users took.

4. Cost-Effective Data Warehousing

The use of BigQuery allows for more cost-efficient data warehousing for ALL GA4 users. By allowing your growing business to warehouse your GA data in a cost-effective way, Big Query gives you analytical flexibility and provides event-level historical data logs.

This is the evolution that many marketers have been waiting for as, previously, the BigQuery function could only be accessed by GA360 subscribers, each of whom had to pay a hefty price of $150,000 a year.

This meant small and midsize businesses didn’t have the ability to effectively store the data in a SQL style environment. But now, with just a couple of clicks, all organizations with Google Analytics 4 properties can now access cheap data warehousing.

The reality is, that SEO data collection can be expensive, but GA4 will help make these data points a reality for many small and medium-sized businesses that aren’t ready for API integration just yet.

Having larger data sets the table for many smaller companies to have the abilities that large companies have had for years. With the right staff, companies will have the ability to increase revenue, engagement across their sites, conversions, and more efficient spending of ad dollars.

5. Predictions Powered by AI

GA4 is using AI to make predictions based on data trends. With the new platform, you get powerful insights and predictions powered by artificial intelligence.

Although this concept has been used in analytics for some time now, GA4’s approach is different as it can highlight data trends that can impact the potential revenue of a business, such as the increase in demand for a particular product or service.

Another example of how this can be used by businesses to make smart decisions is to make use of the AI-powered insights and predictions feature to predict outcomes like churn rates or the potential revenue your business might earn from a specific segment of customers.

All these are examples of how this technology can help anticipate stages of the growth marketing funnel and where it can drop off.  It can help anticipate your customers’ actions in the future, enabling you to place more of your focus on higher-value audiences, and ultimately boost your bottom line.

What are Some Expected Future Trends of GA4

As we look to the future of GA4, we see certain trends emerging:

1. Cross-platform tracking: Designed for cross-platform tracking, GA4 enables SaaS companies to track user behavior across websites, mobile apps, and desktop apps.

2. Predictive analytics: With predictive analytics, SaaS companies will be able to foresee user behavior, allowing for proactive decision-making.

3. AI and machine learning: GA4 leverages AI and machine learning for deeper insights, equipping SaaS companies with even more powerful analytics capabilities.

GA4 Needs to Be an Essential Part of the Growth Marketing Framework That Your Business Needs to Adopt

Google Analytics 4 is a game-changer for businesses. Its ability to track and analyze user behavior across multiple touchpoints, coupled with its powerful analytics capabilities, makes it an invaluable tool for any growth-focused business looking to optimize its user experience, boost conversions, and enhance customer retention. All of this is necessary to have the analytics on hand to generate insights to improve marketing and ultimately achieve greater sales growth.

Businesses eager to stay ahead of the curve should integrate GA4 into their analytics strategy. Despite a slight learning curve and the need for data migration, the benefits offered by GA4 are too significant to ignore. By harnessing its power, companies can gain deeper insights into their customer journeys, make informed decisions, and ultimately drive their growth.

If you are looking for help with setting up and determining how best to set up GA4 in your organization in order to better  leverage the growth marketing funnel in your organization, why not reach out for a free, no-obligation growth marketing consultation?  Our expert growth marketers look forward to learning more about your business.