Google Analytics 4: Important Things to Know for Your Business

Google Analytics 4: Important Things to Know for Your Business

What Is Google Analytics 4? (And Why You Should Use It)

Have you been Googling ‘things to know about Google Analytics 4’? Should you incorporate GA4 into your business’s marketing strategy?

These are two of the most popular questions marketers are asking themselves right now.

Google Analytics 4 – popularly known as GA4 – is the latest evolution of Google’s analytics tracking. It allows you to get a comprehensive view of how users are interacting with your brand across multiple platforms and devices. This report also provides implementation instructions and reference materials geared towards a developer audience.

Since its launch in October 2020, marketers and business owners have been asking how they can implement GA4 into their marketing strategies.

In this post, you will learn about Google Analytics 4 and analyze its benefits for your business.

What Exactly Is Google Analytics 4 (GA4)? 

To learn about GA4, you first have to know about Google Analytics. This web analytics service provides statistics and basic analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. It can track and make reports about your website traffic and measure your advertising ROI. It also tracks your Flash videos, social networking sites, and different applications. As part of the Google Marketing Platform, it can be used freely by anyone with a Google account.

GA4 is Google’s latest version of this widely popular analytical platform. The way its data storage and architecture (data processing) are designed makes it completely different from previous versions.

This updated analytical platform includes several new reporting features that improve tracking, reporting, and insights over the previous Universal Analytics (UA) property. It can also track a website and an app within the same account.

Machine learning allows it to capture more detailed insights into how people interact with your website. This new approach to measuring and analyzing traffic usage will help you understand user engagement across various devices, platforms, and domains for years to come. You can then use these insights in your marketing and business decisions to ultimately get better ROI.

How Can I Benefit from Using Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics’ reporting tool is widely used by millions of business websites to track their user interaction across web domains, mobile apps, and offline applications. It helps them track their web traffic, monitor their marketing channels, and measure their key performance indicators (KPIs).

Now, GA4 comes into play with a bunch of new key features that differentiate it from the old version. One significant difference is the new AI data modelling feature. It fills in gaps in data where traditional analytics may have been blocked by cookie-consent rules, blocked JavaScript, or a focus on privacy.

Here we discuss some of the key benefits you get from this latest GA platform.

  1. Cross-Platform Rollup

If you’re an analyst who manages both websites and mobile apps, GA4 will let you track your data in one account. Cross-domain tracking that does not require code adjustments can be done within the UI.

  1. Improved Data Exploration

Compared with previous Google Analytics platforms, GA4 is far more powerful in terms of data exploration. This is because the ‘exploration’ reports that were previously available only to GA360 are now available for free. It helps to:

  • Explore data more easily.
  • Analyze individual users.
  • Create custom conversion funnels.
  • Compare different segments.
  • Perform a path analysis.

  1. Create Predictive Audience

Are you a marketer? GA4 has a great feature that allows you to group users to create a predictive audience based on the criteria you set around these predictive metrics.

For example, you can build a predictive audience based on the probability that they will make a purchase or churn within seven days. Then you can build another campaign to recapture those customers. This leverages your first-party web behaviour to generate predictions rather than relying on data from a third party.

  1. New Engagement Metrics

Do you want users to engage with you on a particular app or website? Then you need to know which are genuinely interested in and engaged with your content by reading your article, scrolling your website, or watching videos.

Google Analytics 4 is more event- and action-oriented than older versions. With this new way of tracking, it doesn’t make as much sense to have a metric describing inactivity on the site, which is what the bounce rate used to show.

That is why Google Analytics 4 replaces bounce rate with the new ‘engagement rate’ metric. For example, previously, tracking many common user interactions required custom JavaScript, but it is now built into the tool. Scroll tracking, video playback, and exit link clicks are all available within the GA4 platform.

  1. Clear Insight into the Customer Journey

GA4 allows you to have a complete understanding of the customer journey across multiple devices, platforms, and domains. The customer life cycle reporting makes it easy to drill down into particular aspects of the customer journey.

The GA4 analytical property is designed to be future-proof. This latest version of Google Analytics and its innovative features can seem a bit overwhelming at the beginning. Don’t worry! Simply contact one of the top web agencies in Toronto for GA4 integration into your SEO strategy.

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