Google Analytics GA4 is a free, sophisticated, and simple-to-use web analytics tool that allows you to collect information about the traffic and activity on your website. You can acquire useful insights on your audience, their interests, and how they interact with your material by tracking how users interact with your website.
GA4 also enables you to segment your traffic in order to better identify which visitors are most important to your company. You can, for example, categories your traffic based on their location, device kind, or the type of information they are interested in. Understanding your audience allows you to better personalize your content and marketing activities to match their needs.
Google Analytics GA4 is a must-have tool for any company looking to better understand its online audience and optimize its website. If you haven’t already begun using GA4, now is the time!
What’s different about GA3 and GA4?
As we’ve seen, Google Analytics 4 has a lot of new and better features, like reports that are powered by AI. But the main difference between GA3 (Universal Analytics) and GA4 is that GA3 doesn’t track events while GA4 does.
In GA3, events are things like clicks. In GA4, an event can be a user looking at a pageviews, talking to someone on social media, or doing something else. You can also give each event more than one parameter to find out more, such as where it was logged.
GA3 and GA4 are also different when it comes to recording sessions. In GA3, a session is a group of hits that a user makes during a certain amount of time. GA4 keeps track of a user’s sessions, which are a group of things they do. Some of these things could include buying something, clicking a button, etc.
Some things you should know about G4 are:
Combine data from all your apps and websites
By using an event model that works on any platform, GA4 makes it possible to get information from any digital asset, like a website or an app. This means that you can see how people interact with your brand across all of your websites, subdomains, and apps in one place. With no need to set up cross-domain tracking, there is no chance that your tracking will be inflated or confused.
Simplified data model
In the past, your Google Analytics data was made up of sessions. This made it hard to keep track of users who moved between domains or whose actions caused their sessions to be split. Now that the data model is based only on users and events, it’s easier to understand and gives you more ways to customize how you collect data.
Connect the same user’s different devices
Cross-device tracking has been digital marketing departments’ worst enemy for a long time. Before, if a user went to the same website on their phone and their laptop, there was no way to connect the two.
This was a big problem for digital marketers because people might click on a Paid Social ad on their phone, fall in love with a product, and then go home and buy it on a different device. This would mean that the sale would be credited to organic search, even though your paid activity did most of the work.
New ways to figure out what people do
Google has updated the tools for analysis in GA4 by adding a new set of basic reports and a new “Analysis Hub.” Machine learning models from Google are used to find and show you trends. There are also modules that look at customer churn and potential revenue. Google also got rid of the Bounce Rate in the new version. Instead, they added a new metric called “Engaged Sessions,” which measures how many of your site’s visitors stay for at least 10 seconds.
Access to the data you collect in a more complete way
From a data analyst’s point of view, GA4’s built-in integration with Google Big Query is exciting because it lets them access the data collected at the event level. This access was previously only available to GA360 clients who paid for it. It opens the door to a wide range of marketing science and attribution applications that are unique to each business.
Change how the automated tables look
If you’ve been using Universal Analytics for a while, you’re probably used to seeing a lot of data tables. Even though these tables are usually helpful, it’s not always easy to change them to show another metric or dimension. You can certainly add a second dimension. But that’s pretty much all. In Google Analytics 4, anyone with Admin access can change the way data is shown in any report.
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You can make custom dashboards in Universal Analytics. They are pretty cool, but they don’t cover everything. With GA4, you can use Explorations, which used to be called Analysis Hub, to make your own reports. These reports are set up like an Excel workbook, with tabs across the top and different kinds of information on each tab.
Explorations let you make tables or diagrams for cohorts, paths, funnels, or segments to help you understand them better. You can share a new Exploration report with certain people, print it as a PDF, or download it as an Excel workbook.
Conclusion
All in all, there’s lots to be excited about with GA4.It is thought that for many businesses this tool could unlock a new level of data analysis that enables a greater understanding the performance of their business and particularly their digital marketing efforts. In July 2023, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will take the place of Universal Analytics (UA). This new version has more powerful tools for marketers and business owners, but user privacy is still the most important thing.
As we’ve seen, GA4 adds AI-powered insights and predictions that can help you make your marketing campaigns better. It also gives you fine-grained control over the data you collect and how you use it. It also stops fake traffic.
Author
Jaydip Parikh is the founder of Tej SolPro, a digital agency providing SEO services to clients across the globe. Parikh has 20 years of experience in sales and marketing. He regularly speaks at conferences and events, both online and offline.
