Businesses must navigate new obstacles to understand their customers’ complicated, multi-platform journeys in today’s measuring market, all while preserving user privacy.
If you are like most organizational leaders around the globe, it is challenging to stay up-to-date with the ever changing landscape of digital marketing. It also means your website is most likely making use of Universal Analytics (UA) – the software that measures all your website traffic. Universal Analytics is the predecessor to Google Analytics 4 and it will be disappearing in just over a year from now.
Are you ready?
Google released Google Analytics (GA) 4 two and a half years ago to meet these changing measurement requirements and help companies prosper. GA 4 provides a solid analytics experience that is built for the future, with the ability to measure a wide range of data types. It enables organizations to view unified user experiences across their websites and applications, as well as to leverage Google’s machine learning technology to uncover and forecast new insights. Most crucially, it’s engineered to keep up with a dynamic environment.
You’re leaving vital business information on the table if you don’t use a current measuring system. So make Google Analytics 4 your cross-platform analytics solution right now. The previous iteration of Analytics, Universal Analytics, will be phased out next year. On July 1, 2023, all standard Universal Analytics properties will cease processing new hits. Universal Analytics 360 sites will get an extra three months of new hit processing, ending on October 1, 2023, due to the recent introduction of the new Analytics 360 experience.
Leaving Universal Analytics behind
Universal Analytics was created for a new age of online measurement based on the desktop web, autonomous sessions, and more readily viewable cookie data. This system of measuring is soon becoming outdated. Meanwhile, Google Analytics 4 is cross-platform, does not depend only on cookies, and provides user-centric measurement using an event-based data architecture.
And, although Universal Analytics has a range of privacy options, Google Analytics 4 is built with privacy in mind to provide our clients and their users a better experience. It enables enterprises to address changing demands and user expectations by providing more extensive and granular data gathering and use controls. Importantly, IP addresses will no longer be stored in Google Analytics 4. In today’s worldwide data privacy market, where consumers are increasingly demanding greater privacy safeguards and control over their data, these solutions and controls are extremely important.
What makes it unique from Google Analytics 3?
GA4 is based on Google’s App + Online property, which combines data from all of your linked mobile applications, web apps, and websites. It also switches from ‘hits and sessions’ to ‘events’ as a metric for user involvement.
Hits on pages, ecommerce activity, and social media referrals were all aggregated into a session’ in Google Analytics 360 (GA360). These sessions become an easy method to describe a website’s popularity. You had to manually setup events if you wanted to know how your users interacted with certain links or objects. If these artifacts are accessible on various services, GA3 will not be able to integrate your website and app analytics automatically.
GA4’s ‘event’ based methodology gives you a customizable way to measure user involvement throughout your entire service portfolio. For example, you may use GA4 to check how many people have seen a video on your website and its mobile app.
A new data layout lies at the core of this new analytics environment. The data layout in GA4 contains a lot fewer variables than in GA360. Some variables were commonly blank or empty fields, such as ‘hits.LatencyTracking’ and ‘Hits.Publisher.’ ‘Nesting’ has been used in other disciplines. Only when a user interacts with the service in a manner that generates a data point will GA4 fill these nested data fields.