Why businesses need to switch to Google Analytics 4 now

Google Analytics has had a shiny new upgrade, and the 28.1 million businesses who use the software worldwide¹ will need to make a change over to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) before July of next year.

Google Analytics will completely replace Universal Analytics (UA) on the 1st of July 2023, allowing businesses to benefit from more detailed reports and allowing internet users to gain more privacy from more stringent cookie laws.

From the 1st of July 2023, you will only have six months to view your Universal Analytics data – and, while it has not been confirmed, Google is highly likely to delete this data because it does not comply with the current privacy laws!

Why do businesses need to switch to GA4 now?

You should switch over to GA4 as soon as possible! Delaying the switch until July next year could leave you with no historical website data to compare within the GA4 interface.

Making the shift now allows some time to gather data within GA4, enabling you to continue making monthly reports when Universal Analytics data is no longer accessible.

Give you and your team the chance to get used to the new interface and features before the familiar interface of UA is deleted. We recommend undergoing online training in the meantime and making time to play around with the platform while you have Universal Analytics as a backup in case you struggle to get the data you need.

You also now have the unique opportunity to have both a GA4 and GA3 account, allowing you to spot any data anomalies and explain data discrepancies to clients or stakeholders in the business before Google Analytics 4 becomes the sole interface.

What are the main differences between GA4 and Universal Analytics?

Google Analytics 4 differs from Universal Analytics with its customer lifecycle-framed reporting. This system aims to give a complete view of how customers are engaging with your business across all devices and channels, helping you to understand where you should be prioritising your marketing and advertising efforts.

Another main difference is that GA4 is built for a future cookieless world. Rather than relying on user data collected by cookies, the software fills in data gaps in a privacy-safe way to co-operate with recent privacy laws. In this way, no IP connection is collected, there is less focus on demographic data, and the maximum data retention period is 14 months.

GA4 has a fantastic new focus on analytic predictions using Artificial Intelligence technology. This provides suggestions for future growth to help make decisions on your marketing budget. GA4’s reporting also now combines mobile app and website usage for unified analysis. This is in recognition that mobile phones make up almost 60% of search engine traffic in 2022, so it is a vital metric for all websites to track.²

Despite the many differences, Google Analytics 4 will remain a free platform for businesses to use, regardless of how many properties they connect, and is designed in a similar user-friendly way to GA3!

What are the key new features of Google Analytics 4?

– Events

GA4 has replaced sessions with events. Instead of session-based data, every user interaction is a separate event, which is a much more granular measure.³ As Google commented, this events-based model will “deliver user-centric measurement.”⁴

For example, if a potential customer opens your web page, clicks an internal link and adds something to their basket, this will be recorded as three separate events.

Additionally, you can now track up to 300 events, which are separated into four distinct categories, including automatically collected events, enhanced measurement events, recommended events and custom events.

Events in Google Analytics 4 will also be measured differently from the way sessions are currently measured in GA3, providing a more accurate overview of the time spent on site. For instance, if a user is on your site from 11:59 PM until 12:05 AM the same evening, GA4 recognises this as the same session, whereas GA3 would count this as two sessions.

– Insights and Artificial Intelligent predictions

Insights and predictions are powered by artificial intelligence, and automatic insights are a really easy way to see changes in data and improvements on site. GA4 provides predictive analytics based on the current trends of the business, for example, “Expect 10% more conversions next week” or “Expect 20% fewer website visits next week”.

You can simply use the search bar to ask questions such as, “How many people viewed my website today”. Google Analytics 4 also has many question templates set up for quick data collection, including website sessions, sales totals and conversions, which avoids you having to go into these individual sections to get a daily overview of activity.

– Custom reports

In GA4, you can now create filtered custom reports. For example, In one report, you can display only mobile data, and in the other report, you can display only web data.

Using the “Explorations” feature (previously called Analysis Hub), you can create custom reports, which are laid out very similarly to an Excel workbook. The reports are tabbed across the top and each tab has its unique data. This makes collating and sharing marketing, sales or business reports really clear.

– More detailed conversion rate reports

You can now see more details about the conversion rate as GA4 focuses more on audience-based conversions. In GA3 or Universal Analytics, conversion data is only based on data from a page or event.

With the previous version of Google Analytics, there was a limit of 20 conversions per site, however, GA4 has gifted us an extra 10 conversions to track which will open more avenues to marketing campaigns.

There are two helpful terms to remember when it comes to conversion rates in GA4:

User Conversion Rate: the percentage of users who have activated any of the pre-determined conversion events.
Session Conversion Rate: the percentage of sessions (group of events from a user in a set time frame) in which any conversion event has been triggered.

– Data deletion feature

GA4 allows you to easily delete large amounts of data at once within its easy-to-use customer interface. For peace of mind, Google will give you seven days to change your mind, after which the data will be deleted permanently.

This has lots of advantages; you can get rid of data caused by a mistake within a marketing campaign or from specific events on your site that you don’t see as relevant anymore.

– Elapsed time measurement

Google Analytics makes it easier to see the time between each user interaction or event, which is invaluable when tracking the timeline of the sales funnel.

With this new feature, businesses can now measure how long it takes users to convert from the very first time they click to open your webpage, and this information can help you to understand and evaluate the success of your marketing material.

How can businesses set up Google Analytics 4?

There are three ways to get set up, according to official advice from Google:⁵

If you’re new to Analytics and ready to collect data for your website and/or app, set up a completely new account on Google Analytics 4 and simply follow the set-up instructions.
If you want to connect Google Analytics 4 to a site with an existing Universal Analytics account, use the GA4 Setup Assistant to add a Google Analytics 4 property alongside your existing Universal Analytics property. You can switch between these two using the property selector in the Admin section of Google Analytics.
You can also add Google Analytics 4 to a website builder platform or CMS (content management system).⁶ Do this if you use a CMS-hosted (Content Management System) website, e.g. a website created using Wix, WordPress, Drupal, Squarespace, GoDaddy, WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, Awesome Motive, HubSpot, etc.

Next steps

Once you have GA4 set up, you can rest assured that you are collecting the most accurate information for your website! This will help with marketing, social media and PR activities as you can track the success of these activities in much more detail.

If you are looking for a company to manage your bespoke PR and marketing efforts, contact us today! We pride ourselves in helping businesses from many different industries achieve their wildest ambitions – just take a look at our portfolio!

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