Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
What is Google Analytics 4?
Google announced on the 14th Of October 2020, that Google Analytics 4 as the new website and application analytics platform from Google.
As of the 1st of July the current Google Analytics (universal) version will no longer be available.
This is an upgraded version which ticks many boxes for marketers. So, what are the benefits?
Customer-centric Measurement
This latest version is more focused towards user behaviour rather than segmenting by device or platform. This will allow marketers to identify how a user first discovered your website all the way to purchase or enquiry - great news!
Better understanding of the customer journey
What are the actions your customers are taking once they have clicked into your website? Do you know? Are they one time purchasers and never return? Having a clear view of your customer’s journey is a powerful tool. Viewing each stage of the marketing funnel and assessing the insights and optimise your marketing strategy will lead to maximising returns on investment into your marketing efforts.
In GA4 the menu is now located on the left hand side. Under the lifecycle category, the tab is broken down based on your customer’s journey.
- Acquisition
- Overview
- User acquisition
- Traffic Acquisition
- Engagement
- Overview
- Events
- Pages and screens
- Monetisation
- Overview
- E-commerce purchases
- In-app purchases
- Publisher ads
- Retention
- Overview
User activity over time
Analyse data based on a potential customer’s stage in the customer journey. Under Engagement, you will see an interesting insight such as user activity over time.
This metric allows you to identify the rate of which users drop off after their first visit to your website, within the last 30 days.
User Stickiness
The User Stickiness metric located under the engagement tab, shows how “sticky” users are. This is broken down in 3 parts:
- Daily active users/ monthly active users
- Daily active users/ Weekly active users
- Weekly active users/ monthly active users
User stickiness is an essential feature which allows us to evaluate the return rate of customers.
From new acquisition to final conversion (purchase or enquiry) and all the way to post-conversion (customer retention), the lifecycle tab provides a better understanding of the marketing funnel.
Predictive metrics using machine learning
You will find that you will now receive automated alerts based on critical data trends from your website.
eCommerce website owners could be alerted to rising demand for specific products. It has been termed as Purchase Probability and allows you to identify a user’s likelihood to perform a transaction say in the next 7 days. This is based on the behaviour of your website or app visitors based on their behaviour over the last 28 days.
Churn probability is another available productive metric which identifies user within the last week who are likely to drop out over the next 7 days...pretty cool.
These predictive metrics allows you to set your audiences apart. By identifying ROI positive audiences to invest in, you will be able to make pinpoint marketing decisions whatever your KPI’s.
Integrated Reporting
This is the best part of the new GA4 and one of the greatest benefits - you can view integrated data from both of your website and app visitors and events.
Expect more accurate reporting, cross-platform and cross-device tracking now that your data combines both web and app properties.
Analytics Intelligence
Viewing important business data effectively is key and this insights feature allows to you analyse as easy as possible. Stop spending tie filtering data and switching between multiple tabs, instead, ask analytics intelligence the questions!
This new feature is found in the insights tab and include:
- How many users did we acquire last week?
- On what days do we get the most users?
- What is the revenue generated from organic search vs paid search?
- Which products generated the most revenue?
- What devices drove the most sales?
This comprehensive list of covers a variety of essential categories including:
- Basic performance
- Demographics
- User acquisition
- Traffic analysis
- Technology
- eCommerce
This feature is sure to create some efficiencies for marketers as most of the work is done for you. You can not gather insights quickly and efficiently.
Enhanced measurement
Enhanced measurement is available once you have set up your data stream. It is an automated method of tracking events and it allows you to measure the interactions on your web and app instantaneously.
And since it is automated you dont have to do anything once you have set up your data stream.
Enhanced measurement automatically tracks and measures the following events:
- Pageviews
- Scrolls
- Outbound clicks
- Site search
- Video engagement
- File downloads
The user interface is simple enough that you can easily disable these events by unselecting the interactions you dont want to track:
This will allow more granular data and provide you with a stronger way to identify how customers interact with your content.
Easy to use ID tracking
We’re loving the new GA4 because setting it up is fast, efficient and hassle-free.
Previous versions of GA, tracking the User-ID of your website visitors is a painful process. With the new User-ID feature, it allows you to associate data across multiple sessions and different devices. This provides a better understanding of how users interact with your content over an extended period of time.
Once you have enabled User-ID, you will be able to identify the same user across web sessions, devices and engagements because each user is uniquely identified.
Currently, without the User-ID feature, a user can browse your website over multiple devices, for example, and each time they would be considered as a seperate person.
Google Signals
- For users who have turned on ads personalisation
- Collect additional information on these users
- Enable cross-device eligible remarketing campaigns
- Populate audiences that you export to YouTube
- Enable cross-device reports
- Enables enhanced audience and demographics reporting
This is a huge time saver!
User properties
Another update on GA4 is user properties which allows you to tag certain attributes to your target audiences
This feature allows you to set user properties to identify the attributes of your app users. Whether these attributes are timeless or slow changing, you can use these to filter your reports.
Here are some example attributes that you can set:
- “profession=marketer”
- “favorite_team=Liverpool”
- “spender=true
Comparisons
Comparison have replaced segments in GA4. There are now more ways to filter your data under this new version of Google Analytics.
With comparisons, you can choose from the following:
- Audience name
- User
- Age
- Town/City
- Country
- Gender
- Language
- Region
- Signed in with User ID
- Language code
- Device
- App version
- Browser
- Device category
- Device brand
- Device
- Device model
- Operating system
- OS with version
- Platform
- OS version
- Screen resolution
- Stream ID
- Acquisition
- First touch date
- First visit date
- User Google Ads ad group ID
- User Google Ads ad group name
- User Google Ads ad network type
- User campaign creative ID
- User medium
- User campaign
- User source
- User source/medium
- Session Acquisition
- Session Google Ads ad group ID
- Session Google Ads ad group name
- Session campaign creative ID
- Session medium
- Session campaign
- Session source
- Session source/medium
- Other
- Test data filter name
You can now add another comparison (total of 5) up from 4 in the previous version.
This new GA4 is built for the future. If you have not upgraded to GA4 you will not see data flow from your websitr as of the 1st July 202
Related Articles
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) - User Guide
Add users You can add as many users as you need. To add a new user to an account/property/view: Sign in to Google Analytics. Click Admin, and navigate to the desired account/property/view. In the Account, Property, or View column (depending upon ...SEO, Google Analytics, Pixel Tracking and Tag Manager Policy
We have had an increased request for pixels and tracking codes to be added to client websites to track both Google, Facebook and the like. As we continue to improve our website development operations and implement further controls to ensure site ...Google Platforms Setup/Configuration/Optimisation
This service is specifically for the setup or configuration or optimisation of Google Platforms. There are many actions/services to provide across Google Platforms. If you do not see a service below that you are requiring, please raise a ticket and ...Google Listings & Ads - User Guide
For pricing and how to add to your website see at the bottom of the page. Setup and configuration Sync your store with Google and configure your free product listings 1.1 Set up your accounts. Connect your WordPress.com account, Google account, and ...WooCommerce Analytics
WooCommerce Analytics is a new reporting and data analysis tool to help you manage your WooCommerce Store. The suite introduces nine new reports along with advanced filtering and segmenting tools, the ability to download all data to CSV, and a ...