Even if you’re not a Google Analytics pro, you may have noticed that it seems like the company has been launching a lot of products lately. The reason? Google wants to make its analytics offerings more streamlined, consistent, and useful for marketers and business owners. In October 2020, this initiative led to the release of Google Analytics 4 (GA4). GA4 is an upgrade to App+Web, which is a newer product that had previously been called App + Web Beta. Even though it’s new, we expect GA4 will become the default version of Google Analytics in the future—and this means it’s time for all marketers to get on board.
What is Google Analytics 4?
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google Analytics. It’s a new way of collecting data from your website and reporting on it, as well as a new way of collecting data from mobile devices.
When GA4 was first released, there were a lot of bugs and issues in the system that made it hard to use. For example: if you updated from an older version like GA3 or even 2 to 4, then some features wouldn’t work properly until you updated your site settings again. And if you tried to implement custom tracking code for e-commerce or other things into GA4, sometimes it would break your site instead of adding any additional information about how people were interacting with it!
GA4 is the future of reporting.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the future of reporting. It’s the future of Google Analytics. It’s simply called GA4, and it’s a big deal. If you’re not using GA4 yet, it’s time to start.
GA4 offers many useful new features and a more consistent experience across devices.
Google Analytics 4 has a lot to offer. The new interface is easier to use and more consistent across devices and browsers, but it also offers many useful new features, like:
- Real-Time Reporting—Get near real-time data on your website’s performance from your browser or mobile device.
- Enhanced E-commerce Tracking—Use transaction IDs for better reporting.
- Custom Dimensions & Metrics—Allow you to track custom event names, properties and values in addition to standard Google Analytics metrics like Pageviews, Bounce Rate, Time On Site and etc., all in a single report!
Before you adopt GA4 completely, we recommend waiting until the majority of your traffic has shifted over to Universal Analytics.
We recommend getting an GA4 account set up right away so that the account can start to gather as much historic data now. As a reminder, all standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023. The account set up of GA4 is different than Universal Analytics so, we recommend reaching out to your marketing agency or even us to help out with this set up.
This is a big change, so it’s best to wait until the majority of your traffic has shifted over to Universal Analytics before you adopt GA4 completely. How do you know if this is the case? If your site currently uses Classic Analytics, the “View Settings” link will be grayed out and not clickable. This indicates that you are in Legacy Google Analytics edition and GA4 isn’t available yet. Once over 50% of visitors have moved to Universal Analytics, it will become available for use on sites running Legacy edition as well.
Now is the time to start learning about and adopting Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is here to stay and it’s the future of reporting. You are not required to use GA4 right now, but if you haven’t already, now is the time to start learning about and adopting it.
GA4 offers many useful new features and a more consistent experience across devices that will make your life easier as a digital marketer. It also allows you to connect with other tools within Google Cloud Platform (GCP), so there are a lot of good reasons for making the switch.
If you have any questions about this change or how it might affect your business, feel free to reach out on to us at Contact Form.
