Thousands of businesses, both large and small, require web analytics to understand more about their audience and create a better experience for them. With more businesses going digital, it is of prime importance for any organization to make best use of the marketing data. Google Analytics is a pioneer in providing end-to-end customer analytics from both Web and Mobile.
Google Analytics has grown a long way since its initial launch, with Urchin at 2005 to ga.js, and then Firebase, and now, the most recent version, Google Analytics 4 (GA 4). GA 4 is a highly sophisticated platform, drawing from various components of the Google ecosystem to address modern-day marketing needs in the space of web and mobile application analytics.
GA 4 (Web + App)
GA 4 is the most exciting and power-packed update ever since the launch of universal analytics. As it is very new in the market, there are many questions, which will be addressed here.
What’s New in GA 4 (Web + App)?
GA 4, now AI-powered, provides deeper and more granular details across the web and mobile applications. Some of the key benefits are:
- New AI-powered insights and predictions - Predictions that are far more granular can be made with GA 4
- Deeper integration with Google Ads - Google Ads integrate seamlessly with GA 4
- Customer lifecycle reporting - It provides a detailed breakdown of the stages in the customer lifecycle.
- Codeless event tracking – GA 4 removes all the latency present in the prior version, as events are captured real time.
- A cookie-less future – Many businesses face issues with respect to missing data due to the cookie policy. However, GA 4 is able to fill in the gaps where data is not complete.
Why GA 4
Ever since GA 4 was released in the market in October last year, there have been tons of updates, which will only get better as time progresses. GA 4 is, without doubt, the future of Google Analytics. It would be wise to move towards GA 4 since it is event-based and uses advanced machine learning (ML) models also allow it to provide data for user behavior and website traffic without relying on the hits for each page.
- Major ROI: GA 4, with its in-built machine learning algorithm, helps in predicting the segments of customers who are most likely to purchase.
- Measurement Protocol: A set of rules that helps the application to send data to the Google Analytics server.
- Event Editing & Synthesis: New events can be created directly from the UI using this feature.
- Cross-platform: GA 4 can deliver insights across platforms from mobile apps to web applications.
- Privacy/durability: GA 4 is a more secure platform than the former version, and has addressed the needs of a cookie-less future.
- Migration tools: GA 4 has special migration tools if a client wants to migrate from GA to GA 4 along with setup options.
- Dual Tracking: This enables both GA 4 and universal analytics to work together.
Migration Plan for GA to GA 4
Google offers two primary migration paths:
- gtag.js – Migration to GA 4 without any additional code implementation.
- Google Tag Manager – GA 4 configuration to be added in the place of universal analytics to populate the reports in Google Analytics.
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