What Marketers Need to Know About Google Analytics 4 (G4)

If you’re a website owner you are aware of how important it is to keep a close eye on your website traffic, page performance, and overall health of your website. One of the best tools to help you monitor all the important components of your website is Google Analytics. In addition, Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce helps you not only track data such as traffic sources, bounce rate, and conversion rate, but it enables product impression, promotion, and sales data to be sent with any of your Google Analytics pageviews and events. Enhanced Ecommerce gives you more powerful insights into the shopping behavior of your visitors. Based on actions taken by your visitors, such as viewing the product detail page but not adding anything to the cart or making a purchase, you can create segments and retarget these visitors accurately. This information provides valuable input for merchandising efforts, conversion rates, and revenue. And that is perhaps the most important reason of all to utilize and understand your analytics data.

What Exactly Is Google Analytics 4? Inaugurated in mid-October 2020, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is an extension of the regular Google Analytics Suite and was rolled out by Google in order to help website owners gain a more comprehensive view of their customers’ behavior and website traffic data.

GA4 draws upon components of the Google ecosystem to support the changing landscape of digital marketing. It has machine learning at its core to automatically surface helpful insights and give you a complete understanding of your customers across devices and platforms. GA4 is privacy-centric by design and is Google’s solution for measurement in a online world where cookies are fading away and privacy regulations are constantly tightening.

The new Google Analytics will give you the essential insights you need to be ready for what’s next.

Improved Focus on Customer Lifecycle Data The new Analytics is designed to help marketers gain a more holistic view of how audiences engage with their website and interact with products and provide a customer-centric measurement, instead of measurement fragmented by device or by platform. It uses multiple identity spaces, including marketer-provided User IDs, unique Google signals, and tracking ids from users who opted into ad personalization, to give you a more complete view of how your customers interact with your business.

Acquisition and Retention as a Result You’ll also get better intelligence insights into your customers across their entire lifecycle, from acquisition to conversion and retention. This is critical when people’s needs are constantly evolving and you have to make real-time decisions in order to win - and keep - new customers. Based on user feedback, reporting has been simplified and re-organized so you can intuitively find marketing insights based on the part of the customer journey you’re interested in. For example, you can see what channels are driving new customers in the user acquisition report, then use the engagement and retention reports to understand the actions these customers take, and whether they stick around, after converting.

Better Visibility As a marketer, this allows you to see how the customer is navigating across your content, create a custom dashboard, and view what kind of products they interact with. It allows you to track the behavior of your customers in order to see what they like the most.

When you inherently know what your customers need and are most interested in, it’s game over. With full control into the granularity in which you want to analyze your data insights, navigating the interaction process a customer engages in with your content becomes a game-changing experience.

Smarter Insights Everyone wants to improve their marketing decisions and get better ROI. By implementing Google’s advanced machine knowledge models, the new Analytics can automatically inform you of significant trends in your data - like products seeing rising interest due to new customer needs. It even helps you forecast the future actions of your customers. For example, it calculates churn probability so you can more efficiently invest in retaining customers at a time when marketing budgets are under pressure.

If gaining insights over a period of time is advantageous to your eCommerce store, Analytics can pull traffic comparisons. This has been particularly useful in the last couple of years as customer engagement and behavior have changed dramatically.

Knowing which days of the week customers are most likely to make a purchase based on historical data can thus help you manage and control your ad budgets more efficiently.

Get Started NOW In 2022, GA4 will be the only recourse for Google Analytics tracking. At that time, data from your current Universal Analytics properties will not be migrated over to GA4. With that in mind, it is imperative that you create a new GA4 property now to run in parallel with your current Universal Analytics property, using dual tagging to get familiar with GA4 and build historical data before an eventual migration to GA4 in the future.

The sooner this task gets done, the more historical Google Analytics data you will have when switching to GA4 next year.

The default experience for new properties is now the new Google Analytics and is where your business should be investing in future improvements. There are capabilities many marketers need before fully substituting their current Analytics setup, and working with an experienced eCommerce agency will be your golden ticket. We encourage you to create a new Google Analytics 4 property (previously called an App + Web property) alongside your current properties. This will allow you to start collecting data utilizing your tracking ID and begin to benefit from the most advanced improvements as they become available while keeping your current implementation sound.

TL;DR While getting started with Google Analytics 4 properties appears simple, strategic guidance can prove helpful. Let us help you configure and implement the new Google Analytics and get a deep-dive tour of important features by scheduling your free consultation .

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