A Marketer’s Guide to Google Analytics 4

Getting More From Your Data

Guest Blog by Three Five Two

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This blog is written by Sarah Woodward, the EVP of Growth at Three Five Two.

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For years marketers, analysts, and product managers have struggled to get a complete picture of their customers' cross-platform journey. Now, Google Analytics 4 (“GA4”) is here to change that. 

Leveraging machine learning, GA4 provides marketers with real-time insights into customer behavior, preferences, and motivations, making it easier for them to take action to drive growth. Some of the new features of GA4 include enhanced tracking, predictive analytics, deeper integration with Google Ads, and greater privacy controls. With the deadline for migration set for July 1, 2023, marketers must familiarize themselves with the platform and plan their custom tracking and reporting needs to ensure a smooth transition.

What Does This Mean for Marketers?

Audrey Aavik, a Senior Strategy Analyst at Three Five Two, sat down with our marketing teams over a lunch-and-learn to discuss what the Google Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 switch means for marketers and analysts.

GA4 leverages machine learning to drive cross-platform insights that empower marketers to make real-time decisions about their customers and products. It provides better insights about behaviors, preferences, and motivations and actionable recommendations to improve your digital properties. 

Universal Analytics and GA4 collect different data for certain dimensions, such as source and medium. Migrating Universal Analytics audiences to GA4 requires a manual process of examining audience definitions and recreating them in GA4. Although audiences are built similarly in both versions, GA4 includes predictive audiences while Universal Analytics does not. 

Predictive audiences identify users who are likely to take certain actions, such as making a purchase. This type of information can be a difference-maker for product and marketing leaders looking for an edge.

Some of the new features include automatic trend alerts, calculating purchase probability, churn probability, and predicted revenue for different audience segments. Teams can now spend less time analyzing data and more time taking action to drive growth.

GA4 also promises deeper integration with Google Ads to track in-app and web conversions for Google Ads, YouTube Ads, non-Google paid channels such as Facebook, and organic channels, including search, social, and email. With a  unified view of their customer journey, marketers are empowered to make more informed decisions.

This enhanced tracking provides a full-funnel picture with more out-of-the-box event tracking options, and the ability to review users' journeys and debug within the tool. Marketers can more easily understand its various user journeys through their web properties.

Google Analytics has always offered custom report building; it now provides more relevant canned Life Cycle reporting beyond just Acquisition to Engagement, Monetization, and Retention. These journey stages are similar to the Pirate Metrics framework Three Five Two uses to map a customer's engagement journey from acquisition to referral. Marketers can now easily access ad-hoc reporting features in Google Data Studio with templates to help visualize the data undergoing analysis.

Greater privacy controls are baked into GA4, as well. Marketers will have more control over data sharing and anonymization to meet their brand's data integrity and privacy standards. With less reliance on cookies, Google will use data modeling to fill in information gaps in the customer journey.

Deadline for Migration

Data recording for all Universal Analytics accounts will end July 1, 2023. (360 Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new events on July 1, 2024.) Every web property will need to make the switch. Google recently announced that they will set up a GA4 account for all projects that have yet to switch over starting in March.

Aavik shares, “So that's excellent news. Those who don’t make the switch won't lose all of their data as we once thought. But that new account will only include basic setup with no customizations. If you've invested time and effort in setting up custom collection and reporting, I still encourage everyone to make their own switch to ensure they keep any custom metrics running.”

Switching now also gives teams time to QA their data and copy any custom reports they want. The earlier the migration, the more historical data and insights teams will have in GA4.

Teams that are not currently using Google Analytics as their primary reporting tool should also look at GA4. Similar platforms like Adobe Analytics often come with much higher costs unnecessarily. GA4's new reporting capabilities may offer substantial savings in software and the reduction of resources needed to maintain more complex platforms.

Don’t know if you are using Google Universal Analytics or not? Here’s how to find out.

A Couple of Watchouts

GA4 records data at the event level instead of the session level. Marketers and data teams must rethink how they set up event tracking and evolve reporting to maintain accuracy. Recreating old custom events and dimensions can lead to miscalculated metrics.

Many custom settings in the admin panel control your data privacy settings. Ensure you entirely understand your selections and that they align with your consent statements to your site users.

Getting Analytics Right in 2023

The sunsetting of Google Universal Analytics offers an opportunity for teams to improve their site analytics and data strategy. Is there enough data to inform decision-making about their customers' web behavior? Does infrastructure support end-to-end attribution models that support the complete picture of customers' buyer journeys?

“The migration isn’t a heavy lift, and we’ve helped most of our clients through the transition in about one week. At the same time, we’ve reexamined data strategies and found opportunities to improve how we use data to improve business outcomes.”

— Audrey Aavik | Senior Strategy Analyst | Three Five Two

Marketers should get familiar with the platform and start planning their custom tracking and reporting needs now. And if their team still needs to have the tough questions about whether or not data is genuinely serving the company, now's the time.

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This blog was a contribution blog from our agency partners at Three Five Two.