It's time for the new Google Analytics

It's high time to get Google Analytics 4 up and running alongside your regular Google Analytics. In the following article you will find out why.

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A new measuring tool?

You may have noticed that Google Analytics has been showing notifications about the new version of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for the last few days. This isn't a complete novelty — Google just renamed the Google Analytics app+site it launched in 2019. In addition to renaming, it has now added a number of new features to the tool, and when creating a new Google account, it primarily creates a version 4 property.

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It's an important change!

Are you serious about analytics? GA4 brings a new measurement concept that changes the existing order.

1. GA4 are more tailored to the needs of websites, e-shops and mobile applications
2. They help you analyze how many customers are returning to you or what is the total value of all user transactions
3. All data is sent to GA4 as an event. Which opens up new possibilities for how to work with them then.
4. You can access the basic data through Big Query. So you have the option of simply connecting them to other systems or extracting information from them.

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In addition, we all have nothing left but to gradually switch to GA4. Google will likely end support for Universal Analytics (i.e. the current version of Google Analytics) in the future and develop new features only for GA4.

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Analytics measured per user

Google's older measurement tools were aimed at measuring Visits (sessions). Visitation is a kind of virtual concept that is introduced primarily in order to better work with the resources that people come to the site. But most of the time in the reports you are not interested in the visitors, but the people. Like if you can interest them and if they buy from you (or otherwise ask). This typically takes a longer period of time and evaluation for one visit does not make sense. You also wonder if customers come back and shop repeatedly. They do not play a role at all in this visit. For a goal such as registering for the newsletter, you can also expect that one person will register only once, even if they come to the site 10 times. Again, you are interested in evaluating data related to people, not visits.

GA4 changes the focus from the visit to the user. Like the older Universal Analytics, they have tools to connect people across devices -- either by self-tagging with help User ID, or automatically with the help of Google Signaler. However, reports in GA4 make much more use of this data. You can study how often people return to the site over time. You can work with the number of biased people, which makes more sense than the number of biased visits. However, they are used to calculate extremely useful metrics such as Lifetime value, for eshops comparing the number of “first-time buyers” with the total number of shoppers. If you use remarketing, you'll also appreciate the ability to create segments based on a user's calculated probability of buying — so you can target marketing only to users who are highly likely to buy.

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Everything is an event

You can send several types of hits to legacy Universal Analytics — pageview, event (e.g. download of a file or click on a link), timing (to measure page load time), social (e.g. social sharing), transaction, and item (an older method of measuring transactions). Additionally, for some time the older Universal Analytics supported screenview and exception for measuring mobile applications. Each type of hit worked differently and was handled in a different way. And yes, it's as complicated as it sounds.

In GA4, everything is an event. Did anyone view the page? It is incident page view. Did anyone download the file? It is incident download the file. Has anyone come to the site? It is incident coming to the site. Thanks to this generalization, the data is significantly better to work with. Thus, you can:

• Combine page views and event counts in one report. Which is great if you evaluate, for example, how much people use which features on a particular site.
• Create conversion funnels containing arbitrary actions, which in older Universal Analytics could only be created from pageviews. If the conversion funnel was, for example, filling out a complex form measured with the help of events, you were out of luck.
• In the “Path Analysis” tool, monitor page views as well as actions on the page. So you get an overview of both the frequency and order of calls of individual events. So you can analyze what people do before they start scrolling, what precedes the opening of the product photo gallery, etc.

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Access to data

Another great novelty that especially pleases analysts is the ability to access raw data through Google BigQuery. For example, if you need to integrate data from Google Analytics into a CRM or other system, you don't need to break Analytics down with various hacks and tricks, just download it. In addition, this opens up connection possibilities for data mining or machine learning algorithms. In GA4, the limitation is not what Google allows you to download, but what you can process and calculate yourself.

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What needs to be done?

Get GA4 up and running in parallel with your regular Google Analytics. It makes the most sense in the following cases:

• you have a website and a mobile app
• you have a web application, intranet, client portal, etc.
• you don't need to import campaign cost data

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GA4 currently does not cover the functionality of existing Universal Analytics, and if you import campaign cost data into GA, this may be a barrier to a full transition for now. But Google is working hard on GA4, and in the coming months we can look forward to fine-tuning attribution models, data import capabilities, etc.

But it makes sense to set up GA4 measurements on the web and measure in old and new Analytics at the same time. This way you can continue to work with Universal Analytics, which you already know and have historical data here. But at the same time, you will collect data history in a new account, you can learn and experiment with them.

Nothing pushes you to switch to the new GA4, there are no known terms of anything. There is no official information that Google plans to end Universal Analytics altogether. But our tip is that sooner or later he will do it. Therefore, it makes sense for us to start measuring in GA4 earlier, because GA4 will make more sense for the project than the older Universal Analytics.

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What next

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