Marketers have access to more data and statistics than ever before. This information, when harnessed correctly, can be used to make smarter, more effective decisions in turning potential customers into conversions.
In October 2020, Google completed the biggest update of its analytics tool in over a decade with the introduction of Google Analytics 4. With this, further metrics and personalised content joined the party, giving professionals even more equipment to build successful, targeted marketing campaigns.
With such a huge change, it’s important to not only stay up-to-date with the latest developments, but to also incorporate Google Analytics 4 into your business. You don’t have long to do so before it becomes a mandatory change to your analytics system – and this can cause major problems if you don’t prepare for the switch.
That’s where this comprehensive guide will help. It will explain the history of website analytics and everything you need to know about this latest version of Google Analytics, including how to set it up and successfully export your current analytics data.
Ready to install Google Analytics 4 right now? Jump straight to our GA4 installation set-up section!
What Is Google Analytics 4?
If you have worked with Google Analytics in the past, you’ll know what this tool allows you to do. It supplies you with important insights such as website visitors and conversion figures. Google Analytics 4 takes all of this to the next level.
In the introduction to this guide, we said GA4 was the biggest update to the analytics platform in over a decade. Some would go as far as to say it’s the most important, game-changing update Google Analytics has ever received. This is due to its ability to analyse a whole host of important customer usage metrics.
That’s right. This is the new generation. It’s not just about tracking traffic any longer. You have the tools to follow the customer’s entire journey, whether they bounce around multiple platforms and browsers. It also leverages the most advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence, giving marketers unparalleled insights into how users interact with their websites and apps.
Alongside AI-driven insights and cross-channel data tracking, GA4 is also notable for its approach to customer privacy. By falling in line with the latest privacy laws, including CCPA and GDPR, it ensures that customer data isn’t misused – and your business won’t suffer any potential ramifications by extension as a result.
Our SEO Expert, James King, delves deeper into the reasons why Google’s Universal Analytics will soon be retired and the benefits Google Analytics 4 will offer.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Vs Universal Analytics: What’s The Difference?
Universal Analytics is being shown the door by Google. It has been a great servant for the past decade, but it is being phased out as GA4 becomes the standard platform for analytics. If you haven’t made the switch already, you also don’t have long to do so. Here’s what Google has to say:
On July 1, 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties will no longer process data. You’ll be able to see your Universal Analytics reports for a period of time after July 1, 2023. However, new data will only flow into Google Analytics 4 properties.
Google Analytics 360 properties will receive a one-time processing extension ending on October 1, 2023.
By the end of 2023, Universal Analytics will no longer exist in a useable form. Depending on how long you have been using the platform, this change might be difficult to process. However, don’t view it as a negative – GA4 might have a number of differences, but it also has various advantages over its predecessor.
The biggest difference between the two is the ability of GA4 to seamlessly report on activities that occur across both websites and apps. With that said, other changes include:
A New Dashboard:
The first difference you’ll immediately see is GA4’s dashboard. This has changed everything entirely. Many of the reports you remember have been moved or removed, creating a streamlined platform. The navigation bar for GA4 makes it easy to find what you’re searching for, with buttons for reports, advertising, library, configure, explore, and home.
Access To Predictive Insights:
Due to the predictive metrics powered by GA4, it’s possible to make data-driven decisions. With metrics such as revenue prediction, churn probability, and purchase probability covered, you have the potential to create audiences based on their predicted behaviours. Along with creating more targeted Google Ads campaigns, it can help enhance website performance by crafting custom funnels to match the needs of different audiences.
Cross-Platform Tracking:
Most users will visit a website multiple times before purchasing. They’ll also typically do this across different platforms. With Universal Analytics, trying to track cross-platform usage was impossible. With GA4, only one property is required to track web and app data. This means you can follow the entire customer journey via platform-to-platform from initial engagement to conversion and retention.
Measurements Become Events:
If you’re using Universal Analytics, you know the most important metric is page views. With GA4, however, measurements are all turned into events. Rather than looking at a generalised set of data, events supply you with a full picture of how users interact with your site and app. Session-level reporting is still available, of course, but a whole host of new metrics – including those that focus on everything from engagement to demographics – provide more data and an easier route to track customers during the buying journey.
Marketers Gain More Control:
Ultimately, these changes give marketers much greater control of their analytics with GA4. It’s possible to only focus on specific reports that matter most for your company’s marketing efforts. You can also create custom segments, further zoning in on markets that give you the insights you desire, offering a granular view of your audience and their behaviours.
Website analytics have come a long way since they were first conceptualized. Website counters might have been the main source of information back in the 1990s, but businesses these days have countless analytics they can use to improve their operations. With the recent release and continued development of Google Analytics 4, here’s a look back at the history of website analytics.
In 1990, 3 years earlier, the modern internet was launched as the world knows it today. Even after its creation, the internet wasn’t overflowing with new technological advancements and websites. In fact, in 1993 it was estimated there were only around 600 sites in total that were populating the World Wide Web.
It was also at this time when Webtrends was released. This was one of the first providers of website analytics and certainly the most prevalent at the time. With that said, it wasn’t a bastion of information. Webtrends tracked ‘hits’ via log files. These hits were for anything from a HTML page’s text to a link. Yet this information still played a role in letting site owners know how their creations were performing.
Before the creation of Analog, only tech teams were able to understand and interpret website analytics. Yet once Analog hit the scene, those log file reports suddenly became comprehensible for site owners. It supplied visual graphs alongside clear documentation, meaning marketing professionals – and not just tech whizzes – could effectively use web analytics.
It’s not just computer scientists who can access and make use of the internet. Due to developments like Analog, it opened the door for others to join in the action. This was also applicable to the growth in web analytics tools.
With more and more people jumping onto the internet, there was greater demand for more accessible, informative web analytics for companies to better understand their traffic numbers. In that regard, one tool quickly rose up the ranks to become the industry leader: Web-Counter.
There are still archaic websites to this day that feature the Web-Counter at the bottom of their pages. It seems overly simplistic in this day and age, but the ability to count site visitors in real-time with an odometer-style hit counter changed the analytics game.
Over the decade following the introduction of the Web-Counter, the internet evolved at a rapid pace. Websites popped up in much larger numbers, and they were more refined and visually demanding than ever before. The Web-Counter also made way for Javascript tags. These tags were created and used to collect data for reporting on site traffic, trends, and overall performance.
To capitalize on the huge number of websites now populating the internet, more and more web analytics companies join the market. One of these companies was Urchin. You might not recognize the name, but it laid the foundation for the biggest analytics platform today. This is because Google acquired Urchin in 2005, and they turned this into the first iteration of Google Analytics.
A decade after the Web-Counter ruled the scene, Google Analytics launched several in-depth insights that gave website owners and marketers unprecedented information about those visiting their sites.
This includes In-Page analytics. This allowed site owners to analyse everything a visitor did on a webpage, whether it was visiting a certain page or interacting with a specific element. This type of information supplied online businesses with not just quantitative statistics about visitors but also qualitative behavioural data.
Further expanding on their work in the website analytics field, Google moved forward with a major development in the form of Universal Analytics. This launch introduces a number of new features and changes when tracking Google Analytics website traffic.
One of the biggest features was the ability to track users and their behaviour across multiple devices. This was made possible with user IDs. In addition to this, the monitoring of offline behaviour became standardized by Google, while the addition of further information such as demographics made customer data even richer.
The first steps to track mobile usage were also made by Google. For both Android and iOS, mobile apps for Google Analytics were launched. Via SNKs, app analytics were supplied to give site owners actionable insights into visitors from mobile devices.
As mobile usage became more prevalent, Google decided to push forward and evolve its own mobile analytics. This saw the introduction of machine learning as part of its app-based analytics. With this machine learning, it supplied marketers and site owners with smarter, more refined insights on the go.
It also led to the mobile Google Analytics experience being much more streamlined. It delivered more relevant metrics and monitoring that was done in real-time. This ultimately proved to be a significant turning point for the entire analytics industry.
Following over a year of being in a beta stage, Google made the next step in the evolution of its analytics platform by introducing Google Analytics 4.
This latest version of Google Analytics made one significant change to proceedings. Instead of separate platforms to analyse statistics and performance for website and mobile usage, GA4 has one big aim: to unify them and turn them into a single platform for reporting.
Before GA4, those using analytics required 2 platforms – GA and Firebase – to be able to analyse statistics for app and web, respectively. As mobile usage continues to grow and become the standard platform for users, the separation between the two proved to be an issue for marketers. GA4 has produced an easy-to-use platform where site owners can easily understand how users interact on their websites and apps in a unified way.
How To Set Up Google Analytics 4 (GA4)?
You understand the power of GA4. You know a switch from Universal Analytics has to be made. As a result, the next step is inevitably to set up GA4 for your website. The good news: it only takes a few clicks to get your GA4 account configured and up and running, making the switch a simple one.
Let our SEO expert, James King, break it down for you:
You sadly can’t migrate data from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4. Nonetheless, you are able to export historic data for your own records and reporting!
If you’re starting off fresh and have no data to export, you are fortunate in that you’ve averted a headache you could do without. Yet if you do have historic data that currently sits on your Universal Analytics account, you have to go through the trouble of moving this over to GA4.
At least, that would be the case if it was possible.
That’s right: you cannot export historic data from Universal Analytics to GA4. It’s also a feature that is unlikely to crop up in the future, either.
It is the difference in schema and dimension definitions/calculations that make merging the data not possible… The Universal Analytics export is sessionised, meaning each row in the export is a session, and every interaction is nested in that row. The GA4 export is very different, where each row is the event (interaction) itself. In simple terms, the data between the two is significantly different. It’s like trying to compare football with American football. There are similarities, sure, but they ultimately vary drastically from one to the other.
Explained by Adswerve’s Head of Innovation, Charles Farina, to Search Engine Journal.
With that said, even if you cannot migrate your historic data to GA4, it doesn’t mean it has to be lost forever. In fact, even when Google pulls the plug on Universal Analytics, it is still going to provide a period of time for users to grab their old reports before they disappear.
The easiest way to save your historical data is with a manual export. Here’s how to do it:
- Login to your Google Analytics account
- From here, find the Google Analytics standard report – or reports – you wish to keep.
- Customisations can be placed on each report. You can filter for a specific country, for instance, or specific page grouping.
- Once you have finished customising your chosen report, go to the top-right corner of the page and select Export.
- You will be given 4 different file formats to select from: Google Sheets, PDF, CSV, or Excel.
Even though you cannot seamlessly integrate this data into your GA4 account, at least you have the choice to save these reports.
The lack of exporting also places an added emphasis on making the move to GA4 as soon as possible. The quicker you are a fully signed up user of GA4, the sooner you can start collecting data via this platform and reaping the benefits of it.
GA4 is the present and future of analytics. It’s going to be around for a long time – and the quicker you adapt to it, the better. It is an incredibly powerful tool, one that delivers invaluable analytics and deep insights into your audience. New features like cross-platform tracking and AI-driven data further highlight the effectiveness of GA4.
GA4 will continue to grow and evolve over the following years. To stay up-to-date, make sure to bookmark our Knowledge Hub. Even as it exists currently, GA4 is something you can no longer ignore. This isn’t just because of its vast assortment of features, either, but because of its position as the new standard platform for Google Analytics.
The good news is that not much effort is required on your part to set up a GA4 property for your site or app. It’s a task that can be done in a matter of minutes.
However, trying to understand and benefit from the data GA4 provides is a different story. If you require assistance in that regard, don’t hesitate to book a call. Our team of experts are here to help, whether you want to know more about how GA4 works or how to maximise performance with this analytics tool.
If you already have a Universal Analytics account, below is a quick rundown:
- First, begin by logging into your Google Analytics account.
- On your account, locate the Admin section. This is found towards the bottom-left of the screen as a gear icon.
- Select the Google Analytics account you wish to set up a GA4 property for. Confirm it is selected.
- Now in the Property column, the next step is to select the property which currently collects analytics for your site. In this case, it will be the Universal Analytics property.
- You will now see the Property column. Locate the “GA4 Setup Assistant” option, which will conveniently be the first option on the list.
- Now you are transported to the Setup Wizard. After reading the introduction, click the “Get Started” button.
- If you’re utilising the gtag.js tag on your website, it’s possible to also choose the “Enable data collection using your existing tags” option.
- Finally, click “Create Property.”
Here’s how to make the move from Firebase to GA4:
- First, begin by logging into your Firebase account.
- On the left panel, click on the Analytics button and then Dashboard.
- At this stage, you will be presented with a banner prompt at the top of the page to move over to GA4. Simply click “Begin upgrade” to get started.
- Continue to follow the on-screen instructions provided to finish the upgrade.
When the upgrade has finished, both Google Analytics and the Firebase console will feature your app analytics.
