What is Google Analytics 4?

What is Google Analytics 4?

Businesses all over the world use Google Analytics to measure, record, and analyse their marketing data. It’s a vital “free” tool that helps businesses understand their customers’ behaviour and how they react with their website. In October 2020, Google released their next phase of Google Analytics, Google Analytics 4.

This blog will discuss

• What is Google Analytics 4?
• What are some of the benefits of using Google Analytics 4?
• How does Google Analytics 4 differ from Universal Analytics?
• How to set up a Google Analytics 4 property?

So, let’s get to know the future of Google Analytics.

The first question on everybody’s minds is going to be ‘What is Google Analytics 4?’

Google Analytics 4 is a new generation of Google Analytics property designed to help meet your businesses measurement needs.

The Google Analytics 4 property, previously known as a ‘App + Web property’, uses machine learning to provide, what Google are calling, a future experience of Analytics. A Google Analytics 4 property is now the default when you create a new property. However, unlike the previous name suggests, this property is available to all businesses: those who only have a website and those who only have an app, as well as those who have both and want to combine all their data in one place.

But what if you’re already using Google Analytics to measure and report on your data?

So, now we know what GA4 is let’s take a look at some benefits of using these properties.

GA4 properties have been designed to help adapt your measurement strategy to an ever-changing digital environment. They do this by scaling with your business and measuring data across devices and platforms. By using Google’s machine learning, GA4 is able to provide insights that can help you to achieve your marketing goals.

One of the features, available to all GA4 users, is the analysis tool. When using this tool, you will initially land in the Analysis Hub. From here you can see analyses previously created by yourself and those that have been shared with you. You can also create a new analysis from a template or from scratch.

No matter how you want to start your analysis this feature allows you to interpret your data using a variety of techniques, like funnel analysis, path analysis and exploration to uncover insights.

GA4 properties also make it easier to create new audiences, giving you more options when defining and segmenting your audiences. One option allows businesses to automatically delete a user from an audience list once they have completed a desired action. If your business creates IDs for signed-in users. GA4 properties allow you to use these IDs to define and create audiences.

Another feature available to all GA4 users is the ability to export your Analytics data to BigQuery. Here you can securely store your data in the cloud, combine it with data from other sources and run queries across all your data sets, or move your data to any other system where you want to use it.

How does Google Analytics 4 differ from Universal Analytics?

Those of us that have already been using Analytics will know that a Google Analytics Account can have multiple properties. In the past, there were only two kinds of properties: Universal Analytics for measuring website data and Google Analytics for Firebase for measuring mobile app activity. But now the Google Analytics 4 property can collect both types of data and combine them in one place.

The way GA4 properties and UA properties collect and process data differs in more than one way. UA properties collect data using a session-based model. Sessions are groups of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. GA4 properties collect data using an event-based model, meaning that this same data is collected and stored as events. (Session data is still available in GA4 properties). Events can collect and send information that more fully specifies the action that a user takes and provide insight on what is happening in your website or app such as pageviews, or button clicks. GA4 properties can automatically collect data from a range of events without the need for extra code or Google Tag Manager set up.

Another difference in the way the 2 properties collect and process data is the way that they use user identifiers. These identifiers, known as Identity Spaces, can be User-IDs, Google Signals, or Device IDs.

In UA properties it is difficult to de-duplicate users that move from one device to another because the identity spaces work separately from each other. UA properties rely heavily on device ID, with a few reports using the Google signals identity space. If the User-ID feature is enabled, it’s data is reported separately from the rest of your data and doesn’t integrate with the other identity spaces.

A problem with this method is that, in the current digital era, it is less likely that a customer will complete a purchase on a single device. People interact with businesses in whatever way is most convenient for them at that specific time, like researching a product on a mobile phone but eventually completing the purchase on a desktop device or researching online but completing a purchase through a business’ mobile app.

GA4 properties can tell a more unified, holistic story about the relationship between your users and your business by creating a single user journey from all data associated with the same identity. GA4 properties use all available identity spaces when processing data to help it de-duplicate users that have moved from one device to another or those that have crossed platforms during their conversion journey from your reports.

The 2 properties also report data differently to each other. UA properties organise your data into an increasing number of predefined reports, designed to reveal valuable insights. You are able to customise these predefined reports to an extent with Custom Reports but unless a report has been created for the insight that you are looking for, you may find it difficult to get the analysis that you want from your data.

GA4 properties offer a much more simplified way of reporting. A selection of overview reports, each covering a single insight, is shown in a summary grid of widgets. From here, you can delve into a more comprehensive report by selecting the link at the bottom of each summary card.

If you’re looking for insights that the reports don’t cover, the Analysis feature, mentioned earlier, gives you more customisable ways to analyse your data. With Analysis, you can drag and drop the dimensions and metrics that you’re interested in into your report. You can also quickly and easily filter, segment, and sort your data to get the insights that you care about. Once you’ve discovered interesting data sets, you can export them as Google Analytics segments or audiences, share your analyses with others, or export the data for use in other tools.

By now you must be wondering ‘How do I set up a Google Analytics 4 property?’

Before creating a GA4 property there are a few things that you need to be aware of.

1. If you use a website builder or CMS-hosted website, such as Shopify, Wix, or WordPress, etc, use your website builder’s/CMS’s custom HTML feature to tag your site.
2. If you already use UA to analyse your website data, the GA4 property will not back fill with historical data. The GA4 property will only collect data going forward. However, your Universal Analytics property is left unchanged and will continue to collect data. Therefore, you will need to continue using your UA properties to view your historical data. These are always accessible via the property selector or Admin screen
3. GA4 properties use a feature called Data Streams. Data Streams allow a single Analytics property to be connected to the various platforms in which your customers may interact with your business. So, a business with both a website and an app would need to set up separate data streams for each. The property can then combine the sets of data for reporting purposes.

Once you are ready to set up a GA4 property, follow these steps

1. Either sign into your existing Google Analytics account or create a new account, if you’re a first-time user, and go to your account settings.
2. Create a GA4 property by entering your business’s information for the new property. By default, all new properties created in Analytics are GA4 properties.
3. Choose the platform for your data stream – iOS, Android or web – and enter the information for your app or website. Note, if you’re creating a web data stream, you’ll see an option called ‘enhanced measurement’. Keep this on to automatically collect pageviews, scrolling, outbound link clicks, site searches and other common user events. You can disable or re-enable enhanced measurement at any time.
4. Enable data collection for website tracking.
   • If you are setting up a website data stream and you’re using Gtag.js, you will need to manually deploy your Analytics code to your website. Google explains how to install the new tag using this guide
   • If you are setting up a website data stream and you’re using Google Tag Manager, you can use GTM to deploy your Analytics code to your website. This guide from google explains how to install the tag using Goggle Tag Manager.

Once you have a GA4 property set up it is time to check that it is working correctly. To check, log in to your Google Analytics account and open the GA4 property. Open your website in another browser and move around your website. The GA4 property should be collecting and reporting your data in the real-time section.

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