Out with the old, in with the new (well, two years’ new). For all of you data-driven marketers, it’s officially time to start saying our goodbyes to Universal Analytics (UA). Recently, Google has announced UA will officially be retiring in 2023. GA4 (Google Analytics 4), released back in 2020, will be taking its place.
While GA4 has been available now for two years, some of you may still be using Universal Analytics, like us here at PK. So how does this change things for you? For starters, GA4 provides some exciting new features. Here’s a few of our favorites.
New Tracking Method
From siloed reporting to solo reporting, you will no longer have to analyze sessions and events separately. Currently, UA provides session-based tracking with the option to separately track your own event-based tags. This can create a complicated process for reporting and linking sessions and events together. These have now been consolidated as GA4 uses all event-based tracking. For those not familiar, an event is any activity that occurs on a page of your website (i.e. contact submission forms, external links, video plays). For example, imagine if a visitor were to land on your website, click a button, submit a contact submission form, and watch a video. In UA, this would only be tracked as pageviews, rather than specifying each interaction on that page.
Improved Data Security
This will allow you to manage and minimize the collection of user-data to follow new international privacy controls. One of the biggest changes here is the IP anonymization due to GDPR (EU regulation) stating the potential of being found by someone via your IP address. Therefore, these will be anonymized but you will still receive information such as gender, age, etc. Along with this update is the data storage timeline capping at 14 months currently; a consent mode feature for event-based tagging which allows users to opt out of being tracked; and data deletion capability allowing users to opt to have their data deleted.
Data-Driven Attribution
Moving towards user-focused measurements, this new feature allows you to fully analyze data across all marketing efforts and provides combined app and website data under one property. With UA, we have not had the capability to link various platforms and analyze the entire customer journey. Thanks to this cross-platform attribution, now we can. For example, let’s say you click on a TikTok ad that takes you to a website but you exit the site, deciding that you are not ready to purchase. If you return to that website directly, TikTok wouldn’t receive credit throughout that entire customer journey. With data-driven attribution, you can now see how apps and paid media play their part, receiving a full view of your consumers journey.
Automated Event Tracking
As discussed previously, event tracking is a feature that allows you to track a specific user’s interaction / activity with a web page. With UA, in order to set up event tracking you need Google Tag Manager or a back-end web developer. In GA4, event tracking has been automated. Now, you’ll have dozens of events (i.e. video start / stop, click of a button) automatically being tracked for you that had to be built manually in UA, and you still have the option of building custom events.
Here’s what we know
UA will be phasing out on July 1st, 2023 and historical data will not be transferred over so you will want to export any data you may want to keep. UA and GA4 are separate but they are able to run parallel with each other on a website until the transition. That being said, while GA4 capabilities continue to be built out, this transition means you will need to create a GA4 property as soon as possible. Creating a GA4 property now allows time for you to build historical data before the transition, providing you a substantial amount of data by the time of the phase-out.
Here at PK we recommend creating your GA4 property but continuing to use UA for the time being. This allows you to accumulate historical data, guarantee accurate machine learning capabilities (due to accruing data), and familiarize yourself with the new property. For more information, you can click here to learn more details about the transition to Google Analytics 4.
PK Information is a FileMaker-certified development agency serving the Tampa Bay and Knoxville regions. We believe that great software can change everything. Would your database benefit from a process review? Contact us today!