Keeping track of customer behaviours, and using this insight to influence your marketing approach is difficult offline. However, Google Analytics makes it easy to do these with your online businesses. From December 2020, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), has replaced Universal Analytics.
While GA4 is a big change from its predecessor, users of Universal Analytics will be unable to enjoy certain features that may improve their web, app, customer, and ad analytics. Google Analytics 4 comes with enhanced integration with Google Ads, smarter predictive metrics, and AI-powered tracking for business future-proofing, among others.
Features of Google Analytics 4
With digital technology, change is rapid, and early adopters always seem to be the biggest beneficiaries. Google Analytics 4 is the new analytics tool to replace Universal Analytics. It is a more intelligent web traffic, customer behaviour, and revenue prediction analyser than Universal Analytics.
According to Google, users of Universal Analytics should adopt the GA4 as the former will stop processing data by July 2023. This means that if you rely heavily in year-on-year reporting, it’s time to get set up because time is running out. Apart from continued customer and sales data analysis, here are some features of the GA4 and how it’ll make your data analysis better.
Cross-platform Tracking
Unlike UA, GA4 tracks data on both web and mobile devices as one. In other words, it eliminates duplicate data and gives you more accurate data on the number of visitors from your ads.
If a user visits your website from a mobile device and a PC, UA will register those visits as two different customers. However, Google Analytics 4 is smarter and is better at recognising customers across their devices.
Predictive Metrics and Insights
With its structurally intelligent framework, GA4 provides personalised insights aimed at improving functionality, and conversion rate of your website and ads, respectively. It alerts you of what needs to be fixed or improved to see a positive change in your objective. This has been trialled through UA over the past couple of years, but in GA4 it’s much more integral.
Also, through artificial intelligence, it predicts purchase, churn, and revenue, through customer behaviour. Its predictive metrics use a 28 days period to speculate customers that’ll purchase your product and your possible income.
AI-powered Tracking for Business Protection
Gathering customer information through cookies is becoming more difficult due to privacy issues and laws. However, through AI, GA4 can fill in customers’ information without violating any privacy laws.
Your business is assured of continuity, and GA4 helps to future-proof it as you have customer information to work with.
Better Google Analytics-Google Ads Integration
Google Ads target your audience, and Google Analytics analyses your audience and the result of your ads. Better integration of the two introduces some automation, such as the removal of converted leads.
GA4 also allows you to fine-tune your ads by giving you better insights into your target audience, increasing the effectiveness of your ads.
Event Tracking Without Codes
Customer behaviour on your site sometimes requires coding. However, GA4 eliminates the need for that. You can a lot more “events” as standard such as; video playtime, scroll time, and other basic events in real time..
You can also create custom events, and track them without complex coding. GA4 allows you to create and track up to 300 custom events per property.
Final Thoughts on Google Analytics 4
It’s no exaggeration to say that GA4 hasn’t been well received. People, inherently don’t like change and long term users of Universal Analytics typically dislike GA4, usually because of its different User Interface
Whilst it is massively different, it’s here to stay, so we have to get used to it. We actually feel that GA4 is an improvement over Universal Analytics, and its features offer many benefits to digital businesses. With its improved intelligence, and better result organisation, digital business owners can understand analysed data better, and use them to drive beneficial change to their online presence.
