What to Know, How to Prepare, and How Can TFD Help
We recently held a webinar dedicated to demystifying GA4 and helping you access the data within. You can check out the recording of this webinar here and view the slides from the webinar here.
Gone are the days when an out-of-the-box Google Analytics configuration was all that was required to track your online audience effectively. As every product and service around us becomes more customized, so do our data insights.
Google has announced that GA4 will soon replace Google Universal Analytics (UA), and that UA will stop processing new hits starting July 1, 2023. While Google UA will not process any new data, you will still be able to access your old metrics for at least 6 months. If you have a paid Google Analytics 360 account, you will be able to maintain access until October 1, 2023. While that may sound like impending doom, you still have some time to prepare. Even with the cushion - it’s best to move from Google UA to GA4 sooner rather than later.
TL;DR - The Google Analytics you use today is going away on July 1, 2023.
3 Standout GA4 Features for Publishers
Privacy is Paramount
We saw Apple take a stand for privacy earlier this year in their release of iOS15. As the world cracks down on consumer protection, Google is giving businesses a choice on how to control their data management and security. With international data privacy restrictions, this transfers compliance risk away from the platform to individual companies. Native data points will no longer be collected on users including city, device brand, device model, etc. GA4 has also announced it will not log IP addresses as the platform moves away from a reliance on cookies.
Machine Learning of the Customer Journey Across Platforms and Devices
For the first time, marry the performance data from your app and website. In-app tracking, in conjunction with web tracking, allows for better marketing visibility of the customer journey.
Integrates with Google Ads Platform to Optimize Campaign Performance
More robust audience building is rolling out in Google Analytics 4. With Purchasing Probability metrics, GA4 can aggregate an audience of “likely 7-day purchasers” - users who are most likely to make a purchase in the next week. Especially exciting for publishers is Churn Probability, which creates an audience of active users who are not likely to visit your site or app in the next seven days, allowing you to funnel them into re-engagement campaigns to rekindle the relationship.
What GA4 Means for Your Data
In short, GA4 and Google UA are versions that use different data models. Google UA is based on sessions and pageviews. GA4 is based on events and parameters. This will affect the visual mapping of your data points and the connections between them. Because of the new data models, there will be a new set of reports that are generated when you start tracking events.
No longer will Google automatically track the metrics you’re used to; businesses need to consider what metrics are valuable to their growth and what is worth tracking. Page scrolls and clicks are now events that need to be configured.
Audience insights can be gleaned in a variety of ways, and ensuring your GA4 account is set up properly from conception will ease the data transition.
TFD Can Help You Make the Transition
With a staff of analytics experts focused primarily on publishing clients, TFD has the insight to apply learnings across multiple publishers and set up a best-in-class GA4 platform for your team.
Our proprietary TFD Databoards integrate seamlessly with GA4 for ultimate data transparency and data modeling visualization.
The earlier your GA4 transition, the more retrospective data will be available to you, allowing for year-over-year visibility.
TFD is currently accepting a few GA4 transition projects per month. Email Tonya@TwentyFirstDigital.com to talk about getting started.