With the release of Google Analytics 4, we want to help you quickly leverage all available technologies to increase the success of your business online. Here are the top benefits of the GA4 property.
Team Madcraft
Launched in mid-October 2020, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the newest version of Analytics. With the planned retirement of Universal Analytics (UA) in July 2023, GA4 will become the only property of choice on the platform. Therefore, to keep relying on data for strategic insight and a better understanding of your customers, you’ll need to upgrade to GA4.
After July 2023: You will no longer be able to process data using UA. Therefore, we highly recommend migrating from UA over to GA4 as soon as possible to avoid starting from the beginning when UA ceases to exist. The main advantage of migrating over now is that you can set up GA4 to co-exist alongside UA (up until July 23rd, 2023). This allows you to start collecting data in the background of GA4 while using UA in the forefront. In addition, installing GA4 now delivers value in a second way: you can familiarise yourself with the new interface, features, and reporting capabilities.
With the release of Google Analytics 4, we want to help you quickly leverage all available technologies to increase the success of your business online. Here are the top benefits of the GA4 property.
GA4 cross-tracks web and app activity on one platform. Cross-tracking helps you enrich, customise and add value to your customer touchpoints by integrating multiple data sources from the web and mobile apps.
Advanced machine learning on GA4 allows you to use predictive analytics to forecast a suggested audience’s probability (from 7 up to 28 days) or predict a data anomaly (from 2 weeks up to 32 weeks). Predictive analytics can help optimise your digital operations, get a competitive advantage, and understand customer journeys more accurately.
BigQuery is free on GA4, unlike its predecessor UA making it possible to export data easily. BigQuery reduces your storage costs for data with the free tier offering up to store 1 TB of processed query data each month.
From IP anonymisation to first-party data collection to data retention, GA4 has it all. As the Internet becomes more privacy-centric, GA4 has improved privacy and security features and is evolving to become compliant with the newest data protection laws.
Tailored suggestions automated by Google help you make the most out of GA4. While insights and recommendations are optional, it is good to listen to them as they often reveal strategic insights you can use to your advantage on the platform.
In comparison to previous versions of analytics, GA4 reports are much more customisable and actionable. An additional feature includes the exploration tab that allows you to create custom reports and view data differently.
As the GA4 interface has changed, the new metrics will help you offer greater relevancy to your customer by simplifying the platform so that you can understand better how users interact with your website.
Home: View a snapshot of all your important data, automatically personalised with recently viewed activity, insights, and recommendations.
Reports: View standard reports in real-time. App developer (if applicable), gaming (if applicable), lifecycle, and user details reports can all be found in this tab.
Explore: Create custom reports that allow you to base data on your specific goals.
Advertising: Understand your customer purchase journey and the relationship between marketing channels.
Configure: View statistics on events, conversions, and audiences. Debug view is also available here.
Admin: Edit your account and property settings.
Security features are positioned at the forefront of the GA4 platform. GA4 uses machine learning anomaly detection to detect “unusual behaviour” within the data being processed on the platform. Anomaly detection aims to drive decisions to audit, investigate or block anomalies.
As online transactions become more common, criminal activity and malicious attempts can arise. Anomaly detection is an excellent security feature on GA4, significantly reducing the risk of false transitions and fraud. As a result, your time can be spent more effectively, fraud can be detected more easily, and losses can be reduced.
Anomaly detection offers value in a second way; it can be used to forecast future occurrences. To avail of the machine learning capabilities, you will need historical data in your GA4 account to “train” Google to predict unusual data behaviour.
To detect anomalies, GA4 will need a training period of:
Once you adjust the anomaly detection settings, hover over the data in the exploration report; anomaly data is highlighted by an empty circle. The anomaly information will show if you hover your cursor over the empty circle.
GA4 provides a free connection to BigQuery, a cloud data storage and management system, where you can export all your data from GA4 property to BigQuery. Unfortunately, you cannot directly transfer data from UA to GA4. (If you have GA360, you can transfer directly over to GA4.) Therefore, you will need to manually upload to BigQuery before importing the data into GA4. Once exported from GA4, an analytic table is generated to include important data such as the event date, timestamp, event name, and event parameters. GA4 BigQuery’s free tier usage limit is up to 10 GB of active storage and 1 TB of processed data each month. If you need to store or process more data, you must upgrade your tier.
GA4 no longer requires separate platforms to collect app and web property data. GA4 simplifies your data collection efforts by allowing you to view data from your website and app on one platform. With this feature, you can understand your user journey and touchpoints across devices, giving you the information needed to build better user journeys and experiences. Combined app and web view can help you recognise your customer’s intent, preference, and rationale for their behaviour.
When you add an app data stream, GA4 splits the stream for iOS and Android, helping you get more specific data per device type.
The DebugView in GA4 provides a more advanced look at the platform. You can see incoming data as GA4 collects it. In DebugView, you can view events at different time intervals. You can also see the minutes stream, top events, current user properties, and a device selector.
You can view events at different time intervals
Events are logged from 60 seconds.
Top events are logged from the last 30 mins.
When you add an app data stream, GA4 splits the stream for iOS and Android, helping you get more specific data per device type.
GA4 has shifted from a session-based model that tracked ‘hits’ to an event model that tracks ‘events’. The difference is that hits such as page views, events, social, and screen views will now be tracked as events. The event-based model focuses heavily on how people interact with your site, so keep this in mind when setting up events.
In GA4, an event is a specific user interaction on a website or app. The reason behind the change in the model is to better understand the customer journey, including how customers interact with your website or app, and what is important to them.
GA4 offers four types of events:
a. Automatically collected events (prebuilt dimensions and metrics)
b. Enhanced events (prebuilt dimensions and metrics)
c. Recommended events (prebuilt dimensions and metrics)
d. Custom events (custom dimensions and metrics)
These are automatically populated on GA4 for common interactions that happen on your app and/or website:
Enhanced measurement is enabled by default on GA4. You may disable this if you wish. We recommend you leave it enabled to save time instead of creating the events listed below manually. Enhanced measurement allows you to track important actions people take on your website such as:
GA4’s recommended events allow you to see additional features and behaviours of your users to generate more useful reports. Below is a list of the types of recommendations, depending on what you need to track.
Custom events allow you to collect data specific to your business. We advise you to check if a specific event is already prebuilt by checking automatically collected events, enhanced measurements and recommended events listed above before you spend time and effort creating a custom event. You must register custom dimensions and metrics and manually configure its tags on GTM. With custom events, you can set the track type, the tracking parameters, the action, and the trigger for each event you create.
Once you have set up your desired events, you can view event data in five ways in GA4:
Realtime report
Explorations
BigQuery
Data API
Looker Studio (formerly known as Data Studio)
GTM allows you to create custom tags specific to your goals on GA4, aiding you in tracking any additional activity not prebuilt on GA4. GTM is more advanced and may require working with a developer to install tags (types of code) onto your website and GA4.
For example:
Once you set up the Google Tag Manager code snippet on your website, GA4 will begin to collect these tags, which you can review in the DebugView report.
In GA4, Google signals are session data that measure users across devices. Google signals are for users who have turned on Ads personalisation within their Google account. This feature allows you to create highly relevant ads based on user preferences.
If you enable Google signals and don’t change the reported identity to the device, GA4 will start applying thresholds to dimensions will low user count.
GA4 employs today’s most advanced analytics, running largely on machine learning technologies. Just like anomaly detection, GA4 uses predictive analytics for building suggested audiences and predicting future buying behaviour. With predictive analytics, you can efficiently invest in retaining customers as the machine learning algorithm is capable of forecast patterns.
Predictive machine learning analytics can be located when building in the suggested audience or the exploration tab. Predictive analytics delivers value in a second way, by helping you focus your resources and efforts on the most valuable and promising set of users.
GA4 can forecast future predictions such as;
Purchase probability (forecasts next 7 days) (currently only applicable for in-app purchases and eCommerce purchases)
Churn probability (forecasts next 7 days)
Predictive revenue (forecasts next 28 days)
As the Internet becomes more privacy-centric, Google wants to offer users control over sharing their activity with Google Analytics. In addition, the introduction of data protection laws such as GDPR and CCPA has further impacted how websites handle personal information.
GA4 sets out several improvements in its privacy controls:
IP anonymisation: Under GDPR and CCPA, an IP address is considered a personal information identifier. GA4 has a built-in Inonymisation feature that hides user IP addresses. This feature is set by default on GA4, and you cannot disable it.
Data retention: You can choose how long GA4 can hold user-specific data, from a minimum of 2 months to a maximum of 14 months before Google automatically deletes it, making it easier to compile with EU GDPR. You can schedule a data deletion request. For all other event data, you can choose the length of retention from 2 months to 14 months.
GA4 offers tailored insights and recommendations to help you get the most out of analytics. You can choose whether to accept or dismiss recommendations as you wish. Recommendations come and go depending on whether it has been applied already, dismissed, or if the recommendation is no longer significant. An additional benefit is that you can create and manage your insights, set conditions, and get notified by email when a custom insight is triggered.
To view the insight in more detail, click on the card.
IP anonymisation: Under GDPR and CCPA, an IP address is considered a personal information identifier. GA4 has a built-in Inonymisation feature that hides user IP addresses. This feature is set by default on GA4, and you cannot disable it.
GA4 reports are more customisable, improved, and actionable than previous analytic versions. In addition, you may see different tabs available depending on your GA4 account type. For example, eCommerce or gaming accounts may see other tabs available.
Reporting snapshot
Contains a general overview of your most important data. You can modify what appears on the snapshot page to your liking.
Explore allows you to create your own custom report and interpret the data in your own way. In comparison to GA4 predecessors, exploration reports offer more flexibility. You have the choice of pre-made template techniques to help generate the report. Once you choose the technique, your custom report is split into variables, tab settings, and the custom report. Once you input the data you want to appear in the report, you can change the report’s visualisation type from the standard table to scatter plot, geo map, and many more.
You can select the type of exploration technique you want:
The new integrations from the GA4 property will help you adapt to an evolving market that focuses on understanding the customer journey. You’ll be able to anticipate the future actions of your users, giving you the data needed to improve your customer journey, improve the ROI of your marketing and provide a better user experience.
If you need help in any aspect of setting up GA4, contact our Google specialists at Madcraft.