Move Forward with GA4 - Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) has long been the go-to tool for viewing and interpreting website activity data, including conversion rates from Google AdWords and other digital marketing platforms.GA has developed over the years to provide marketers, sales teams and business owners new insights into customer behaviour, not least the precise journey tracking abilities that have allowed businesses to refine the customer journey and remove obstacles that have impeded sales.
Much of the data that GA could show (especially in terms of the origin of clicks and website visits, and the customer journey when a purchase cycle was longer than one or two visits), relied on cookies to track user activity across the web and across the buying cycle. Now that GDPR rules make the use of these tracking cookies a hard opt-in, and many browsers have blocked third-party cookies, we cannot rely on the old GA tools.
GA4 does not rely on cookies, instead using event-based data analysis to show how users move through the website and the sales cycle. One huge benefit here is that you won't see several potential origin points for each user. With third-party tracking a customer might see your advert on several different platforms before taking action, each of which will take credit for the conversion, leaving you in the dark about which platforms are working best for you.GA4 gives you much more reliable data with which to understand and refine your digital advertising success.
Another privacy benefit of GA4 is that it does not store IP addresses, which helps every business stay on the right side of privacy laws, both current ones and any short-to-medium term ones which may arise in the future. Online privacy is becoming much more of a hot-button issue and internet users now expect to be able to control who sees their data, who can store it, and for how long.
Although GA4 was launched in 2020, many website owners still haven't made the switch and time is running out to do so. The current GA will stop processing in July 2023, while GA360 will stop in October 2023.Making the switch now means you'll have historic data to compare your yearly progress with when the switch happens. The data in the original GA dashboard will be available for six month following shutdown.
Moving to GA4 doesn't mean abandoning your current analytics tool and dashboard – we can get you set up with both tools on the same site so you can compare the data tracking between the two with plenty of time to get used to the new interface of GA4.With both tools you can see how your current reporting will look using the new tools, most importantly you'll be able to see what metrics will have to change, and what can stay the same.
Don't wait until it is too late to have a full 12 months’ worth of GA4 data to look back on, make the switch now so you can continue to understand and refine your marketing activities in 2023 and into 2024 with all that data at your disposal. Contact us today to see how soon we can hit the ground running with GA4.
