Google Analytics & GA4
Google Analytics is a web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes.
Why Is Google Analytics Important?
You can use Google Analytics for a range of different purposes. In the section below, we will quickly review three of the most common applications of Google Analytics.
Analytics For Marketing
The insights you can gain from Analytics reports can be vital to improving your marketing. Data collected can help you answer a range of questions about your marketing efforts:
- How much traffic is driven to your site by different marketing channels?
- Which websites refer the most visitors?
- Where do your site visitors live?
- What is the conversion rate of visitors from different channels?
They can show you the channels to invest in and those to move away from. They can also help you better define your target audience, amongst many other helpful insights.
Analytics to Improve Site Performance
Analytics reports are also the perfect place to learn about your site and those people who use it. In this area, the questions which the platform help you answer are even more plentiful:
- Which of my pages get the most traffic?
- Where on my site, do visitors leave?
- How quickly do my site’s pages load?
- Are load times longer for visitors using mobile devices?
Those kinds of insights give you practical ways forward for improving your site performance.
Analytics to Aid Your SEO
Google Analytics insights are also invaluable for informing your SEO. The platform helps answer an array of questions about how users find and interact with your site:
- How much search traffic is your site getting?
- Which of your landing pages gets the most traffic?
- What search queries do visitors use to find your site?
- What’s your site’s bounce rate for visitors from different sources?
In SEO, as in many things, information is power. The more you know about your site visitors and your target audience, the better.
So What Is Google Analytics 4 (GA4) And Why Is It Important?
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the new version of Google Analytics. GA4 replaces Universal Analytics (aka GA3) which will become obsolete on 1 July 2023. You cannot simply upgrade from GA3 to GA4. These are totally different analytics systems with different data structures so it is a seismic change in Analytics.
Moving on from Universal Analytics
Google Analytics 4 operates across platforms, does not rely exclusively on cookies and uses an event-based data model to deliver user-centric measurement.
Google Analytics 4 is designed with privacy at its core to provide a better experience for both our customers and their users. Importantly, Google Analytics 4 will also no longer store IP addresses. These solutions and controls are especially necessary in today’s international data privacy landscape, where users are increasingly expecting more privacy protections and control over their data.
Starting your measurement with Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 is designed with your key objectives in mind — like driving sales or app installs, generating leads or connecting online and offline customer engagement.
Here are just a few ways Google Analytics 4 can support your business.
Understand your customers across touchpoints
Get a complete view of the customer lifecycle with an event-based measurement model that isn’t fragmented by platform or organized into independent sessions.
Use data-driven attribution to analyse the full impact of your marketing across the customer journey. It assigns attribution credit to more than just the last click using your Analytics data, and helps you understand how your marketing activities collectively influence your conversions. You can export that analysis to Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform media tools to optimise campaigns.
Measure engagement and conversions with business and compliance needs in mind
With new country-level privacy controls, you can manage and minimise the collection of user-level data — like cookies and metadata — while preserving key measurement functionality.
Get greater value from your data
Machine learning generates sophisticated predictive insights about user behaviour and conversions, creates new audiences of users likely to purchase or churn and automatically surfaces critical insights to improve your marketing.
Easily activate your insights
Expanded integrations with other Google products, like Google Ads, work across your combined web and app data, making it easy to use Analytics insights to optimize your campaigns.
What happens next?
All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new sessions on July 1, 2023, and 360 Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new sessions on October 1, 2023. After that, you’ll be able to access your previously processed data in Universal Analytics for at least six months. BUT you cannot import the data into GA4
We can help you make the move over to Google Analytics 4 as soon as possible to build the necessary historical data before Universal Analytics stops processing new hits.
Affordable Monthly Plans
No Fixed-Term Contract
It's Free With No Obligation
Your GA4 Questions Answered
What happens to our current data (Universal Analytics) when we migrate to GA4?
When you migrate to GA4, you will still have access to all your data from Universal Analytics for six months (after July 1 2023) and you can export it for future analysis. However, it’s important to note that you cannot directly compare GA4 vs GA3, the former uses a different data model than Universal Analytics, so you won’t be able to merge your data together. And if you want to hold onto your Universal Analytics data indefinitely, then it’s important that you export your historical UA reports during the six-month period, or you risk losing your data.
Do I have to switch to GA4 - I am happy with Universal Analytics?
Many people ask “Should I use GA4 or universal analytics?” The truth is, if you don’t make the switch to GA4, your business will miss out on all the benefits that GA4 has to offer. And from July 1st, Google will not be recording data with Universal Analytics and eventually after 6 months, totally obsolete, and you will not be able to access your Universal Analytics data or view your reports.