What is Google Analytics 4?

Google recently announced a new version of Analytics called Google Analytics 4. Google Analytics 4 (formerly known as App + Web) is a new kind of property with new reports and vastly different than what we’ve been used to with traditional Analytics. With GA4 you can now use it for both websites and apps together whereas traditional Analytics properties only support websites. This is a big change primarily if you run an app and would like to track data.

Google Analytics is widely used by millions of websites and businesses to track user behavior and the amount of web traffic they receive.

What are the differences between Universal Analytics and GA4?

With Google Analytics 4 Google is offering a new version that’s very different from the traditional Analytics. The biggest difference is the user-interface below.

Google Analytics Traditional
Google Analytics Traditional
Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4

You should not expect to find many of the traditional features and results used in the new Google Analytics 4. GA4 also now only features two tiers of data being account and property compared with traditional analytics with three tiers account, property and view. With views now gone from the new Analytics look for streams.

If you have an app the new GA4 provides a more complete understanding of your full visitor/customer life cycle with the advantage of bringing together data from apps and web.

Event tracking is quite different in that in classic Analytics you would be required to modify Analytics code on your website, however GA4 has the ability to setup and track events within the interface.

Highlights of Google Analytics 4

  • It’s focused on giving marketers a “more complete understanding of the customer journey across devices.” And it seems that it’s more focused on measuring the customer journey and not just standard hits and basic metrics.
  • It’s designed around your needs where you can get specific insights and look deeply into your campaigns.
  • It’s built with machine learning to automatically discover insights from your data. You can then use these insights to improve your digital marketing.
  • It’s designed to be “future proof” and work in a world without cookies or identifying data.

Conclusion

Google recommends using both traditional universal Analytics and GA4 at the same time. This is because you may already be familiar with the old interface and data layout and that’s fine for most businesses without an app. There’s also no indication of when or if the old style of Analytics will be removed or automatically moved accross.

We recommend  businesses with traditional Analytics properties continue to use that version. As with new Google products we have to wait and see if GA4 takes off or if it remains in Google’s beta testing phase.

Dont worry, businesses and website owners will not be forced to switch over to the new version of Analytics.

You can check out Google’s own video below to get familiar with the new version of Analytics. GOOP Digital are working on setting up the new Google Analytics 4 interface for all clients moving forward, running these alongside traditional Analytics.

Get in touch with GOOP Digital for more information or if you have an app, we can setup GA4 for you ASAP. Why wait, explore the new more intelligent Google Analytics.

 

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