Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has been the main Google Reporting Platform for a year, ever since it took over from Universal Analytics (UA) in July 2023. It brought with it some significant changes and we’ve spent a lot of the last year helping our clients manage the transition between UA and GA4.
Now, a year in, we want to give an update on how GA4 is working, what it’s doing, and the best reports, tips, and tricks you need to get the most out of it.
Table of Contents
What is GA4?
In case you’re still unfamiliar, GA4 is how many businesses collect data to learn about visitor behaviors on their sites. While the previous system, UA, used cookies, GA4 works with machine learning and predictive analytics to track user sessions across multiple devices as well as apps.
Why is this important? We know that around 60% of overall internet traffic starts on a mobile device, but consumers typically jump between mobile browsers, desktops, apps, and tablets before actually taking action on a site. Analytics that only reveal user behavior on one platform don’t give the whole picture.
With GA4, marketers and all site owners receive consolidated information and can see consumer habits across multiple devices.
Does GA4 protect user privacy?
Yes, GA4 protects privacy. In fact, it was due to increasing concerns around privacy and security that Google decided to change UA and rolled out GA4 back in October 2020.
After that initial rollout, Google announced in March 2022 that UA would stop collecting new data as of July 1, 2023, and the era of GA4 began.
As part of its more privacy-centric focus, GA4 uses machine learning and AI rather than cookies to predict user behavior.
Our Favorite GA4 Reports
As an analytics platform, GA4 provides many reports to help distill user behavior into actionable insights. These are our favorites.
Acquisition Reports
One of the most common reports that we use is the Acquisition Report. This report tells you where site visitors came from: direct, email, paid search, organic search, referral, paid social, etc.
With GA4, the Acquisition section can further be distilled into the User Acquisition Report and the Traffic Acquisition Report.
User Acquisition Report
This report not only provides a great overview of where your new traffic is coming from, including organic, paid, social, and direct channels, but also gives you a much more granular view of your traffic sources for new users.
For example, GA4 will show you if a new user first came to your website, then visited your app, and then came back to your site three more times over the course of two weeks before making a purchase. In this User Acquisition report, all those visits will appear as one user who came to the site multiple times, rather than multiple visits from multiple users.
Furthermore, since the report will reveal how the user first came to your site, we use this report to understand where increased brand awareness is coming from for our clients.
Traffic Acquisition Report
This report is designed to help you understand where your website traffic is coming from. It tells you how each user arrived on your website each time that they visited.
This report provides cross-channel traffic source dimensions. You can add multiple dimensions and metrics to customize the report for your needs.
We use this report to see what channels are driving users to come back to the site and which are creating the last purchase session. It is the most popular report with our clients.
Engagement Reports
The Engagement Report goes beyond sessions and bounce rates to show you how users are actually interacting with your site. In this report, you can see elements such as time spent on page, engaged sessions, and event completions.
GA4 Benefits & Marketing Impact
Benefit 1: User Journey
GA4 tracks user interactions across channels (website, app, etc.), allowing you to see the entire user journey. For example, you can see if a user clicked on a social media ad, landed on a product page, and then made a purchase.
This is an improvement from UA, which primarily focused on individual pageviews. It didn’t provide a clear picture of how users moved across your site.
Marking Impact
Understanding the user journey helps you identify potential drop-off points and optimize the user experience across all touchpoints. This can lead to increased conversions and customer satisfaction.
Benefit 2: Event-Based Measurement
Event-based measurement in GA4 allows you to track specific user interactions, like clicks on buttons, video views, or file downloads. This provides a rich picture of how users are engaging with your site or app.
Conversely, UA focused on session-based measurement, and not event-based measurement. A single session could look like either a user bouncing off the homepage or a user spending 20 minutes reading multiple articles. These are entirely different events, but under UA, both were given equal weight, showing up as one session each. This made it difficult to understand user behavior.
Marketing Impact
With event-based data, you can see which elements of your site are most engaging, identify areas for improvement, and optimize your marketing efforts for specific user actions. For instance, you could focus on promoting content that drives more video views if videos often directly precede sales.
Benefit 3: Machine Learning Insights
While UA offered limited automated insights, GA4 leverages machine learning to identify trends and anomalies in your data. It can predict future behavior and suggest actions based on analyzed insights.
For example, imagine you run an e-commerce store and there’s been a recent decline in mobile app purchases. GA4’s machine learning might identify this and surface an insight card titled: “Mobile App Purchase Decline.” The card would include details such as the specific timeframe of the decline and offer potential explanations.
With GA4, you don’t have to dig through the data. Instead, these insights are automatically provided.
Marketing Impact
Machine learning insights can help you anticipate customer needs, personalize your marketing efforts, and identify potential issues before they arise. This can lead to more efficient and effective marketing strategies.
GA4 Challenges
Nothing is perfect. Here are some challenges we’ve noticed as marketers using GA4 over the last year and a half.
Challenge 1: Event-Based Measurement
While we like this GA4 element, it does come with a learning curve. The switch from session-based measurement to event-based measurement requires a shift in thinking. This is especially true for professionals who used UA for a significant amount of time.
The more time you spend with GA4 and event-based measurement, the more helpful it will become. Once you see how many types of events you can track, and the details each provides about user behavior, we think you’ll be happy to move forward and not look back.
Challenge 2: Data Discrepancies
There can be discrepancies between data from GA4 and UA, making year-over-year comparisons difficult. However, as time goes on, this won’t matter as all relevant data will be in GA4.
Challenge 3: Custom Reports
While GA4 offers robust data, building custom reports is more complex than it was in UA. Google offers support for report customization, and you can always ask a professional for help.
Tips for Using GA4
Here are some of our top tips to help you get more from GA4.
Tip 1: Tracking Meaningful Actions in GA4
We highly recommend that you identify all key actions that you want to measure. This could be anything from button clicks to form submissions or video completions. Once you’ve identified the actions, set up events and key events to capture this data. The sooner you have the data, the better you can understand user behavior and optimize your marketing efforts.
Pro Tip
Use consistent naming conventions for custom events. Consistent naming conventions make your GA4 data easier to understand and analyze over time. It also improves collaboration between marketing teams and analysts.
All names should be as self-explanatory as possible. In addition, GA4 imposes these event naming rules:
- Event names are case sensitive. For example, my_event and My_Event are distinct events.
- Event names can include English and non-English words and letters.
- Do not use reserved prefixes and event names (listed in linked article).
- Event names must start with a letter. Use only letters, numbers, and underscores. Don’t use spaces.
Tip 2: Tracking Key Events
In order to turn these key events into conversions, simply toggle the check mark “on” (blue). Any event can be turned into a conversion, but not all events should be conversions.
What do we mean? Well, you might not consider a page view a conversion, so you wouldn’t want to mark it as such. However, if a submitted lead form or a purchase is a conversion, toggle the switch on to make sure these are counted and reported.
Pro Tip
Why track some events as conversions and some merely as events?
Turning specific events into conversions indicates which events are the most important actions for your audience to take on your website. This also allows you to import these conversions into Google Ads for more optimized ad delivery and performance.
Tip 3: Leverage GA4’s Funnels
Funnels are a powerful tool in GA4 that allow you to track users as they progress towards a specific goal, such as completing a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. You can create funnels for any user journey and see where users drop off. This helps you identify areas for improvement and optimize your conversion funnel.
Funnel Reports
Funnel Reports now offer many new, free features. Some of our favorites are:
- Trended Funnels: These allow you to track each step of the funnel to see how it changes over time. You can view the data in a graph, and see how different elements will change or affect the trajectory of the funnel.
- Open Funnels: These allow a visitor to enter the funnel at any point in the process. Previously funnels were closed and only allowed you to see when users started from one specified beginning point.
- Elapsed Time: GA4 allows you to see elapsed time. With this feature, you could see how long it took a user to add an item to their cart versus completing the purchase.
Pro Tip
Combine custom events with funnels. This will let you track specific events within your funnel to pinpoint exactly where users are dropping off. For example, if you have a funnel for the checkout process, track events for:
- Adding items to the cart,
- Entering payment information, and
- Completing the purchase.
Now, if purchases aren’t completed, you can see which step in the checkout process is causing the most friction. Once you know that, you can take steps to solve the problem.
Tip 4: Master Custom Dashboards
GA4 allows you to create custom dashboards that highlight the metrics that matter most to you.
Pro Tip
Build dashboards for different personas. For example, create a dashboard for your sales team with key event metrics. Then create another for your content team with user engagement metrics. This allows everyone to quickly access the data they need in a format that’s easy to understand and use.
One of the custom dashboards we like is our Landing Page Report.
This report allows us to see which pages are bringing in the most engagement from our audience. Since our goal is to generate leads from our website, we use this report to determine which pages are performing well and which ones need optimization.
Moving On with GA4
That wraps up the summary of our last year’s experience with GA4. From customizable reporting and accurate cross-device insights, to simplified event and engagement tracking, there’s a lot to love about this platform.
However, we know many people still struggle with the learning curve. Hopefully this blog post delivers some clarity. If you have any questions or want help with your analytics and marketing, ask us at any time.
Further Resources
- Tracking Leadpages Conversions in Google Analytics 4 & Adwords
- How to Keep Your Rankings with Google’s March 2024 Core Update
- Generative AI’s Influence on Personal and Companies’ Online Presence and SERPs
The Mather Group LLC is a digital marketing agency. We specialize in enhancing online reputations through authentic content and expert digital brand management. Clients trust us with Wikipedia services, SEO, PPC, and ORM. Don’t like how you’re showing up online? Let’s talk.