What is Google Analytics 4?
Tracking your website’s analytics is crucial for gaining valuable insights into user behavior, identifying areas for improvement, and making data-driven decisions to optimize your online presence and achieve your business goals. Without a modern measurement solution, you leave essential insights on the table that can impact your business.
So now is the time to make Google Analytics 4 (GA4) your website’s analytics solution. Introducing Google Analytics 4, the latest iteration of Google Analytics designed to empower users in monitoring their web traffic and analytics. This advanced marketing tool offers invaluable insights to shape effective marketing strategies.
Unlike its predecessor, Google Analytics, which focused on sessions, GA4 revolves around users and events. This fundamental shift brings numerous advantages to marketers, enabling them to analyze cross-platform interactions and pathing with improved capabilities. The flexible model offered by GA4 enhances behavior prediction, providing marketers with a powerful tool to understand and target their audience effectively.
Considering Google’s prioritization of GA4, we highly recommend delving deeper into its features and benefits. It holds immense potential for optimizing marketing efforts and staying ahead in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
Why You Need to Switch to GA4
Switching to Google Analytics 4 is a good idea for a few reasons.
- GA4 will help you track how people are using your website on different devices, like phones and computers. This is important because many people use multiple types of devices.
- GA4 uses smart technology to provide us with useful information about our website’s visitors. This information can help you make better decisions and improve your online marketing strategies.
- GA4 is designed to respect people’s privacy and keep up with privacy rules. This makes it a trustworthy and reliable tool.
By simply setting up a GA4 ‘property’ data collection will begin to work towards strengthening your machine learning (ML) models. This makes future analysis more accurate, so when you’re ready to implement a marketing strategy you’ll be one step ahead!
Starting July 1, 2023, standard universal analytic properties will no longer process data. However, new data will only flow to GA4 properties. GA4 is designed for the future. This means new features like predictive capabilities, direct integrations to media platforms, event-based data, privacy controls, behavior and conversion modeling, and an updated data collection.
All these measurements help us understand the customer journey, and target audience trends. With the correct marketing strategy, we can use this information to convert more sales/clients.
How You Make the Switch to GA4
Luckily, setting up GA4 is simple, and just a few clicks away! Your current analytics property will be left unchanged and continue collecting data (until July 1st, 2023). You can connect a new GA4 data stream to your current universal analytics.
Steps to Getting Started with GA4
- Log into Google Analytics Account
- Click Admin (Gear Icon)
- Confirm that your desired account is selected
- Confirm the desired property is selected
- Click GA4 setup assistant. (First option in the property column)
- Once inside the setup page, click the large blue “Get Started” button.
- Finally click the blue “Create Property” button.
You should be all set and ready to collect data using your new GA4 account. Welcome to the future!
How Align Marketing Can Help You
If you need help setting up GA4, we’re here to help! We already have all our clients set up on GA4 – and we would be happy to help you make the switch as well. It’s extremely helpful to understand your GA4 reporting dashboard so you can make any necessary adjustments to your digital and content marketing strategy. Finally, we can also set up new/advanced analytics tracking based on the new tools and insights GA4 provides.
Interested in having Align set up your GA4 account? Connect with us here!
