Migrate to Google Analytics 4

Why Google Analytics 4?

Google has announced that Google Analytics UA (GA3 for short) is being sunset on 1st July 2023. Google Analytics 4 will become Google’s only web analytics platform from that date. Users of GA360, the paid version of GA UA, will be granted an extra 12 months to migrate to GA4. In addition, GA3 properties will delete after 6 months of GA3 stopping processing data. 

The process of migrating to GA4 generally involves six stages:

1. Planning to ensure GA4 aligns with your business objectives and performance measurement needs.
2. Console changes in GA4 to tailor it to your business needs.
3. Google Tag Manager – Configure GA4 & other marketing pixels in an agile way.
4. Developer – If necessary, we instruct your developer on any coding needed. 
5. Reporting – Your dashboards and reports will be migrated to GA4 source data.
6. Knowledge transfer by providing all necessary training.

Download our free Google Analytics 4 migration checklist.

What is Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 is Google’s next-generation web analytics platform which utilises the power of machine learning to provide more valuable insights about web and app users. GA4 allows you to track users on both websites and apps within the same GA property. It is also an event based-platform rather than being built around page views. 

It is recommended to retain your existing Universal Analytics (UA) property because they are complementary platforms. GA4 lacks some features, such as views and page speed, which means UA can still offer many valuable insights until the platform sunsets in July 2023. Hopefully Google will add some of these features to GA4 in the coming months. 

It is recommended to create a GA4 property as soon as you can to begin collecting data before GA UA sunsets on July 1st 2023.

What are the benefits of Google Analytics 4?

Web analytics is about improving your understanding of how visitors use and interact with your website or app, and identifying ways to increase your conversion rate.

Google Analytics 4 helps you achieve these aims because:

• It is an event-based system, which means that it can be configured to measure any type of interaction on your website or app, including clicks, scrolling, viewing of videos and much more.
• Machine learning allows GA4 to automatically alert you to new trends and behaviours by processing data over time.
• AI also enables GA4 to create predictive audiences which use machine learning to calculate the probability of individual users purchasing or churning in the near future. These audiences can be used with Google Ads to create remarketing and re-engagement campaigns to improve your conversion and retention rate. 
• GA4 is a cross-device solution which means it can measure users as they move between mobile and desktop. It uses multiple unique identifiers including user IDs, and unique Google Signals from users who agree to ad personalisation. 
• The solution provides greater integration with Google products because it tracks users across app and web. This means conversions from external sources e.g. YouTube can be measured whether they are in-app or on a website.
• The Explore reporting engine provides a powerful funnel visualisation report which was only previously available in GA360. 
• The Explorer report replaces the custom report in UA and provides a dynamic table format with many innovative features. This includes highlighting where the metric in a cell is higher compared to other rows of the same dimension. 
• GA4 can connect with BigQuery for free. This means you can export unsampled raw data and analyse it in BigQuery. Allowing you to segment your audience and set up targeted advertising.