Google Analytics 4 And What It Means For Your Business
As the digital landscape is constantly changing, so are users in the way they consume and share content, make purchases, and engage with your brand. From mobile apps to websites, YouTube and more, your brand is not just your website anymore. Google Analytics 4 or GA4 is the next evolution of analytics tracking and was built to understand how users are engaging with your brand across all platforms and devices.
Released out of beta in October 2020, GA4 is the latest version of Google Analytics and the fourth major update since its release. In the following article, we will cover the major updates and how Investis Digital recommends your company move forward with these changes.
Web and App Tracking Combined in GA4
The new update includes plenty of changes that mark Google’s commitment to being a leader in analytics tracking, but the most significant is how Google Analytics can now incorporate your website and mobile app data together into a single, unified view.
According to App Annie1, there were 204 billion mobile app downloads in 2019, a figure which has continued to grow and is expected to grow in the future.
This new web + app user tracking will give you the ability to understand how users are engaging across both your website and mobile app, allow you to identify your most valuable users, and continue to nurture those users into lifelong advocates of your brand.
As users continue to engage with your brand across multiple platforms and devices, it is not only important, but absolutely necessary to understand that engagement. Only with full and complete datasets will you get the full picture of user engagement and how you can use that data to drive profitable business decisions.
Machine Learning for Automated Insights and Recommendations
In addition to unifying website and mobile app data, GA4 takes major strides in machine learning to provide businesses with automated insights, predictive trends, and recommendations for your most profitable audience targeting.
GA4 now has the ability to notify you when there are anomalies in your data, such as sudden increases from a certain channel that could indicate a piece of content going viral. Or conversely, a sudden drop in traffic that could indicate issues with your tracking code that need to be resolved immediately.
In addition to providing you with insight into what has happened, Google Analytics can also give you insight into what will happen with predictive metrics. The most promising of these types of metrics is the estimated amount of revenue that you can collect from a certain group of your users that you can then target in Google Ads. This will allow you to understand how much a segment of your audience is worth to your bottom line.
Machine learning has long been a focus of Google and has already been integrated into products such as Search, Gmail, and Google Maps. By integrating machine learning into Google Analytics, you can rest easy knowing that Google will do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to data analysis and audience segmentation, which will allow you to focus on your most important initiatives.
Updated Customer Journey Reporting
If you’ve attended our workshops, read our content, or had any discussions about performance marketing, you’ve likely heard us talk about the Customer Journey and its value to your business. As a quick recap, the Customer Journey is the path a user takes from understanding they have a problem, to finding a solution, and ultimately becoming an advocate of your brand.
In GA4, reporting has been updated to reflect the Customer Journey, from Acquisition to Engagement, Monetization, and finally Retention, a journey that is now a staple of any viable marketing strategy. Understanding how your data drives users through their journey is key to making profitable business decisions. And sometimes more importantly, understanding the gaps in your marketing strategy can often uncover more valuable insights than what you’re doing right.
Even this simple shift in reporting, shows Google’s commitment to understanding the Customer Journey and how important it is in the context of larger marketing strategies.
YouTube View-Through Attribution
You probably know that Google is the world’s largest search engine, but you might be surprised that Google also owns the second largest search engine, YouTube. With over 1 billion hours of video served every day2, YouTube is critical to increasing your brand awareness and engaging users online, however attributing revenue to YouTube in the past has been shaky at best.
To show the true value of YouTube, GA4 now has a stronger integration between Google Analytics and YouTube. In the past, YouTube would only get credit for conversions if a user clicked through to your site from the video. However, that is not how a majority of users behave on the video platform. Instead, users often watch your video and then continue on to another video and are not likely clicking through to your site, which ends up becoming a missed attribution point from YouTube.
To remedy this, Google Analytics now offers view-through conversions from YouTube, so marketers can understand how views of a video contribute to your revenue and not just clicks to your website. This is a critical change that will show the true value of YouTube in your marketing campaigns.
Here’s What Investis Digital Recommends
With these new updates to GA4, Investis Digital is committed to ensuring your brand has the most comprehensive and accurate data to inform your marketing and business decisions. Due to the significant technical update to how users are tracked, an upgrade to GA4 requires a new Google Analytics property, meaning no historical data will be ported over.
We recommend upgrading ASAP if your business applies to any of the items below:
- Has a mobile app
- Active on YouTube, either paid or organically
- Currently going through a site migration or will be in the future
- Don’t have time for regular, in-depth analysis
Even if your business doesn’t apply to any of the items above, we still recommend creating a new GA4 property to start collecting traffic and conversion data today since GA4 will be Google’s preferred analytics version moving forward.
While your new GA4 property is collecting data for year-over-year analysis, we recommend to continue reporting out of your current Google Analytics property until data in the GA4 property is accurate, comprehensive, and reliable.
To take advantage of all the new features GA4 has to offer, a more technical implementation is required that will involve development teams for both the website and mobile app. Investis Digital can provide direction and assistance for the development teams to make these updates. We are confident that the additional technical effort to setup GA4 tracking will go a long way in enhancing your analytics data collection and analysis for years to come.
Conclusion
GA4 is the future of Google Analytics and Investis Digital is committed to bringing you the latest advances in user tracking, reporting, and analysis. It is a major update to Google Analytics and one that indicates a substantial change in how users are interacting and engaging with your brand across devices, platforms, content types, and the various stages of the customer journey.
Google has updated their analytics to reflect their commitment to providing valuable insights of user behavior to help you better understand your users and provide them with the content they are looking for at the right time.
At Investis Digital, we know the importance of technology to your brand and are keeping a close eye on the landscape of digital communications. If you would like to find out how analytics can help inform your digital strategy and provide measurable evidence of its success, Investis Digital is here to help.