Should You Upgrade to Google Analytics 4 Now?

Google has now released Google Analytics 4, the latest version of the widely used web analytics platform. This latest release brings with it a significant overhaul in terms of not just functionality, but the overall UI and UX of the tool. Together these updates mark a significant step forward in making Google Analytics the best, most user-friendly analytics tool on the market. In this post, we take a look at key areas that have seen major updates and how you can make the most of these new features to improve your digital analytics capabilities.

Why has Google Analytics been updated?

Google Analytics has remained largely unchanged for years now. It was designed in a time when not only were cross-device interactions rare, they were technically difficult to measure with any degree of certainty. Fast forward to 2020 and Google’s improvements in AI, cross-device and cross-channel capabilities and we have a new paradigm for how web analytics can and should operate. This is where Google Analytics 4 comes in.

Improved Predictive Analytics 

Google Analytics has been using machine learning to power aspects of the platform for a couple of years now, with areas like Google Signals and data-driven attribution having existed for some time. With Google Analytics 4, AI-powered insights and predictive analytics feature much more heavily throughout. For instance:

• AI can now be used to alert marketers to trends within the data, such as an increased demand for a product in your inventory. This could be an incredibly powerful tool for marketers working in Ecommerce to capitalise on emerging trends, ensuring you have enough supply to meet demand.

• Product owners will certainly be excited about the prospect of being able to predict key metrics like churn rate as part of this new system. Being able to calculate churn probability among specific consumer segments, across both app and web properties is one of the most exciting new features available in Google Analytics 4.

• From a marketing perspective, marketers will be able to leverage these predictive analytics to create Audiences for remarketing; improving marketing efficiency by reaching more qualified prospects. 

Improved Google Ads integration

Accurately measuring return on investment from marketing spend is tricky. In a largely last-click attribution world, it’s easy to fall into the trap of assigning credit to areas of your marketing spend without fully understanding the complete picture of what’s happening during the customer journey.

Google Analytics will now provide the ability for marketers to analyse the totality of their efforts, by combining conversions from YouTube engaged views that occur in-app and on the web alongside conversions from Google and non-Google channels, as well as Organic Search, Social and email. This could be a real game changer when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of cross-channel activity making campaign planning and budget allocation much more intuitive.

Up until now, Google Analytics has largely struggled to paint a picture of how users interact with your brand across devices and channels. In Google Analytics 4, instead of anaysing by device or channel, new customer-centric measurements are made possible by:

 “...multiple identity spaces, including marketer-provided User IDs and unique Google signals from users opted into ads personalization” (Google)

These new capabilities will make it significantly easier for brands to understand customers’ digital journeys from awareness, right through to conversion by stitching together interactions across a much wider range of touchpoints and contexts than previously available. 

Greater controls over data collection

With the need for greater transparency around data collection and processing, Google Analytics 4 provides marketers with much more control over what kind of data they collect and how this is processed.  

With this new system, it’s easy for marketers to control things like anonymising IP addresses; disabling collection of certain kinds of data and setting data retention periods. Previously, much of this was obscured from the end-user, so these new controls are a welcome addition that will make complying with company or governmental regulations significantly easier.

If you would like to find out more about Google Analytics 4 and how to bring your web analytics implementation up to scratch, get in touch.