Calling all marketers: Have you made the transition from Google’s Universal Analytics system to its current platform, GA4? And if not, why not?
There are many reasons to complete the migration now. Google is set to retire its market-leading Universal Analytics version on July 1, 2023. Meanwhile, GA4 is a vastly different system, and marketers will need time to learn the new interface and data collection methods.
Further, according to Google, data collected in Universal Analytics will remain accessible for a minimum of only six months after the sunset date. The sooner GA4 begins tracking data, the more data will be available for historical comparison once GA4 becomes the only option.
Google’s switch to GA4 is the latest in a string of major news developments that continues to transform web analytics and the entire digital marketing landscape. The push for greater consumer data privacy protection is fueling many of the changes and is the subject of DAC’s recent white paper in Ad Age, “The Marketer’s Guide to Web Analytics in a Privacy-First World.”
Better tracking of user behavior
GA4’s new features stand to significantly improve the marketer’s ability to collect and analyze customer data. And because of this, GA4 can help brands fill the void from lost third party-data, which includes the removal of cookies from Google’s chrome browser and unique identifiers from major mobile advertising platforms.
Whereas Universal Analytics’ session-based model primarily tracks website hits and page views, GA4’s event-based platform allows marketers to track user behavior with up to 50 different parameters. This promises to provide a much more detailed picture of a customer’s web interactions, including the steps leading up to a conversion or sale.
Additionally, GA4’s new e-commerce tools, deeper integration with Google Ads and ability to connect web traffic to mobile app data all deliver a more complete view of the end-to-end customer journey.
Button, text, color, URL: A GA4 primer
Google’s previous system limited the tracking of events to three basic parameters: category, action and label. In GA4, marketers can dive much deeper into the descriptive actions that occur within a particular session.
“Any action you want to track can be an event, whether it’s visiting a page, clicking a button or viewing a video,” said Mario Lyn, manager of web analytics at DAC’s Proove Intelligence.
Whereas Universal Analytics defines a conversion around a single action, such as clicking on a button, GA4 can ascribe multiple characteristics to that same action, such as button text, color, page URL and more. A careful analysis of this data would reveal which variables within the button click performed most effectively.
“With Universal Analytics, you put up the screen and it’s the same type of data for everybody,” Lyn said. “But with GA4, you can add more layers on top and more traits to that individual piece of data. So, you have to put a lot more thought into what you’re collecting and how you’re collecting it.”
Strategies to future-proof the org
With GA4 comes both greater responsibility and greater opportunity for marketers to take ownership of their data and overall web analytics practice. According to Dan Temby, senior VP, technology and analytics, at DAC Group, today’s marketers must “backfill the gap in intelligence and fidelity” lost by the reduction in third-party data.
“All of the changes we’re seeing due to privacy legislation are forcing people down the path of a truly integrated marketing technology stack, as opposed to a series of independent platforms designed to do independent things,” he explained.
“Traditionally, web analytics has existed apart from advertising functions like data management platforms and demand side platforms,” Temby noted. “Now everyone is having a conversation about the need for an integrated series of signals against an integrated customer profile. The only way to achieve that is through an interconnected martech stack, and web analytics is the cornerstone of that capability.”
Organizations have other means to prepare for any additional privacy-related changes coming down the pike. They can, for example, build stronger data relationships with publishers, who have access to demographic and behavioral information about site visitors that marketers may not possess. They can also work more closely with their own data scientists and engineers, not only on GA4 implementation but also on new statistical approaches for budgeting decisions and ROI calculations in a changing digital media environment.
Last but not least, marketers need to focus on what they can control. Cookieless advertising solutions will come and go (remember FLOC?). It’s not necessarily a good idea to try to get out ahead of the next big thing. By the time you do, it may not be so big.
Ultimately, marketers will always find ways to talk to the people who are interested in their products. Understanding who those consumers are in the first place, irrespective of channel, is about as future-proofed as marketing can get.
