All You Need to Know About the Latest Google Analytics 4 update

Almost 3 years ago, Google Analytics 4 was rolled out in order to help businesses better understand their customer’s multi-platform journey. An update earlier last month (March 2022) has introduced a host of new reporting features. Along with these changes comes the announcement that Universal Analytics will be no more as of July 2023, so now is the time to prepare.

The new update on March 14 focused mostly on Search Ads 360 integration, allowing users to benefit from the following:

?? Analytics exports conversions to Search Ads 360

?? Search Ads 360 campaign and cost data is imported to Analytics

?? Analytics app – and site-engagement metrics are available in Search Ads 360 reports (available only if you have upgraded to the new Search Ads 360 experience)

Now is the time to ensure Google Analytics 4 is your cross-platform analytics solution – as Universal Analytics is being retired on 1 July, 2023. After this date, you’ll still be able to access any previously processed data in your Universal Analytics property for at least six months, however, it’s strongly advised that all historical data and reports are exported during this grace period.

“Universal Analytics was built for a generation of online measurement that was anchored in the desktop web, independent sessions and more easily observable data from cookies,” Russell Ketchum, director, product management at Google, said in the announcement. “This measurement methodology is quickly becoming obsolete.”

As user’s online journeys are changing and becoming more and more multi-platform focused, businesses need to accurately measure and monitor data. For example, Google Analytics 4 doesn’t rely solely on cookies and instead uses an event-based data model to deliver user-centric measurement.

Are you already using Google Analytics 4? If not, here are just some of the benefits of the updated platform.

Understand your customers across multiple touch points:

?? Get a complete view of the customer lifecycle with an event-based measurement model that isn’t fragmented by platform or organized into independent sessions.

?? Improve ROI with data-driven attribution

?? Use data-driven attribution to analyze the full impact of your marketing across the customer journey.

?? Measure engagement and conversions with business and compliance needs in mind

With new country-level privacy controls, you can manage and minimize the collection of user-level data — like cookies and metadata — while preserving key measurement functionality.

Easily activate your insights

Expanded integrations with other Google products, like Google Ads, work across your combined web and app data, making it easy to use Analytics insights to optimize your campaigns.

It’s now time to move operations across to the updated Google Analytics 4 platform in order to ensure no historical data is lost. If you’re lost and don’t know where to start, get in touch. Our professional services can help right away. Click Here