Discover Google Analytics 4 Properties #GoogleAnalytics4 #s1ep08

A new generation of Google Analytics is here to help us meet our measurement needs. Whether we’re new to Google Analytics or you’re a measurement pro, it’s important to understand the features of the latest Google Analytics 4 (GA4) properties and how they compare to the existing Universal Analytics (UA) properties.?

In this episode, we’ll learn:

• The benefits and features of the latest Google Analytics experience
• How to stay up to date with a product that will change over time
• How GA4 properties differ from UA properties?
• How GA4 properties collect and process data
• How identity spaces work in UA properties vs. GA4 properties

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Discovering A New Generation Google Analytics 4 Properties

What’s New with Google Analytics?

With innovative features and improved flexibility, this experience is the future of Analytics. Whether we’re just starting to use Analytics or we’ve been measuring with it for years, this infrastructure will unlock valuable insights for our website, our app, or both!

Google Analytics 4 properties were briefly known as “App + Web properties.” The name was changed to reflect the fact that this property type is for all businesses, not just those that have both an app and a website.

In the past, there were only two kinds of properties: Universal Analytics for measuring websites, and Google Analytics for Firebase for measuring mobile app activity. But now, the Google Analytics 4 property can collect both types of data.

What's a Google Analytics property?

This property was designed for all Analytics users: those who only have a website, those who only have an app, as well as those who have both and want to combine all their data in one place.

• A?Google Analytics account?can include multiple properties and property types, but property can belong to only one Analytics account.
• Universal Analytics properties:?Also known as UA properties, this is the term for the existing web-only Analytics property type.
• Google Analytics 4 properties:?Also known as GA4 properties, this Analytics property type can process data from both websites and apps. Plus it has many new features for all Analytics users.

The benefits of Google Analytics 4 properties

The next generation of Google Analytics is designed to scale with our business and measure across devices and platforms. This allows our measurement strategy to adapt to a constantly changing digital environment.

Check out some of the benefits of the GA4 property type:

1. Scaling with our business: It can measure, unify, and de-duplicate all the interactions people have with our company across devices and platforms, giving us a complete, relevant, and timely understanding of the customer journey.
2. Adapting to a changing environment: It offers responsible, a durable measurement that enables business outcomes for the long-term while meeting user expectations for privacy.
3. Revealing intelligent business insights: It automates and facilitates insight discovery with the power of Google’s machine learning, making it frictionless to get the most value from our data.
4. Helping our marketing goals: It allows us to more effectively take action on our data and insights to achieve measurable marketing outcomes.

Integrated reporting

More and more, people expect to interact with businesses however is most convenient for them — for example, researching a product on their phone and then purchasing it later on their computer.

Full reporting across devices:

Users often switch devices or profiles as they interact with our website. The latest Analytics experience can de-duplicate users across data from different devices. This means Analytics can measure a single user journey across devices based on the best available user identifiers.

We can use Google’s signed-in data, bring our own identifier for signed-in users, or seamlessly use both.

Unified web and app reporting:

The latest Analytics experience can add value to our business if we only have a website, or we only have an app. But if we have both, it can give us insight into cross-platform journeys.

Integrated reporting and analysis:

The latest Google Analytics experience can seamlessly and intelligently combine all our data streams to report key insights unique to our business.

We can even go beyond pre-defined reports with the Explorations tool, which gives us new and more flexible ways to examine our data.

What Sets Google Analytics 4 Properties Apart

Differences Between GA4 & UA

When the development of this experience began, Google Analytics was already more than 12 years old. It was time to redesign the infrastructure to make Google Analytics more user-friendly while preserving the key features and functionality we enjoy in UA properties today.?

The Most Important Differences of GA4

1. Measurement: Flexible event-based data model
2. Reporting: Full cross-device and cross-platform reporting
3. Automation: Machine learning throughout to improve and simplify insight discovery

Some more key differences

Audiences

An audience is a set of users you define based on different attributes that are important to your business — for example, fans of sports and travel, people shopping for cars, or users who have already engaged with our company's products or services.

With GA4 properties, it’s easy to create new audiences, and we have more options when defining and segmenting our audiences.?

If our business creates IDs for signed-in users, GA4 properties allow us to use this data when building audiences. We can now define our audiences based on IDs sent to Analytics to create audiences based on signed-in users.

Explorations

Interpret our data with greater freedom using the Explorations tool. Use a variety of techniques, like funnel exploration, path exploration, and free-form exploration to uncover insights.

BigQuery Export

Export our Analytics data to BigQuery so we can securely store our data in the cloud, combine it with data from other sources, and run queries across all your data sets. Or move our data to any other system where we want to use it, even with Python!

How GA4 properties collect and process data

Rather than using a session-based model, which groups user interactions within a given time frame, GA4 uses an event-based model, which processes each user interaction as a standalone event.

• The session-based model: In UA properties, Analytics groups data into?sessions, and these sessions are the foundation of all reporting. During a session, Analytics collects and stores user interactions, such as pageviews, events, and eCommerce transactions, as hits. A single session can contain multiple hits, depending on how a user interacts with our website.
• The event-based model: In GA4 properties, we can still see session data, but Analytics collects and stores user interactions with our website or app as?events. Events provide insight into what's happening in our website or app, such as page views, button clicks, user actions, or system events.

Benefits of the event-based model

If you have a website and an app, it’s important to measure a diverse range of user interactions to better understand how people engage with our business across these platforms. For example, we could measure:

• Clicks and pageviews on your website
• Installs and opens on your app
• User engagement and conversions on either platform

The event-based data model consistently measures these interactions across devices and platforms and provides you with even richer insights from our data.

More about events in GA4 properties

Many basic interactions with our website or app are automatically collected as events in the latest Analytics property. For example, the first time a user visits your website, the property will log this action as a “first visit” event.

We can also enable the enhanced measurement feature, an option that lets us automatically collect more events without having to update our website's code. Enhanced measurement allows us to measure many common web events like pageviews, scrolls, file downloads, and video views.

Identity spaces in Google Analytics

When trying to understand user journeys, Analytics can use several different user identifiers, such as the IDs you assign to users logged into your website, Google signals, and device IDs. These groups of identifiers are called identity spaces.

• User ID: If you create our own persistent IDs for signed-in users, we can use this data to accurately measure user journeys across devices. To enable the User-ID feature, we must consistently assign IDs to our users and include the IDs along with the data we send to Analytics.
• Google Signals: It uses data from users who are signed in to Google. With Google, signals enabled, Analytics associates event data it collects from users on our site with the Google accounts of signed-in users who have consented to share this information.

Enabling Google signals is very simple. We don’t have to make modifications to our website or app to get started with this feature — just turn it on!

• Device ID: Analytics can also use device ID as an identity space. On websites, the device ID comes from the user’s browser. On apps, the device ID comes from the app-instance ID. We don't need any further setup in Google Analytics to use the device ID.?

Identity spaces in UA vs GA4

• Identity spaces in UA properties: In UA properties, most reporting relies heavily on device ID, although a few reports and features can also use the Google signals identity space. When the User-ID feature is enabled, its data is reported separately from the rest of our data and doesn't integrate with other identity spaces. Because these identity spaces work separately, it's difficult to measure user journeys across devices and de-duplicate users in UA properties.
• Identity spaces in GA4 properties: In GA4 properties, data is processed using all available identity spaces. First, Analytics looks for User-ID because this feature uses the data we collect. Next, it tries Google signals, and finally, if there isn't a match for either, it relies on the device ID. From there, Analytics creates a single user journey from all the data associated with the same identity. Because these identity spaces are used in all reports, they allow you to de-duplicate users and tell a more unified, holistic story about their relationships with our business.

What does this mean?

When we only have access to one identity space, like a device ID, a single person could appear as a different user every time they interact with our business on a different device. But when we use multiple identity spaces, we can get better insight into user journeys, with more robust cross-device and cross-platform data and reporting that reflects de-duplicated users.

With GA4 properties, you can answer questions like:?

• How many total unique users do we have, no matter what platforms they use??
• How many conversions have occurred on our app and website in the last week — and which platform is contributing to most of these conversions?

We can also go deeper to understand the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns across platforms. For example, we can see how many users started on our app, then visited our website to make a purchase.

?????? Key Factors

1. With GA4 properties, it’s easy to create new audiences, and we have more options when defining and segmenting these audiences.
2. GA4 properties collect and store user interactions with our business as events instead of sessions. This allows Analytics to be more flexible and scalable, and to perform more custom calculations, faster.?
3. GA4 properties combine the use of several different user identity spaces. This gives better insight into user journeys, with more robust cross-device and cross-platform data and reporting that reflects de-duplicated users.

To be continued...

Thank you for learning with us. This episode is based on?the Google Analytics 4 Certification?by Skillshop.?Remember, you could always follow all of the episodes for this subject from the document below:

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