Google Analytics 4 Guide: What You Need To Know

Like it or not, Universal Analytics (UA) is on the way out. With a sunset date of 1st July 2023, the current version of Google’s flagship analytics platform will say farewell, ushering in the dawn of a new era defined by Google’s fourth iteration: Google Analytics 4, or GA4.

You might already be familiar with GA4 — many businesses have been using it alongside UA for the last two years. Alternatively, you might know next to nothing about it. Whatever the case, getting to grips with GA4 is important to your business.

Google Analytics is one of the most popular analytics tools, with over half (55%) of online businesses using it to gain visibility into key website metrics. Understanding how the latest version works should be a priority.

But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. In this GA4 guide, we’ll explain everything you need to know to get you ready for the shift to GA4 — and leverage it to gain a deeper understanding of your customers. But first, let’s answer an important question.

What is GA4?

GA4 is an analytics service that allows you to measure traffic, engagement, and performance across your websites and apps (known as properties), giving you the insights you need to improve all three.

Launched in 2020, GA4 is the fourth and latest version of Google Analytics. It was designed to phase out and ultimately replace the previous version, Universal Analytics, which was built when the digital world was very different from today.

GA4 provides data insights throughout the customer lifecycle, making it a useful tool for businesses or marketers seeking to understand how customers behave before, during, and after conversion. As you’d expect from a modern data analytics platform, GA4 also offers machine learning insights and data science analysis.

GA4 vs Universal Analytics

Up until October 2020, Universal Analytics was the default version used when a new Google Analytics property was created. After that date, the default version became GA4.

Google now plans to phase UA out completely. From July 2023, UA will stop processing new hits, although users will still be able to access data for their Universal Analytics properties for another six months.

Universal Analytics 360 (also referred to as Google Analytics 360), on the other hand, is used by bigger, enterprise-sized businesses. UA 360 is a scaled-up, paid version of UA with extended capabilities. UA 360 has higher data limits, service level agreements and, support-wise, a dedicated account manager and implementation support.

Like UA, however, UA 360 is being sunsetted, albeit from the later date of July 2024.

What’s the difference between GA4 and UA?

There are several key differences between GA4 and UA. In this section, we’ll highlight the most important ones to understand.?

• Events vs sessions

GA4 uses a fundamentally different model for measuring data compared to its predecessor. UA’s measurement model was based on sessions, including any number of user interactions ( known as hits) within a specific time period. These could include page views, clicks, and transactions, for example.

GA4’s data collection model, on the other hand, is based on events, with any user interaction qualifying as a separate event.

The change to events, however, has also led to some ‘missing’ metrics and reports, in particular bounce rate. The bounce rate metric in UA is replaced with ‘engaged sessions’, which shows sessions lasting 10 seconds or longer, has one or more conversion events, or two or more screen or page views.

Other valuable metrics available in UA, such as views per session and average session duration, while harder to access in GA4, have recently been made available through customisable reports.

• Multiple devices

UA was designed for a world where desktop reigned supreme. Since its launch in 2005, however, the world has changed drastically. Today, people access digital services across a range of devices, with mobile becoming increasingly popular in recent years. GA4 is designed to track the users of today, seamlessly collecting data across multiple devices.

• Machine learning

GA4 has machine learning (ML) capabilities, enabling it to use current and historical data to predict how your users might behave in the future. The resulting insights allow you to see the probability of customers purchasing something or churning, for example. UA, on the other hand, has no ML capabilities.

• Data protection and security

GA4 anonymises IP addresses automatically, guarding against the identification and misuse of personal information and protecting personal privacy. Unlike Universal Analytics, this brings GA4 in line with GDPR compliance.

• Future-proofing

Compared with UA, GA4 focuses on tracking user IDs rather than cookies. Reducing the reliance on cookies helps future-proof GA4 and move away from UA’s focus on tracking page visits and sessions through cookies. This will help improve the quality and access to insights across multiple platforms.

• Google Ads

GA4 enjoys a deeper integration with Google Ads, allowing you to measure app and web integrations together. This ultimately provides a deeper level of insight than UA.

• More reporting

With GA4, you get reporting options across the customer lifecycle, with reports focusing on acquisition, engagement, monetisation, and retention (more on this later). With UA, on the other hand, you only get reporting for acquisition.?

GA4 is taking over

GA4 is designed to meet the needs of businesses in 2023, enabling them to understand how their customers behave across platforms and journeys. UA was designed for an era of desktop dominance and cookie-related data — ideas that are slowly becoming obsolete.?

With UA being phased out completely by summer, now’s the time to switch to Google Analytics 4 — if you haven’t already. This means you should:

• ensure you have a centralised archive of historical data you can draw from
• set up GA4 event tracking??
• and transition all your existing UA properties to GA4.

Setting up GA4

As set out in the Google Support guide, GA4 is relatively simple to set up — if you know how.2?In this section, we’ll walk you through the process step by step.

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account.
2. Check which version you are currently using. If you can see three columns (Account, Property, and View), you are using UA. If you can see just two columns (Account and Property), you are already using GA4.
3. Assuming you are still using UA, select ‘GA4 Setup Assistant’ under the Property column.
4. Click ‘Get Started’ to set up a Google Analytics 4 property. Alternatively, if you already have a GA4 property that isn’t connected to your Google Analytics account, select ‘Connect Properties’ and follow the instructions.
5. If you are already using gtag.js tags, select ‘Enable data collection using your existing tags.’ If you are using Google Tag Manager or the old analytics.js tags, you’ll need to add gtag.js tags yourself.
6. Click ‘Create property’.

Once you’re up and running, you can set up a range of capabilities designed to help you track and obtain data, including:

• Configure Custom Events
• Configure User IDs
• Configure Enhanced Measurements
• Activate Google Signals
• Link to Google Ads
• Define Audiences
• Import or set up Conversions

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