Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google's popular digital analytics platform. It offers lots of new features and capabilities that make it a more powerful and flexible tool for measuring website and app traffic.
One of the key features of GA4 is a change to the underlying data model around events. In GA4 every action that a user takes on your website or app, such as clicking a link, viewing a page, or making a purchase is an event. This enables GA4 to provide a unified view of how users interact with your content across websites and apps.GA4 also includes a number of new privacy features that protect user data. For example, you can now opt-out of tracking users across multiple devices, and you can use GA4's advanced machine learning functionality to model user behaviour if they have opted out of being tracked.
In addition to these new features, GA4 also includes a number of improvements to existing features. For example, the reporting interface is much more customisable has been redesigned to make it easier to find and understand your data. And the machine learning capabilities have been improved, so you can get more insights from your data.
Here are some of the key benefits of using Google Analytics 4:
- More accurate data: GA4 uses a variety of new methods to collect data, including events, user demographics, and device information. This gives you a more complete picture of how users interact with your website or app.
- Improved reporting: The new reporting interface in GA4 is easier to use and understand. You can also create custom reports to track specific metrics that are important to your business.
- More powerful insights: GA4 uses machine learning to provide you with more insights into your data. For example, you can see how users are finding your website, what pages they're viewing, and how long they're staying on your site.
- Improved privacy controls: GA4 includes a number of new privacy features that protect user data. For example, you can opt-out of tracking users across multiple devices, and you can use differential privacy to obscure individual user data.
If you're thinking about switching to GA4, here are a few things you need to know:
- GA4 is still in development: so there may be some bugs or missing features. However, Google is actively working on improving GA4, and it's improving all the time.
- You can't migrate your Universal Analytics data to GA4: If you're currently using Universal Analytics, you can't migrate your data to GA4. However, you can and should start collecting data in GA4 alongside your Universal Analytics data.
- GA4 uses a different data model than Universal Analytics: this means that some of the reports and metrics in GA4 may be different from what you're used to seeing in Universal Analytics.
Overall, GA4 is a significant upgrade over Universal Analytics but it does come with a new underlying data model that is entirely event based and the interface is quite different.