Welcome to the Evolytics “GA4 in 400 Words” blog series! In this first post, we’ll explore reasons your business should start using Google Analytics 4.

[NOTE: In March 2022, Google announced the sunsetting of all Universal Analytics (Google Analytics 3) properties. UA will stop processing new data on July 1, 2023. Google Analytics 360 —the paid version of UA—will stop processing on October 1, 2023. After these deadlines pass, Google Analytics 4 will be your Google Analytics solution. We recommend setting up GA4 right away to ensure that you have the most historical data collected before UA sunsets.]

Whether you’re an expert at online marketing or let professionals like Home Service Direct do it for you, pretty much everyone has at least heard of Google Analytics. But what does it do? Why do you need to use it?

Reason 1: Customer-Centric Measurement

In Universal Analytics, a single person visiting on different devices will be counted as multiple users by default. This causes some serious inflation in your user counts and distorts metrics like Number of Sessions per User or Amount of Revenue per User. This only gets worse if your business has mobile apps.

Google Analytics 4 offers “customer-centric measurement” — measuring, unifying, and de-duplicating the interactions your users have across their devices and platforms — website and app activity both included. This gives you a more complete understanding of how your users move across the customer journey.

Additionally, GA4 offers a streamlined reporting interface that more closely aligns with how you report on the customer journey: from Acquisition to Engagement to Monetization to Retention. As marketers need to measure opportunities throughout the marketing funnel, it’s an interface designed for marketers. 

Reason 2: Smarter insights to drive marketing efforts

Google’s advanced machine learning (ML) models are baked directly into Google Analytics 4. ML offers a variety of benefits to drive your marketing efforts, including: 

Anomaly detection

Receive notifications when anomalies are detected in your Custom Insights. You can make these even more bespoke by specifying alerts on your key audience segments.

Predictive Metrics and Predictive Audiences

Predictive metrics like Churn Probability enable you to spot potential issues and act on them before you lose customers. 

Create a re-engagement campaign with a “Likely 7-Day Churning User” Predictive Audience and it will be automatically shared to your linked Google Ads accounts for seamless activation.

Reason 3: Adapts with the changing privacy landscape

The privacy landscape is complex and changing by the day. As marketers adapt to changing targeting capabilities, it’s essential that your analytics platform is designed with privacy in mind. GA4 was designed to work in a future with or without cookies. Although first-party cookies are still used for tracking, companies can use their own User IDs and an integration with Google Signals for user identification. 

Google has said that in the future it will use modeling to fill in the gaps when data is incomplete. This provides you with solid audience data while ensuring you don’t have to worry about privacy violations.

Are you convinced yet?

Although there are many compelling reasons to start using GA4, we know you might still have reservations about whether GA4 is the right choice for your business needs. Thankfully, you don’t need to make the full switch away from Universal Analytics just yet. 

In our next blog post in the GA4 Series, we’ll discuss how to enhance your existing Universal Analytics implementation by dual-tagging with GA4. 

Check out all the posts from the GA4 in 400 Words series for the topic most interesting and relevant to you:

1. Post 1: Why Your Business Needs GA4
2. Post 2: Dual Tagging with Google Analytics 4 and Universal Analytics
3. Post 3: Account Structure in GA4 
4. Post 4: Google Analytics 4 Events
5. Post 5: Maximizing User Journey Reporting
6. Post 6: Reporting and Comparisons
7. Post 7: Audiences and Re-marketing in GA4

Evolytics is a proven Google Analytics 4 implementation expert—we began using it for evolytics.com when it was first released. Contact us about how we can help you implement GA4, if you require GA4 training to get your IT and marketing teams up to speed, or if there are any other GA4 support services we can provide as you prepare for the sunsetting of Google’s Universal Analytics.