Elevare Gazette: Thursday Issue 🔔

^{Today's Focus: Google Analytics 4 Transition Guide}

July is almost here, which means GA4 is almost here!

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Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google's analytics platform, it is designed to provide deeper insights and better meet privacy standards.

Today, we'll explore what GA4 offers, the key differences from Universal Analytics (UA), and how you can leverage GA4 to enhance your marketing strategies!

#1. Key Features of Google Analytics 4

GA4 is built with a focus on privacy and flexibility, offering several new features to help marketers understand customer behavior across multiple touchpoints🤝

• Event-Based Tracking: Unlike UA, which uses session-based data, GA4 uses an event-based model. This allows for more detailed tracking of user interactions, giving you a complete view of the customer journey.

  What’s Event-Based Tracking? Anything that is a form of action is an event. For example: Button Clicks, Downloads, Link Clicks, etc. Session-based was more focused on how many times someone viewed your page, etc.

• Privacy-Centric Design: GA4 does not store IP addresses and includes enhanced privacy controls, ensuring compliance with global data protection regulations.

• Machine Learning Insights: Who doesn’t love a good prediction? GA4 leverages machine learning to provide predictive insights about user behavior and potential actions, helping you make data-driven decisions!

• Improved Attribution: Customer Journeys are super important, all the more reason to have a full understanding of attributions. Data-driven attribution in GA4 helps analyze the full impact of your marketing across the customer journey, assigning credit to more than just the last click.

#2. Differences Between GA4 and Universal Analytics

Universal Analytics is going to be phased out, so we have to catch up quickly.

•  Sessions and Active Users: GA4 handles sessions differently, with no automatic session reset for new campaign parameters and a new metric for active users, which tracks engagement over various periods.

  (if a user visits your website through various campaign metrics, they were still counted as an active new session, but no more! Their sessions will be counted as a continuous one to better understand their customer journey)

• Engagement Metrics: GA4 introduces engagement rate metrics, replacing the traditional bounce rate. An engaged session includes a conversion event, multiple page views, or sessions lasting more than 10 seconds. (I am not sure how I feel about not having bounce rates; it is a love-hate relationship)

• Conversions: GA4 counts every instance of a conversion event within a session, whereas UA counted only one conversion per session goal.

  For example: if you go to the chat button on my website anushakannan.com and submit your details on my contact page 3 times, all those 3 times will be counted as conversions instead of 1. UA would’ve counted it as 1 conversion whereas GA4 will count that as 3 conversions.

#3. How can you get started?

• Start Simple: Begin by tracking basic metrics such as page views, user engagement, and conversion rates. As you become more comfortable, explore advanced features like predictive analytics and custom event tracking!

• Use Google Tag Manager: This tool simplifies the process of tracking custom events and managing tags on your website. I will cover more on this in another edition if you’re interested [respond to this newsletter now with “GTAG” if you’d like that in-depth explanation]

• Leverage Tutorials and Resources: Google offers extensive documentation and tutorials to help you get the most out of GA4. Take advantage of these resources to deepen your understanding!

  With that being said: Setting Up and Using GA4: I am going to let Google’s Experts take over here. Learn more

Google Analytics 4 is said to be a powerful tool that offers comprehensive insights and enhanced privacy features. I am excited and curious to use the new Google Analytics, I would love to hear your thoughts!

 Until Sunday,

Anusha Kannan

Follow Anusha on LinkedIn

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