“Google Analytics 4 isn’t just a revamp of a previous suite of services—it’s a whole new way to look at customers and their online behaviors.”
Google Analytics 4 (GA4): What’s New and What’s Different?
How is the Google Analytics Interface Improving?
Google Analytics has become a cornerstone for websites and companies looking to expand their digital capabilities. The older editions of the service provided demographic and audience tracking along with referral sources and new clicks and views. Google has been working on the rollout to GA4 for some time; now, in 2023, they’ll finally be rolling out the changes in the new system and welcoming the world to Google Analytics 4 officially.
The new Google Analytics reporting interface will consist of five sections:
- Lifecycle
- User
- Events
- Explore
- Configure
Lifecycle is where you can see information about your website visitors. And not just any info—all of it. This is where you’ll be able to find where your visitors come from, what their behaviors are both on-page and off, if their website is monetized and in what ways and how data is stored. As Google has transitioned to a more data-aware world, they’re empowering GA4 users with the ability to see more for the entire customer journey.
User is where demographics are broken down in a simple report for a single country or any countries as specified. This tab will also contain technical information about browsers, devices and operating systems with users, which is very helpful when designing and configuring content with UX in mind.
The Events tab contains collections of information about events, such as conversions or clicks. When analyzing the customer journey, this is great knowledge to have as it can answer lots of critical questions: Where are we converting? Where are we supposed to be converting? How can we improve the process for the customer?
Explore lets you create custom reports based on templates from your dashboard. When compiling stats for the time in question, this feature will allow robust statistical packaging that shows the window you want to specify. For marketers who want fine control, this one is a big must.
Configure contains the tools needed to create audiences and discover user attribution. You can also set up your parameters and metrics here, along with detecting errors in tracking much faster than in previous iterations of Google Analytics. When you want to debug your interface, this is where you’ll find the ability.
What New Features Can Be Found in Google Analytics 4?
The new Google Analytics is all about improving audience tracking while allowing more convenient management of the process end-to-end. For example, GA4 will now let you create custom funnels, which previously were only available for Google Analytics 360 Suite users. Custom funnels help break down where your purchasing needs improvement, how customers are converting during the engagement process and how insights can be better harnessed for each stage.
Similarly, GA4 now has Google Ads integration and improved customer tracking. Where once a user journey could be lost due to tracking via cookies across unknown devices, now the full customer interaction can be pieced together and analyzed step by step with the enhanced custom funnels. GA4 will also be event-based for its user tracking rather than relying on cookies, which many users have found invasive in recent years. It also means clearing or refusing cookies won’t be as important to lost data as it once was.
As GA4 is going cookieless, a customer journey might be broken down by how they saw a Google Ad and on what device, when and where they clicked and on what device they finished the transaction on if they in fact converted. The new funnel feature would be able to piece this journey together into an actual path rather than trying to use cookies to fill in blank spaces in the process. Each moment matters in marketing and learning how and where your customers complete purchases can be the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful campaign.
Google has made no secret of the fact they’re pivoting harder to artificial intelligence (AI) than in previous versions of Analytics. With machine learning, Google Analytics 4 hopes to help you actually predict what your customers will do and how a conversion will happen. This new functionality helps visualize:
- Probably of purchase
- Probability of churn
- Revenue predictions
When forecasting or modeling revenue and growth, these metrics are essential figures. It can be hard to know where profit is coming from and how in conventional tracking. Predicting revenue in upcoming quarters has always been a difficult task, but machine learning has opened the possibility of realistic predictions for these important metrics. If you have an eCommerce site or holiday sales to figure into your mix, these metrics will ensure a window that wasn’t previously reliably available.
Part of Google’s challenge is also finding a consistent reporting mechanism for its analytics and the user journey. As such, Google Analytics 4 is getting rid of the old Universal Analytics model and transitioning from differentiated interactions to a single designation of Event. Any interaction is an event and events can be pieced together in funnels to create a customer journey that used to be an assemblage of page views, transactions, interactions and other data that could be seemingly random.
Some final changes include better tracking of mobile app events and better exports of data to Google’s BigQuery. BigQuery aids with in-depth customer interaction analysis and with the transition to improved mobile search functionality the expanded device tracking helps reach your customers where they are. For eCommerce businesses that rely on mobile functionality, more accurate tracking of relevant metrics means storefronts of any size can know the source of their sales and how they make them easier to replicate.
A New View of Your Customers
Google Analytics 4 isn’t just a revamp of a previous suite of services—it’s a whole new way to look at customers and their online behaviors. The rollout allows businesses of all sizes to take more control of how they reach their users and how they use their data. Google has been prioritizing privacy and user comfort in recent years while trying to strike a balance between functionality and intuitive monitoring.
While it can be a difficult task to transition to a new system, staying competitive means visualizing the world and online ecosystems in ways that more closely resemble how customers use them. If form follows function, then Google Analytics 4 has a whole new form.
