Google Launches Google Analytics 4, Find Out Why You Might Want To Use

About Google Analytics 4

Universal Analytics is widely considered one of the most powerful free analytics software platforms on the market, but Google launched Google Analytics 4 on October 2020 with new features that make it even better. Google has made Google Analytics 4 a seamless integration between Google’s suite of products, making Google Analytics 4 the analytics platform of choice for Google users.

Google Analytics 4 is not just an upgraded version, but an entirely different Google product. Google gave Google Analytics 4 the ability to track information on every events that generated from users instead of page views.

One of the most exciting features of Google Analytics 4 is that it includes a robust set of new templates designed to help marketers analyze user behavior in ways never before possible.

Google has built Google Analytics 4 to make it easy for marketers to identify the most relevant metrics and track them over time. Google Analytics 4 also increases Google’s ability to help advertisers get started by providing templates.

I am personally excited about the follow 3 key features on Google Analytics 4 —

Google Analytics 4 is less of a reporting tool and more of an analysis engine

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is different from Universal Analytics in that it’s not a reporting tool, but an analysis engine. Forecasting and analyzing your data will take time to learn if you are used to using UA. Even the most advanced UAs will still have questions about GA4 when they start switching over their accounts, so there may be some digging around before feeling comfortable with this system.

Google Analytics 4 integration with Google BigQuery

Google Analytics 4 has Google BigQuery integration for Google Cloud Platform users. Google BigQuery is an enterprise-grade data warehouse that enables super low latency for querying massive datasets

The Google Analytics 4 data you generate and all your raw event history can be exported to BigQuery for deeper analysis. You get complete ownership of the data, but must decide how permissions will work on projects and datasets with SQL-like syntax queries.

Google Analytics data in BigQuery means, marketers can now do a lot more with deep dive analysis and building custom dashboards when it is integrated with BI tools like the Google Data Studio, Tableau, etc. Google Analytics 4 users can now get easy access to Google Analytics data in Google BigQuery without owning Google Analytics 360.

Google Analytics 4 treats everything as an event

Google Analytics 4 promises to offer a more accurate tracking experience with improved analytics and an event-driven approach. The new Google tool makes it possible for users to break the limits of reporting tools available in Universal Analytics, giving them deeper insights into user behavior on web pages.

In Universal Analytics, every event already has a predefined category. As a result it limits the amount of data that is available for an analytics report. The user must name the event category, action and attributes associated with the event when creating their report to receive any results at all!

Google Analytics 4 is a new way to analyze your website’s data. Rather than treating everything on the page as one single hit, it makes analyzing your web page into multiple sets of data. Customizable event tracking features in Google Analytics 4 allows you to specify the details of events that are most important and track them.

Here are examples of events that Google Analytics 4 allows you to track:

• user behavior and interactions with content
• actions taken by users when visiting the site (clicks)
• downloads from pages
• contact form submissions

In Summary

If you’re looking to do some deeper analysis on your marketing data, the new Google Analytics 4 integration with Google BigQuery may be what you need. The two programs work together to provide a powerful way of understanding how people are interacting with your website and why they make certain decisions about it.

By treating all user actions as events, this update in analytics promises to help marketers understand their audience better than ever before! Have you tried out any of these features?

Let me know if we can help find ways for you to leverage these updates so that your marketing is more effective.