Insights into the Benefits of Google Analytics for Digital Marketers
For many years, companies have been using Google Analytics to make profitable business decisions, as well as to understand the overall landscape of their business. Even after the rise of many analytics platforms, the majority of the businesses continue to use GA as it simplifies data and presents it in several ways at no cost. To further improve the tracking of a user’s journey, Google has launched GA4 with better AI-powered insights, less cross-platform gaps, cleaner data visualizations, improved engagement tracking, and more.
GA4 allows you to see your website activity and visitors through a different lens. Instead of page views and events, you will track every interaction as an event with associated parameters. Instead of goals, you will configure conversions. Instead of views, you will set up data streams. So, regardless of the state of your current GA implementation, you will need to re-think and re-design how you capture the interactions, metrics, and segments you need in order to measure and optimize your website, app, or digital marketing initiatives.
So, what does GA4 mean for digital marketers? Take a look for yourself:
NEXT-GEN GOOGLE ANALYTICS:
The latest iteration of Google Analytics, also known as Google Analytics 4, has become the talk of the town. This is a timely launch. Consumer behavior has significantly changed in the last few years, and the ongoing pandemic has accentuated those changes. Recent changes to privacy and regulations, including cookie policy changes, have also restricted targeting capabilities for marketers.
For these reasons, an improvement in analytics is one of the top priorities for most marketers (see Forrester survey). Such improvements will allow marketers to better measure the worth of every marketing dollar and remain prepared for what’s next.
WHAT IS CHANGING:
- GA 4 properties are now the default when you create a new property for a website, an app, or both.
- Universal Analytics refers to the previous generation of Analytics. This was the default property type for websites prior to October 14, 2020.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS 4 HIGHLIGHTS:
WHAT NETELIXIR RECOMMENDS:
- The product is still in the nascent stage and innovations are rolling out. Continue using your existing GA properties. However, start creating a new GA 4 property and test it for a few weeks alongside existing Universal GA properties.
- Aim at Q1 2021 for a full-fledged rollout. The testing can begin once the holiday season is over or code freeze comes to an end.
- Once the data starts flowing through GA 4, define more intelligent audiences to fine-tune your marketing efforts with the specific nuances of high-value customers.
- Create a long term plan to slowly adopt contextual audience targeting powered by machine learning as cookie or user ID based behavioral targeting loses its relevance down the line.
- Use machine learning-driven predictions to better understand latent and untapped growth opportunities.
NetElixir has an array of analytics solutions to help you reconfigure your GA4 data capture.
