New Analytics Tool: Google Analytics 4

In November last year, Google announced its newest project: Google Analytics 4 ( hereafter called GA4).

This new analytics tool will replace Universal Analytics, which is the current version of Google Analytics. In this blog post, we want to share with you all the new features of GA4, as well as the pros and cons of this new tool.

Do you need to implement Google Analytics 4 now?

We do recommend running both systems in parallel for the next months, since there are some important features still missing in GA4, like decent attribution, referral exclusion list, filters, etc. Surely, these features will be added in the near future, so by the time you read this some have probably already been added. Our estimation is that within the next 12-18 months all companies will have to switch to GA4, if they want to work with a data-driven approach,  Data-driven approach means making decisions based on data and not on guesses. When we start collecting data right now if the new GA4, we can get a head start when the switch to GA4 will be completed. Also, we can compare the different data collection models.

What's new in Google Analytics 4?

First of all, the interface of GA4 is completely renewed. At first sight, it seems more clean and straightforward. It also includes an analytics hub, which is similar to other analytics tools widely used. The Analytics Hub is a new Dashboard tool within GA4. It helps to create quick Dashboards. There are many “types” of dashboards you can build. For example, you can build new User funnels, segment overlaps, and good, old tables. Especially the user flow type looks promising.

The new event report in GA4

GA4 does not work with different "hit types" anymore, instead, it uses an "event only" approach. This means that page views and sessions are gone, well - almost gone. Now, these metrics are translated into events, in this case, they are named ‘page_view’ and ‘session_start’. 

There are also more interactions measured compared to a basic Google Analytics setup. With the ‘enhanced measurement’ feature in GA4 interactions like video interactions, outbound links, scroll depth, site search, and file downloads are automatically tracked. All user interactions are measured in events.

Google also mentions that GA4 uses ‘smarter AI’ features. For an analyst, this might be a bit of a BlackBox and only time will tell how useful these features are. Google claims that it will be able to calculate churn and purchase probability for certain user groups. This would allow analysts to optimize these user groups specifically.

GA4 also promises to provide a more holistic view of customer journeys over different devices. This works with a unique and randomized generated ID and allows to analyze both website and app traffic in one platform. That’s why GA4 was formerly known as Analytics App+Web. 

Probably the most important fact is that from now on GA4 is the new default analytics tool by Google. GA Universal will not be updated anymore, at least not in a significant way.

Comparison GA 4 vs GA Universal

In this chapter, I want to highlight some differences between GA4 and GA Universal.

GA4 does not sample the data at the moment. Sampled data means that GA reduces the amount of data available to you. It also has a BigQuery integration, which allows you to export your data into a DataWarehouse. With that, you can create your very own tables for unique scenarios. However, we do not know if Google will make BigQuery a paid service again, and if it will start sampling again.

With the newest AI of Google, predictive analytics might finally be a practicable thing within an analytics tool. Predictive Analytics means that you can make educated guesses on how the data/website will behave on future changes. This should help to analyze anomalies within the data since the time for manually searching for it should be drastically reduced. 

However, there are many features we miss in GA4. For example, using proper filters using RegEx. These missing features make it difficult for us to use GA4. On the bright side, we are pretty sure that these features will be added within the next months.

Conclusion

Looking at the big picture, it has to be said that GA4 is already an impressive analytics tool. It's very promising when looking at the new event centric principle. The UI is cleaner and up to date. The integration with Google Ads is easier, and when all the missing features from GA Universal are added, we have an impressive and powerful analytics tool in our hands.

For companies, we recommend implementing GA4 immediately. However as said above we recommend running both systems at the same time, until GA4 is mature enough to use on its own.