GA4 provides a more reliable tracking system with improved data accuracy. This means that GA4 can track users across their devices such as desktop, mobile, or without cookies.
Tracking users who have disabled or blocked cookies was impossible with Universal Analytics. Machine learning and statistical modeling offer a promising solution through GA4. This allows companies to fill data gaps and gain valuable customer insights that were previously unavailable.
A privacy-focused design allows GA4 to maintain
key information despite cookie blockers and privacy regulations.
GA4 has many similarities with Universal Analytics, but it introduces some significant changes to note. Let’s dive deeper into our experience with the tool.
What we liked about GA4
There are many differences between GA4 and Universal GA, and we liked most of them. In the end, GA4
Google Analytics has undergone its most significant
overhaul since it was originally launched. This isn’t just a simple facelift. It’s a whole new product!
Here I would like to summarize the main changes we observed and provide you with an overview and links to more detailed information, should you decide to explore it further.
Ready-to-use event tracking
The first thing that stands out when Aruba Email List working with GA4 is how easy it is to set up and how quickly you can start collecting event data.
For Google Universal Analytics, you needed to create custom events for everything except page views. In GA4, everything is event-based, and you can enable some to be captured automatically with the new, improved event measurement. In addition to mandatory page view, you can enable capture of page scroll (90% depth only), outbound clicks, site search, form interactions, video interaction, and file downloads.
It was a good opportunity to review our existing event tracking strategy and see what we needed to implement custom or not in our new GA4 property.
Adopting Google Analytics 4 also allows us to confirm which KPIs were important to our stakeholders. After analyzing the data, we came to the conclusion that some of our previous conversions were no longer meaningful and identified new tactics to measure success.
Creating conversion events
Goals in Universal Analytics have traditionally been quite restrictive and rigid. Conversions are much easier to set up in GA4. Simply mark any of your existing events as a conversion and there you have it – a new conversion event is defined.
It’s recommended to limit who has this access to avoid unintentional misconfigurations, considering how simple it is to set up. Remember: only actions that are related to a business goal should be marked as conversions.
You can now archive goals to free up space, and GA4 also increased the goal limit from 20 to 30.
Conversion events are really useful and essential, as they allow us to see the most important actions using various reports , optimize our Google ads and create audiences with people who did not convert for subsequent remarketing campaigns.
Another interesting new feature of GA4 is the ability to modify existing events and create new existing events within Google Analytics rather than relying on Google Tag Manager. We used this to create events from other events and combine conditions and attributes, resulting in many more unique events than previously possible. This adds simplicity and speed.
Bounce rate no longer exists in GA4
like it did in Universal. And believe it or not, that’s a good thing! Bounce rate by default was not a good metric and required an additional “interaction events” setup in Universal Analytics to make it more accurate to measure content engagement.
What replaces it now is what we call an “engaged session,” and by default, it’s a much more accurate way to measure how users interact with your website or app. A session is considered engaged when the user does any of the following:
Keep your website or app open in the foreground for 10 seconds;
Complete an event marked as a conversion on your website/app;
View two or more pages or screens.
Engagement Rate is a new metric that shows the percentage of sessions that were engaged sessions.
Additionally, new metrics have emerged to help you better understand your audience engagement.
Sessions engaged per user – This is the average number of sessions each user is engaged in.
Average engagement time – Measures how long an app or website remains in the foreground on a user’s browser or mobile phone.
These metrics make it much easier for us to understand the performance of our website and ensure that we are successfully targeting and engaging with our audience.
What we didn’t like: The views are gone
The only thing that disappointed us and really confused us was that GA4 removed views. There are no views anymore, and we don’t have any direct alternative to what the Universal Analytics views feature does in GA4.
There are only two data filter options at the property level and they only cover internal traffic and developer traffic.
