Google analytics 4: what's changed?

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Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google Analytics (GA), Google's free digital marketing monitoring and analytics tool.

GA is the most widely used platform in the world for collecting access, behavior and navigation data on websites. It is no wonder that the launch of its new version in October 2020 has generated heated debates around the world.

Especially after Google announced that the current version of the platform, Universal Analytics – also called “classic Analytics” or GA3 – will die at some point. And that data from Universal GA will not be migrated to GA4.

This means that starting July 1, 2023, Universal Analytics will no longer process new data. If you don’t set up your site for GA4, you’ll no longer have access to your most up-to-date statistics.

And the longer you wait to start namibia mobile phone number collecting data in GA4, the less data you'll have to do historical analysis.

Here at Duda , we’ve been following these changes closely. In this article, we’ll help you understand what’s changing, why it’s changing, and how to prepare.



What is Google Analytics 4?
As the name suggests, GA4 is the fourth generation of Google's monitoring tool. Today, GA4 is the default version of Google Analytics. If you create a new account in the tool, it will automatically be created in GA4.

After nearly 15 years of running Google Analytics Universal, Google needed to adapt to new market realities, such as the end of third-party cookies and increasingly stringent user privacy restrictions.

what is google analytics

Additionally, Google needed to release a new version of GA that would also serve the growing app market.

While Universal Analytics only tracks website data, GA4 is designed to analyze data from multiple devices and tools. GA4 allows you to measure data from websites, apps, and web + apps.

In fact, “Web+App” was the first name given to GA4, in its beta version.

In other words, it is useful for those who have a website, those who have apps, or even those who have both.

GA4 can measure the customer journey across devices seamlessly. Its new reporting and exploration capabilities provide smarter, more flexible ways to examine data.

In short, it provides a more complete view of the user across channels by combining the insights we all know from Universal Analytics with the Firebase data model.



Universal Analytics vs Google Analytics 4
As we’ve seen, GA4 doesn’t just change the tool’s interface. It changes the entire way you capture data and create reports.

While the Universal Analytics data model is session-based, the Google Analytics 4 data model is event-based.

what is google analytics

What does this mean?

Most Universal Analytics data is sent in the form of pageview hits. That is, every time your website page loads, the Google Analytics code loads with it.

GA4 collects its data through events. These are interactions that the user performs on your website or app, such as clicking on a menu, scrolling down the page or performing a search on the site.

All actions that the user performs within the website or app are events for the tool. In GA4, everything is based on this and no longer on page views. Each event is differentiated by means of a parameter and these events are the basis for generating reports.

Another difference is with regard to sampling. In Universal Analytics, standard reports do not use sampling. However, sampling does occur if you apply secondary dimensions, segments, or other queries to your dataset.

In GA4, there is virtually no sampling. It only happens if you exceed 10 million events when creating an advanced report in the Explore/Analysis section and the report created is not a pre-existing GA4 standard report.

To learn more, check out this detailed article that Google Support prepared about the differences in Universal Analytics data for GA4.



Reports in Google Analytics 4
In practice, with Universal Analytics, we just need to install the pageview tag to have practically 70% of the reports ready.

GA4, at the time we wrote this post, comes with few events configured by default in the tool, as per the list below.

what is google analytics

This means you need to have a measurement plan to know what is important for your business and have everything set up in GA4. Otherwise, you will miss information when analyzing.

In GA4, there is no longer a page or e-commerce tag. There is only an event tag. However, while in Universal Analytics each event had only 3 content parameters and one value parameter, in GA4 it can have up to 25 parameters.

In practice, you need to pay much more attention to tagging and choose carefully which fields and parameters will be used for generating reports. GA4 requires greater knowledge of fields, metrics and dimensions. And more strategic thinking.

At first, it will be difficult to get the same reports, as people are used to the many standard Universal Analytics reports and some engagement metrics .



How to migrate to Google Analytics 4
Due to these major changes in the way we capture data and generate reports, it is not possible to migrate data from Universal Analytics to GA4.

Therefore, if you currently use Google Analytics to track your website statistics, we recommend that you start collecting data in GA4 as soon as possible.

IMPORTANT: Ideally, you should set up the new property in GA4 and continue using the old property in Universal Analytics. This way, you can use the data from the old version while exploring the features of the new version.

Once you've set up the GA4 property in your account, verify that the two versions are working together. Log in and open the new property to verify that data has been collected for reporting in this new environment.

The experts' recommendations for this transition period are as follows:

Place the GA4 tracking code and monitor both properties (GA4 + Universal Analytics).
Tag events in both.
By default, your GA4 account only shows 2 months of history, but you can configure it to display a longer time range.
The sooner you start using GA4, the better. It will already show you your history and basic attribution model.
For new websites, one option is to create properties in both Universal Analytics and GA4. GA4 is now fully operational, but there are still many features and innovations that need to be added.