Goodbye bounce rate and session focused reporting. Hello smarter insights and enhanced marketing intelligence. New Google Analytics is revamping digital data measurement.
Google has announced the release of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) that comes with a revamped interface, different data collection setup and lots of exciting new features. Google Analytics is the most widely used analytics platform, the simpler reporting interface with advanced marketing and business insights. It is a very exciting development in the digital data tracking space.
Here are a few cool features that will be of significant help for marketers and businesses alike:
Machine learning searches for insights in your data, alerts you to significant trends and identifies anomalies. For example, products seeing rising demand.
Machine learning models are also applied to your data to provide predictive reporting on customers’ future actions. For example, it calculates the potential revenue you could earn, churn probability and conversion probability.
Analytics tracking is no longer fragmented between platforms. Instead it provides a more complete understanding of the customer journey across devices through a unified view of the web and app performance.
GA4 is stepping away from sessions and focusing on event based data tracking to enable cookie-less reporting and attribution. In addition, this change in the data model enables a consistent data structure across both web and app, with the ability to measure additional information on each customer’s action.
New integrations across Google’s marketing products allow for connecting more comprehensive sets of data, to help understand the combined impact of all marketing efforts, and to optimise new customers’ actions and properties.
The increased importance of privacy standards in the world is reflected in GA4 through additional data controls, data collection and measurement that doesn’t rely on cookies and identifiers.
It’s expected that eventually Google will deprecate the existing Universal Analytics properties, but there’s no need to worry, we’re still a while away from that happening.
In the meantime, the best course of action is to start exploring how GA4 can boost audience and marketing insights. The earlier marketers and businesses start using GA4, the sooner they’ll be able to benefit from the latest enhancements and build up historical data for future use.
New generation GA4 looks and behaves differently, so marketers should prioritise learning how to use GA4 and give themselves plenty of time to familiarise themselves with the new setup and next generation measurement.
