GA4 enables businesses to measure the live experiences instead of a proxy. Meaning, it helps in delivering a full picture of user behaviour and eliminating blind spots in user journeys as you track their entire movement through your website.
In this blog we will outline several benefits of migrating to GA4 that are key to business success and delivering greater insights.
How GA4 works:
Unlike Google Analytics’ previous version (UA), which used a session-based data model to differentiate users and collect user-centric data, Google Analytics 4 is built on an event-based approach to achieve the same results.
Events are triggered as users interact with your site or app. For example, a page view event triggers when a user views a page on your site.
Here are three benefits of migrating to GA4 that will help your business.
Cross-device tracking:
Tracking users across multiple devices was a little difficult because of the technology on which Google Analytics was built.
With Google Analytics 4, we can send multiple data streams to a single GA4 property to track website traffic and mobile apps (Google Play Store and App Store) traffic. Incoming data can be stored and measured in one reporting interface and analysed across devices. This allows us to unify data points and be able to track users across different devices.Unified data view:
To unify all these data collection methods, GA4 must be redesigned in terms of data aggregation and modelling. A mobile app produces completely different data than a website, so they have removed page views, transactions, and social interactions; and unified them all under one concept, Events. With each event that comes in, we can send extra information to describe it more closely, in GA4 these are called event parameters; in UA these are called dimensions. These parameters can be used later to segment, filter, or search through data.Predictive Metrics:
With advancements in machine learning models that process customer page events, GA4 is set to provide businesses of all sizes with predictive analytics on customer behaviour. GA4 supports predictive metrics such as:Purchase probability: This measures the probability of a user that was active in the last 28 days to make a purchase in the next 7 days, which can help with retargeting decisions.
Churn probability: This measures the probability that a user who was active in the last 7 days will not be active in the next 7 days. This can guide the business in terms of product offering.
Revenue prediction: This approximately measures the revenue expected for the next 28 days from users that were active within the last 28 days (about 4 weeks).
To ensure continuity of critical data, it is imperative that you plan your switchover from UA to GA4 well ahead of the July 2023 deadline. The changes in data collection between GA Universal and GA4 will require thorough planning and updates need to be implemented and tested before any replication of your current dataset can be completed. A side-by-side migration can help you access the information in the way you are already comfortable with, while becoming familiar with the new system, making the adjustment far easier.
