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The platform, which replaced Universal Analytics has fundamentally changed how we approach digital analytics and reporting.
Back in July 2023, Google Analytics was completely overhauled. Universal Analytics was sunsetted and transitioned to GA4. (I actually wrote a couple of blogs about it which you can read here). Now a year on since the switch over, after grappling with new design, layout, data points and capabilities I thought I’d reflect on some of the changes and challenges we’ve faced with the tool over the past 12 months.
Transitioning to GA4 was no small feat.
Like any new tool, it took a lot of time to become fully comfortable using and interpreting its results. Even now we’re still discovering new things and that's ok. Its new interface and data points were completely different and some things weren’t in the place you’d have naturally expected them to be.
The biggest shift was moving away from a session-based model to an event-based model. That meant there was a stronger emphasis on user engagement metrics like events which we and our clients had to become acustomed to. We said goodbye to the bounce rate (although we have recently been able to find it again) and hello to a more more focused way of measuring results beyond things like web traffic. This was good news for clients who look for actions like form fills or purchases as a key event. But not so good for those who simply want to increase traffic to their site.
Speaking of increasing traffic, we also said hello to the introduction of a cookie banner policy which all of our Service Essentials clients now have on their website. You would have also seen it pop up on our site before reading this blog. When we first actioned these banners clients saw a decline in the web traffic on their GA4 reports. While it looked like traffic numbers were crashing, it actually was just because their users weren't accepting the policy. We’ve been working hard in the background to make our cookie banner as easy as possible to accept, without interrupting the user as much as possible. Once the banners were added and the new solution in place, traffic stabalise again in GA4 reports too.
GA4 prioritises privacy which is a really good thing.
You now have the ability to only collect essential personal data and can also determine how long data is stored. This gave us much more control over what user data is collected and processed. What that also meant though was that businesses could determin how long they want to store data for, making year on year data comparisons tricky. Lots of our clients use year on year comparisons to measure the success of their marketing. Changing from UA meant that we didn’t always have historic data to compare current results against.
Thresholding data was a real bugbear of mine. I often found myself going to check a report or finding a specific piece of data and would encounter the orange squiggle of doom. Thresholding meant Google was withholding the data from you. This withheld data provides insights into your audience’s demographics, interests, and other characteristics which as a marketer is always useful to know. So instead of the exact numbers, you get a range.
We're in love with the Debug.
Something our developer really loved- a much improved debugging tool. We can now see events, actions and values directly in GA4 as they happen. We no longer have to check if something worked in Tag Manager then wait for it to show up in the reports 24 hours later. This meant we could get tasks done quicker.
We’ve held a number of GA4 training sessions with our clients and one of the most important things to them has been the set up of key events or conversions. GA4 has the ability to automatically set up events like outbound clicks, file downloads and site search data through enhanced measurement feature which they loved. This meant you didn’t need to manually set up every event. We did find that this did at times interfere with our custom events set up in Tag Manager and in the early days would trigger an event twice which wasn’t helpful.
But we don't love the pathfinder.
We still think the pathfinder in GA4 isn’t as intuitive as it was in UA. It used to be really simple to be able to see how a user moves through your website, what they do while they’re there and the page that they left on. Now you have to build individual reports every time and the numbers don’t always stack up.
GA4 is still changing. We’re now over a year in and we’re still seeing things disappear and reappear as something completely different. Overall though despite everything, GA4 gives you so much more data than UA used to which is a really good thing. At times it can be overwhelming how much data is available - it’s just a case of finding the core data points you really need and making sure you know how to use them well.
If you need help understanding your GA4 profile, why not get in touch. We've held a number of 1-1 workshops with businesses who want to learn more about its capabilities.
