People may think of Universal Analytics (UA) when they hear Google Analytics. What may not be as well known is this Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is scheduled to replace UA in July 2023. Universal Analytics was launched in 2005; it provides deep customer insights that were previously unavailable and changes the way businesses quantify and track success. It allows anyone with a Google Account to better understand their customers, their journey and how they interact with online content. With more accessible information, it’s easy to develop data-driven content and marketing strategies for long-term success.
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As customer behavior changed and even a good phone facilitated access to information anywhere, marketers needed new cross-platform analytics tools to improve customer experience and marketing results. Google Analytics 4 was first released in October 2020, promising a new model for data measurement, cross-platform support, event-based modeling, and more. Google is still working on the final release of GA4, but the timeline for it to completely replace UA is on the horizon.
Google Analytics: A quick explanation
Google Analytics is a statistical analysis tool that can be used to track and report website traffic. It gives you information about things like what page on your website a user starts on and how they got there. Google Analytics can measure session duration, how many pages a user visits during that session, and other website activities. It can also track e-commerce sales activity and performance, reporting sales, revenue, conversion rates and other sales metrics.
The data provided by Google Analytics is typically used for things like search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing strategies. It can also be used to assess what type of content is performing well and shape your overall content creation strategy. The service is part of Google’s marketing platform and free to use for anyone with a Google account.
How Google Analytics is evolving with GA 4
Google announced that Universal Analytics will be officially retired on July 1, 2023. You will still be able to access your historical data for 6 months, but UA will no longer process new file requests. We encourage you to ride and start learning Google Analytics 4 as soon as possible, but fully moving to GA4 is not recommended yet.
Google Analytics 4 has been heavily criticized since its release. All of GA4’s capabilities haven’t been implemented yet, and it lacks some of UA’s capabilities, but that’s not exactly why people aren’t happy with the changes. The most common complaints are that GA4 makes simple tasks too complicated, the user interface is confusing, and everything is difficult to use without training. Real-time content statistics may be part of Google’s attempt to make Google Analytics more accessible to the average user, but for now, it’s best to use UA and GA4 together.
Looking at some key changes can help you get started and take advantage of this opportunity to adapt to GA4.
Reports view the user interface in Google UA vs. GA4
The Google Analytics user interface starts with a reporting snapshot that collects some of your key data in one place. GA4 certainly looks different from Universal Analytics, and the changes can seem intimidating at first. You’ll immediately notice that the reporting interfaces are very different. In UA, you can have 25 custom report views to organize your data. GA4 removes this completely and only one view is available.
Instead of multiple filtered views, organize your data using data streams and audiences. Unlike UA, there is a single report view and you can apply data filters to your report view instead of creating a custom view. Basically, you are telling GA4 to filter out specific data from your data stream, such as internal traffic and developer traffic. You can have up to 10 data filters per GA4 property.
Updated Google Analytics 4 measurement model
Google Analytics is about tracking and measuring interaction with your online property in order to gather information about a user’s journey. Universal Analytics uses a measurement model based on page views and sessions, while almost everything in Google Analytics 4 has been adjusted to support an event-based model, focused primarily on mobile data. Each action a user takes is counted as an event. While this may sound strange coming from AU, it should mean more detail about how viewers interact with your property.
Google Analytics 4 changes the way sessions are measured
Sessions are how Google quantifies how long data is collected for a particular interaction with your property. In Universal Analytics, a session is based on the length of time a user interacts with your site. You can think of a session as a table containing all user actions, including page views, events, transactions, and other activities. GA4 removes the time limit and average pages per session are no longer measured. This will mean that the number of sessions and average session time will be different from UA.
Bounce rate is replaced by engagement rate in GA4
Bounce rate is something anyone who uses Google Analytics has seen. In a nutshell, the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. What did Google do to bounce rate in GA4? You guessed it; they just got rid of it altogether. GA4 does not measure bounce rate at all. You’ll find engagement rate on your site, a new metric that measures time spent on your landing page. GA4 also has some other engagement metrics besides engagement rate, such as engagement sessions and engagement sessions per user.
Anonymized IP addresses in GA4 facilitate GDPR compliance
Universal Analytics was created long before the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in 2018. IP addresses are considered personal data and must be anonymized to comply with GDPR legislation. Google Analytics 4 now automatically anonymizes all IP addresses. This may not seem like a big deal at first, but you had to manually configure it in UA; now all IP settings on your properties are GDPR compliant by default.
Landing page reports are not available in Google Analytics 4
Landing page reports show you metrics such as views and clicks to help you measure the performance of your individual pages and monitor conversion rates. Landing page reporting is another metric that has been removed in Google Analytics 4. In this case, however, you can create your own, using GA4’s session_start event, to measure how many times a new session on a specific page. The Session_start event is actually a good example of how GA4 uses events instead of many of the things you were used to in Universal Analytics. If you want to continue seeing landing page reports, you’ll need to switch back to UA.
Cross-platform tracking is coming to GA4
Google Analytics now offers cross-platform tracking. Google Analytics 4 is not only mobile-friendly, but now you can also track and measure data between websites and mobile apps. This is incredibly useful if your mobile app is basically another means of interacting with your website.
Big changes for data retention and BigQuery
Being able to compare current data with historical data is an important part of any analysis. In a confusing move, there’s a big change to data retention options in Google Analytics 4. Universal Analytics used to let you choose 14 months, 26 months, 38 months, 50 months, or even set it to never expire. On the other hand, GA4 only has two options: 2 months and 14 months.
Many analytics users look back at historical data, and while it looks like year-over-year comparisons will continue to be possible, you won’t be able to directly access any of your historical data from the last 14 months. However, GA4 connects to BigQuery natively. If you move your data from GA4, you will be able to keep it longer and SQL queries should be much easier.
What’s next for Google Analytics?
Source: Amplitude
Google is not the only analytics platform out there. If GA4 is too frustrating or doesn’t give you the information you need, it’s worth exploring some competition. While there are many options available, some platforms come from recognizable companies. Parse.ly is part of WordPress VIP, and Adobe has its own analytics platform, creatively named Adobe Analytics. Other leading alternatives like Amplitude and Chartbeat even offer capabilities that Google Analytics does not.
If you’re not sure if your analytics property is affected, you can confirm what type of property you are using If you created your property after October 2020, you’re probably already using Google Analytics 4, but if you’re still on Universal Analytics, now’s the time to start making the switch. If you still need some of the UA functionality that GA4 doesn’t support, keep it active until July 1, 2023 and use that time to get used to GA4 before the big change.
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