I will be blunt. Google Analytics 4 has caused many headaches for agencies and businesses over the past year.
The only guarantee over the next few weeks is that it will get worse before it gets better.
The Universal Analytics sunset is tomorrow, July 1st (and may have already happened by the time you’re reading this).
Many companies are surprised when they start looking at their GA4 reports as a source of truth if they haven’t already. Spoiler: most still don’t!
There’s no doubt that GA4 offers a lot of new reporting and insights that UA struggled with (reporting on user funnels) or failed to provide (hello, data-driven attribution and predictive analytics!).
But those who are used to using UA reports for several years have to adapt very quickly.
Where did my reports go?
While you can drill down into your Google Ads campaign metrics when you feel comfortable, more custom reporting is required than exploring UA-like data.
In UA, there is a Google Ads tab in the acquisition reports section that is easily accessible. There’s a bit more of a workaround in GA4, with similar out-of-the-box reporting hidden as an acquisition card.
But to take advantage of GA4’s advanced Google Ads reporting, this will be handled in the new Explore section. Not a big deal, but for those who aren’t on the platform every day, this could be a struggle to catch up.
For more advanced PPC marketers and data analysts, we encountered some issues linking certain fields to our Looker Studio dashboards.
Source/Average and Ecommerce Conversion Rate data (among others) are not built-in metrics that can be synced unless you’re comfortable creating custom fields.
Therefore, many non-advertisers will overlook these metrics.
Scheduled reports are also gone (as of this writing), so those businesses that got their daily/weekly/monthly reports straight to their morning inboxes have to find another solution.
The good news here is that Google has been publishing more and more original reports over the past year, so they’ve heard these concerns and are taking action.
If you’re still having trouble replicating similar reports and dashboards, custom reporting isn’t rocket science.
Freelancers or agency PPC professionals can take advantage of this additional set of new reporting skills that in-house marketing teams took for granted for years.
Another bow on the lid and a necessary learning curve if you want to benefit from the new reporting suite that GA4 offers.
Where there is disruption, there is opportunity.
Not too fast
Those of us who are a little too into Google Analytics and look at real-time reports for much of the day are underwhelmed.
There is a 24-48 hour delay in all other reports without BigQuery intervention.
This will be a consequence of last click’s move to data-driven attribution.
We see this issue in the Google Ads interface with the delayed conversions reports.
But for marketing executives who want to see the early impact of their 24-hour flash sale or how the first day of their Black Friday sale is doing (oh, how fun it will be when November rolls around), they’ll have to wait a little more
And even when the reports start rolling out, we won’t see full data because of the delay.
This can be a blessing in disguise for PPC marketers whose clients love a good 24-hour next-day report.
Focusing on the new features of the new real-time report, such as user snapshots and comparisons, could be an effective distraction tactic.
On the other hand, if the client needs reports to be more instantaneous, the solution is to take advantage of real-time export to BigQuery.
It will provide near-accurate real-time data, which you can populate using Looker Studio dashboards during these key sales periods and events.
Just a great event
As I’m sure you already know, GA4 is all about the event.
We say goodbye to visits to UA pages, e-commerce, social interactions, etc. and welcome, exclusively, to an event-based world.
Events represent a fundamental data model difference between UA and GA4 properties. With this, we will be missing a fundamental UA metric on pageviews. Sessions are king here.
The death of the pageview means that other key UA metrics, such as bounce rate, will be calculated differently.
UA bounce rate is when a session has only one page view, while GA4 bounce rate is the inverse of an engagement rate (new metric in GA4).
Year-on-year comparisons are therefore almost useless as they work in a completely different way (which many people won’t know about).
These metrics are key for many businesses. To get the most out of GA4, focus on similar or alternative metrics that are unique to the platform (eg engagement rate).
By aligning these metrics with your goals and identifying their value, you can shift the goals in your favor.
This approach allows you to use the power of GA4 to your advantage instead of letting it become a hindrance.
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Drive this data
Data-driven attribution is the new default attribution model in GA4.
This will cause outages (due to slower standard reporting) and discrepancies in channel reporting.
But in the grand scheme of things, it’s absolutely the most accurate method of spreading credit for conversions.
Data-driven attribution isn’t perfect. (It’s still a bit too “black box” and dependent on trusting Google for my taste).
However, it is a much better reflection of the complex user journey spread across multiple digital touchpoints than the last click could manage.
While data-driven attribution is new to Google Analytics, it’s not new to Google.
It has been the default attribution model in Google Ads for at least the last year and has been around for years.
Google Ads and GA4 data-based attribution differs because Google Ads only attributes to everything different Google channels, while GA4 will be extended to all channels.
At the very least, businesses will be familiar with how this works and why they get the odd conversion that occurs, which isn’t a whole number. (I still get asked this regularly.)
Embracing the learning curve
There’s no denying that once we all get used to GA4 and accept UA in its new role as the ghost of data past, we’ll be better off.
GA4 is a much more sophisticated, data-driven and privacy-focused tool than the UA, and it’s long overdue.
Because the jump from Google’s third iteration of web analytics to its fourth was much bigger than any of its previous migrations, the pain points will be more difficult and the learning curves will be more exaggerated.
Patience is required and companies will need to rise from the inertia of previous reports to move forward and embrace this new dawn of data analytics.
PPC marketers will need to guide and educate them along the way. It persists through continuous emails from company executives demanding to know why pageviews have dropped and why the bounce rate has increased so much.
Like teaching your mom or dad how to use a smartphone for the first time and explaining that 5G doesn’t control minds, go ahead and show them the promised land of GA4. They will love you for it and never look back.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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