Marketers are not satisfied with the user interface (UI) of Google Analytics 4.
Indeed, social media has been awash with complaints about the Universal Analytics replacement, but it’s user interface concerns that have dominated the conversation.
So is the GA4 UI really as bad as some say? We spoke to three digital marketing experts to find out…
‘Usability is poor, but wait!’
Janet Driscoll Miller, president and CEO of Marketing Mojo, isn’t a fan of GA4’s user interface, but said it’s “not terrible.” She believes the difficulties that arise are because the platform is so new and different from Universal Analytics. “I don’t think Google has done a very good job with usability in interface design,” he tells Search Engine Land.
Setup and layout are not intuitive – “For example, if you’re creating an Explorations report, you’ll basically first import the dimensions and metrics you want to extract from in the first configuration column, then extract them into the second column that creates your data visualization It’s definitely different in UA and not necessarily very clear to new users.
Google needs to make some tweaks – “I think I speak for most of the Google Analytics power users here, they really need to add the notes feature. It was a great UA feature and probably not hard to program (it’s literally a note and a date), but it was very useful for many of us, especially when doing forensics or troubleshooting projects and working with large teams.
Fix sharing of scan reports – “When you create and share a scan report with others, a) you can’t limit who it’s shared with specifically and b) who it’s shared with you can’t change the date range of the report. Currently, so others can change the date range of a shared report, the user must make a copy of the report so that the user becomes the owner of this new copy of the report and the date can then be modified “.
If you’re having trouble navigating the new user interface, just keep practicing, Miller said.
“The more you get used to how GA4 works, the easier it will become over time,” he said. “Change is hard, but this is here to stay. Before long, we’ll all be a lot better for it. Hang in there!”
“The GA4 lacks basic capabilities, but we’ll get used to it”
Independent contractor and consultant John Erikson has grown increasingly frustrated with the GA4 UI. Universal Analytics was simpler and easier to navigate, which made simple tasks like creating reports much easier to accomplish, he said.
Erikson explained:
Cannot use regex in search box: “You can only search for one phrase at a time, which is very limiting. The only way I found to filter by URL patterns was to set up Audiences. But audiences have to be set up in advance, they can’t be edited /change and the regular expression is limited to 100 characters, so I had to split long patterns into many chunks to create audiences.”
Problems arise if URL structures are modified: “If something changes on the site in the URL structure (which is guaranteed to happen many times in the future), the audience becomes obsolete and there’s no way to look back.”
Time consuming errors: “If you make a mistake when creating an audience, you must discard what you have done and create a new one.”
Segment/dimension issues: “When selecting segments/dimensions in GA4, instead of the ability in Universal to select/deselect one or more segments in a single list and click Apply, you must open the customization or add a comparison, click add filter, select a dimension from a long drop-down menu, then select the dimension value from another drop-down menu, then apply (and you can only select one.) Of course, there is only a difference of a few seconds, but when you look at many different patterns every day, it becomes frustrating to repeat these excessive UI movements over and over again when it used to be faster.
Clumsy design: “This same drop-down structure is used to create/edit GA4 reports. The drop-down lists are long and it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. You can type partial names and find them faster once you know them, but it’s very difficult at first scroll through them all and find what you want. Also, you can only select one, so it’s hard to look at multiple dimensions/values. I find it clunky to use.”
Despite Erkison’s issues with the new platform, he realizes it’s here to stay and is confident he’ll get used to it and adapt.
“It’s frustrating when you’ve used a system that works well for many years and see it replaced by a supposed improvement that’s harder to use and lacks such basic capabilities,” he added.
Get the daily search newsletter marketers trust.
“GA4 doesn’t have the simplest features”
Chris Fox, an independent analytics strategist, has also experienced problems with GA4’s user interface. He points out that simple functions that were present in the UA are now either completely missing or more complicated and time-consuming to perform. Explained:
“Time series charts can only display data at the day level and cannot be changed to view data at the week/month level.” “You must edit your reports to be able to use basic dimensions such as landing page in a traffic report.” “Segments are gone, and instead we have ‘Comparisons’, which have no predefined options and don’t allow you to save the ‘Comparisons’ you create like you could with Segments.” “If you want to add a filter to both dimensions in a report with a secondary dimension, you can’t do it in the table; rather, you have to filter one in the table and the other at the report level in the table top. page (or both at the report level).” “When you edit a report to add metrics, you’re limited to 12, so I often edit a report just to see a certain metric, then reset back to the previous settings.” “Previously, if I wanted to look at a monthly traffic visualization for the past year, I just had to change the date granularity in the line chart in the Channels report to ‘Monthly’. To do this in GA4, I would have to download the data and create the chart myself in Excel/Tableau/etc”.
Of his frustrations, Fox told Search Engine Land that these unnecessary and time-wasting changes have made GA4 “feel like a free edition of the full product that was Universal Analytics.”
Unfortunately, it joins a long list of vendors who have been making the same complaints about GA4’s UI.
Why we care: If enough people are experiencing the same issues with GA4 and then report those issues to Google, the search engine may review your product to make the necessary changes. If you don’t, marketers will be forced to come up with their own solutions, and it will certainly be easier to get together to brainstorm ideas.
deep dive For more information on how to migrate to GA4, read “Learn how to make the switchguide
[ad_2]
Source link
