Bigger, better, stronger?

The past year has seen a number of significant changes for Google Analytics. Since the acquisition of Urchin in 2005 and the going live of Universal Analytics in 2012, there has not been a major update to the web analytics tool Google Analytics. Until July 2019. Google introduced the beta version of Google Analytics App+Web. We are now a year on and new features are constantly being added to the beta version. Also, in the meantime, the name has been changed to GA4. So time for a review. 

Capabilities GA4

There is a big difference between the current session-based framework and the new event-driven way of measuring. As the name suggests, Google is merging two unique platforms, Firebase for measuring apps and Google Analytics for measuring websites. The new App+Web framework only uses event-based measurements. So the era of pageviews is over. 

With the move to event-driven measurement, Google did make sure that as much as possible is already measured by default. For example scroll tracking, video tracking and site search are automatically measured when you use a enhanced measurement tag creates in Google Tag Manager. 

With the advent of GA4, a number of features have been added. As mentioned, you can now see both your website and app activity in one view. Also, GA4 has a number of options that were previously only available for a paid 360 account. Examples include:

• Exploration
• Segment overlap
• Funnel analysis
• Path analysis
• User explorer
• Cohort analysis

Advantages GA4

In addition to GA4 having more features, there are other advantages. For example, with GA4 you are much less likely to suffer from sampling and the interface works a lot faster. And then the biggest advantage: you can interface with BigQuery. This was previously only available to 360 customers. You can now store up to 10 GB per month for free and up to 1 TB of free data querien. Beware, with a medium to large website you will reach this limit quite quickly and you will have to pay extra. The advantage of exporting to BigQuery is that you can link multiple data sources and thus do more extensive analysis. The disadvantage is that you must have SQL knowledge to work with it. Also, a datastudio connection has recently become possible and new options are being added to GA4 all the time. 

Because that was actually also the biggest drawback until now. Many of the functionalities we already knew from Universal Analytics were not yet available in the beta version of GA4. Now more and more new functionalities are being added, and that makes GA4 move toward a full-fledged replacement for Universal Analytics.

The future of GA4 

Want to stay up to date on recent developments around GA4? The documentation on App+Web from Google itself is currently very limited. Fortunately Krista Seiden (former Google employee) and Simo Ahava (Tag Manager guru) good documentation written.

For now, we still recommend putting the GA4 implementation live alongside your current Google Analytics implementation. This is because there are still a few essential components missing from the GA4 implementation. But it is a good idea to start setting up this implementation already. This gives you the chance to get familiar with the new interface and to start collecting data. Because as with Google Analytics, you only start collecting data once you put it live. We expect Google to come out with a recommendation on phasing out Universal Analytics soon. Because that GA4 will become a full-fledged replacement is clear, but when this will happen remains to be seen. 

We can help implement GA4. See here for more info. Or get in touch If you are interested in GA4 training.