Impact
This impacts all of your digital marketing, tracking and reporting
In order to continue running Google ad campaigns based on conversion data or retargeting, you must set up new page view, conversion tracking, and audiences on your website.
You must also switch to GA4 if you use Google Analytics for tracking traffic, website engagement, performance, and attribution from all other paid and organic channels.
Additionally, Google is ending "similar audiences" in August 2023. If your campaigns target "similar audiences”, you will need more conversion data to feed the “audience expansion" algorithm that replaces "similar audiences".
Opportunities
GA4 is a completely new analytics platform that has several advantages
- Same analytics platform as iPhone and Android apps. Build audiences and track engagement across your websites and apps
- New event-based model. Assign custom properties to simplify your event tracking and tagging process. Use one tag for all click tracking that contains source page, target page, or anchor text
- Create targetable audiences based on sequences of events within specific time periods (i.e. people who add to cart within 5 minutes of watching a video)
- New reporting features. Funnels (measure how many people got to specific steps) and customer journey pathing (flowcharts of user actions while on your website) are now available to free GA users
- Cookieless tracking option is GDPR compliant
- Automatic tracking of common events like scrolling and clicking
- Predictive analytics to build targetable remarketing audiences of people most likely to convert based on Google's machine learning.
Challenges
But with these advantages, also come some disadvantages:
- Free GA users will not get access to historical data. You must export and store any data that you will want for future reference
- Migrate to GA4 as early as possible to maximize the data you have accessible for future reporting
- GA4 uses different properties that are not exactly equivalent to the old data
- You will need to analyze both sets of data to define a baseline for the new GA4 metrics
- Data retention time periods are shorter than before
- Changes to property filters, user access, and permission levels require business decisions about how to structure the new analytics accounts. It's not possible to copy everything over as is
Solution
TargetClose provides white glove technology solutions to marketers. For 10 years, we have helped brands and marketers assess and implement the best marketing technology products such as analytics, third-party APIs, and tag management systems. Please schedule a call with us to discuss your GA4 needs.
Contact Us
References:
- https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10089681
- https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/12463119
