What’s new with Google Analytics 4?
Google Analytics 4 or GA4 is the latest version, the next-generation measurement solution. It’s replacing Universal Analytics by July 1, 2023. Since it is the 4th version, it is called GA4. With innovative features and improved flexibility GA4 can unlock valuable insights for your website, your app, or both!
The new event-driven Google Analytics GA4 also provides predictions powered by Google’s machine learning to help improve your marketing efforts.
Note: Google Analytics 4 property was previously named “App + Web property.” The name was changed maybe to reflect not only the version number but the fact that GA4 property can measure 4 different types of streams (Web, iOS App, Android App, internet-connected systems i.e. POS).
The key benefits of Google Analytics 4 properties
In the past, there was no easy way to combine mobile app data and website data in one unified reporting view. Now GA4 can do so with the unification feature cross-platform GA4 properties were designed to scale with your business and measure across devices and platforms.
- GA4 helps you to scale with your business properly as it can measure, unify, and de-duplicate all the interactions people have with your store across devices and platforms, giving you a complete, relevant, and timely understanding of the customer journey.
- GA4 is equipped with an intelligent business insights engine where it automates and facilitates insight discovery with the power of Google’s machine learning to get the most value from your data.
- GA4 helps you to achieve your marketing goals more effectively.
- Full cross-devices reporting where GA4 can de-duplicate users across data from different devices. This means Analytics can measure a single user journey across devices based on the best available user identifiers. You can use Google’s signed-in data, bring your own identifier for signed-in users, or seamlessly use both, and Analytics will always choose the best available option for each situation.
How Google Analytics 4 properties differ from Universal Analytics properties
In GA4 properties, you can easily create new audiences, and you have more options when defining and segmenting your audiences.Moreover, Google Analytics 4 offers new advanced features like Explorations tools for flexible reporting & BigQuery Export that allow you to store your data in the cloud and combine it with other data sources to run more advanced queries across all your data sets.
Here are the other important differences between UA properties and GA4 properties:
The last but not least important change in GA4 is how the data is being collected.
With GA3 (Universal Analytics), Google groups data into sessions, and these sessions are the foundation of all reporting. During a session, Analytics collects and stores user interactions, such as page views, events, and eCommerce transactions, as hits. A single session can contain multiple hits, depending on how a user interacts with your website.
While with GA4 properties, you can still see session data, but Google collects and stores user interactions with your website or app as events. Events can collect and send pieces of information that more fully specify the action the user took or add further context to the event or user. This information could include things like the value of purchase, the title of the page a user visited, or the geographic location of the user.
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