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What Is Google Analytics 4?
Taylor Tunnison • February 17, 2023

If you’re looking to unlock your website’s potential, then Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the perfect tool for you. GA4 is a powerful new version of Google Analytics that provides advanced, ongoing insights into your website’s performance. Allow us to explain what GA4 is, what it can do for you, and how it can help you improve your digital marketing strategy.

History of Google Analytics

Put simply, Google Analytics relies on web cookies and JavaScript page tags to track users’ online activity. Website owners and managers can use it to tell how many people are visiting their site, where they’re coming from online, and whether they’re new or returning visitors. Such precise insight into website user behavior opens up countless new strategic opportunities.


Google launched its proprietary web analytics service in late 2005. With it, business owners and web developers could track various website metrics such as traffic source, bounce rate, session duration, and pages per session. Initial demand was so high that Google suspended open sign-ups and began using randomized invitation codes.


Since about August 2006, Google Analytics has been available to all public websites at no cost. In 2012, Google launched Universal Analytics, which added customizable metrics, cross-platform functionality, and more versatile tracking codes. With this update, marketers and developers could track website data coming from just about any visitor’s device.


A software suite called Google Analytics 360 was released in 2016. This package allowed greater insight into marketing key performance indicators such as return on investment. It also featured a wide variety of new products including Surveys and an Audience Center. Google announced an alternative Analytics tagging system called Global Site Tag in 2017.


Google Analytics is now the most popular web analytics service on the internet. Millions of website owners use it to understand visitor interactions, anticipate their future actions, optimize marketing performance, and create shareable reports at a moment’s notice.


Google recently announced its plans to sunset Universal Analytics later this year. As of July 1st, 2023, Google Analytics 4 will become its new default service. However, current Universal Analytics users can still keep their current setup until then while also leveraging the latest GA4 advancements.

Updates in Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 is the latest version of Google's web analytics service. It was first released in October 2020 and offers unprecedented levels of insight into your website's performance through its sophisticated tracking capabilities. With GA4, you can track user engagement, analyze customer behavior, measure conversions, and much more—all from a single user-friendly interface.


It also offers an enhanced user experience with features like cross-platform tracking, better support for mobile devices, improved segmentation capabilities, and more detailed reporting tools. Additionally, GA4 has built-in machine learning technology that automatically detects anomalies in your data and flags them so you can quickly address any potential issues or areas for improvement.


Google updated its web analytics service to align with recent regulatory changes like GDPR and CCPA that affect how data can be used and collected. Heightened controls like these impact traditional data collection by regulating third-party cookies and device-identifying code. Plus, many users around the world are demanding more control and transparency over how their data is collected and used for ad personalization. As a result, GA4 takes a privacy-centric approach and anonymizes all user IP addresses by default.


Google Analytics 4 aims to be a durable, future-focused measurement platform that scales with your business and empowers data-driven decision making. It can provide a more complete understanding of your full customer lifecycle across devices and applications with or without traditional data collection methods. Here's a brief list of several new and exciting features available in GA4.


1. Event Editing and Synthesis

This feature supports editing, correction, and fine-tuning of logged events within the user interface. It allows GA4 users to modify and collect new events and conversion data without writing code.


2. Data Import

GA4 allows users to send app and website data reflective of events occurring outside their website or app with an expanded Measurement Protocol. Marketers can also widen the dimension of data GA4 collects by importing additional data and signals directly to the platform.


3. Cross-Domain Measurement

This feature enables user-friendly, no-code measurement of a customer’s journey across domains and platforms.


4. Lifecycle Reporting

GA4 supports simplified and reorganized reporting based around the customer lifecycle. Its new reporting curriculum reimagines how it displays default reports to users. Plus, GA4 also expands to include ecommerce reporting, a crucial feature for many modern businesses.


5. Migration Tools

These tools make it easier for anyone to adopt and implement GA4 in just a few clicks. There’s also a Setup Assistant that serves as the one-stop-shop for GA4 setup resources and tools.

Benefits of Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 is designed to provide powerful insights into your website’s performance and customer engagement levels. You can use GA4 to track user engagement across multiple devices, analyze customer behavior patterns over time, and measure conversions from different campaigns or channels. By leveraging the insights provided by GA4, you can optimize your website for maximum impact and ensure that your marketing tactics are working as expected.


You can also use GA4 to gain valuable insights into customer demographics such as age, gender, and location. This will allow you to tailor content and promotions specifically for customers with a higher likelihood of conversion. Plus, by setting up events in GA4 such as video plays or downloads, you can focus your efforts on customers who are most likely to convert based on their on-page activity.

Ask Us about Google Analytics 4

In short, Google Analytics 4 is an incredibly useful tool when it comes to understanding customer behavior and optimizing the performance of your website. Its comprehensive features allow businesses to gain valuable insight into customer demographics while tracking user engagement throughout their journey on the site. With its intuitive interface and diverse data collection capabilities, Google Analytics 4 is set to become the industry’s standard web analytics platform in 2023.


If you have any questions about websites, SEO, or Google Analytics, then we hope you’ll give us a call or contact us online today. We’d love to sit down together and discuss how you can optimize your website to gain more web traffic over time.

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