Why You Need to Switch to GA4, and Quickly!
Introduction
Running a successful business is challenging so having the right tools to hand is critical if you want to reach more customers.
Most entrepreneurs and a good few market professionals I know use Universal Analytics via Google to track their metrics.
For the last decade or so, this has been the gold standard for measuring website performance and most businesses have gotten used to it.
UA is Stopping Soon!
Google has already announced that it will stop processing new hits through UA on July 1, 2023.
Things have changed in the last few years and tracking the way that people come to your site, engage with your social media accounts or which device they use means there are multiple touch points to measure.
Unfortunately, UA is having trouble keeping up.
The good news is that the replacement, Google Analytics 4 or GA4, is already up and running and it has some great new features and benefits that should give you a range of more meaningful metrics for the modern world.
What is GA4?
GA4 is an upgrade from UA to help businesses cope with a much more diverse online world. It’s part a response to this greater complexity and part a move towards privacy-led analytics.
Understanding the customer journey is critical in building effective sales funnels and turning people into fans and customers.
GA4 focuses on event-based data collected across both websites and mobile apps and uses state-of-the-art AI-driven predictive analytics.
It will give you a fuller picture of how people are learning about your product or service and which touchpoints are important for building that customer relationship.
GA4 Has Some Great Benefits, Here Are Just 4!
If you’ve been doing things the same way for several years, you might be reticent about changing. The truth is that GA4 will add a brand new dimension to your understanding of how people engage with your business.
The quicker you think about updating, the quicker you should start seeing these benefits:
- GA4 can track across a whole bunch of different devices and platforms which means you immediately get more depth to your analytics. It uses data streams that give different views of your traffic so you can monitor the entire journey.
- GA4 integrates with Big Query, Google’s state-of-the-art data warehouse, giving you unlimited storage and opening up the possibility of advanced analysis. It lets you determine parameters that mean more to your business.
- There’s a lot of machine learning with GA4 and that allows it to ‘stitch’ together data from different sources and give you the big picture.
- Because it uses event-based tracking it allows you to follow user interactions rather than relying on simpler UA pageviews. It also means that you can track interactions that don’t necessarily happen on your website.
- It lets you predict how likely someone is to purchase your product (purchase probability) or stop using it (churn). This should allow you to tailor your marketing messages across the sales funnel and make them more focused and effective.
These are just a few of the benefits of switching to GA4. The more you explore it, the more you’re likely to wonder how your business ever lived without it.
Get a Quote and Switch to GA4 Today
Not everyone is a tech master and setting up new analytics software can be challenging, especially if this is not your thing.
The great news is that our amazing team can get you hooked up to GA4 and configure it for you so that you can begin seeing the benefits right away.
Want to find out more? Get in touch today.
