GA4 vs UA: Some New Features to Help You Build Better Marketing Strategies
At Chartwell, we know that data drives marketing so you can optimize your resources when it comes to promoting your organization. While data comes from more than just digital platforms, your website is your virtual front door so knowing what your customers are doing there is vital. This is what makes the looming deadline for Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 so important.
As we discussed in our previous blog, it’s time to embrace Google Analytics 4. There are some great changes that Google has made in this version of analytics to help you better understand your customer’s journey so you can adapt your marketing strategies.
In this blog, we’re going to take a deeper dive into some of the changes that Google Analytics 4 has made to help you recraft your analytics strategies.
Bounce Rates vs Engagement Rates
In Universal Analytics (UA), if a user came to your page, looked around but didn’t interact with anything on the page, this was considered a bounce. While we want people to stay on our site as much as possible, some pages are set up to be one main source of information. Special landing pages and blogs are great examples of these. In UA, even if they stayed on the page for five minutes, no other interaction would classify this as a bounce. Your potential client may have found the information they needed and left the site but did have a positive interaction with your site.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) sees this differently. Along with interacting with the site as before, if a person stays on your page for more than 10 seconds then it counts as an engaged session. This new way of analyzing if it’s really a bounce will help you determine if the content on your site really has the value that your clients are looking for.
Tracking Your Customer’s Journey
Cookies have been a mainstay of analytics conversations for the past couple of years. Are we going cookie-less and if we are, what does that mean for being able to track who is coming to our site? Previously, UA assigned each user to your site a unique device-ID. Only actions during that specific session were logged to that user. To be classified as a returning user, they’ll need to use the same browser and device they used before. If they switch devices, they’re considered a new user again. Are you getting as many new visitors to your site as you think or are the same people being tagged multiple times?
In GA4, there are now multiple ways to track your visitors. It will now be possible to track users over multiple devices, browsers and even apps to determine if they are the same person. If you have your own user-ids from account sign-ins, you can also upload these to help provide even more data. Along with tracking users over multiple devices, Google also utilizes the former device-ID that Universal Analytics uses as a final resource to track your traffic. Once again, this helps create a more holistic picture of your new and returning users to determine your customer’s journey from just browsing to making a final purchase. The great thing about this is it can be modified so you can follow your government’s data privacy regulations.
Improved Integrations
In this new version of analytics, Google is bringing many integrations under one umbrella allowing you to better combine your data from all sources. Analytics for your website and mobile apps can be tracked under one property making it easier to track your users across platforms. Also, Big Query is now available to everyone instead of just Enterprise users, allowing you to combine your analytics with offsite data all in one place.
This is all designed to help create as complete a picture of your online visitors and their behaviors as possible. For Google, this data means providing you with a modelling system that can predict trends, build predictive audiences, and fill in gaps in data. For you, it’s a more robust way of seeing the true engagement on your site and analyzing the behaviors of your visitors.
Combined, this data can help you build better strategies for your site, plan more efficient digital advertising campaigns and ensure your website visitors have the best experience possible on your site. If you haven’t made the change yet, time is ticking, but Chartwell can help!
