Learn About The Benefits of Using GA4 Over Google’s Universal Analytics

If you haven’t already heard, Google Universal Analytics is going away on July 1, 2023, and will stop recording data on your website traffic. Don’t worry though, Google is just transitioning fully to GA4.

GA4 is a more advanced version of Google Analytics and offers more features and benefits to users. Some of the key advantages that GA4 has over UA include the ability to create audiences and triggers, enhanced data filtering options, and the ability to track user behavior across multiple devices.

Better Audiences Triggers

One of the key advantages that GA4 has over UA is the ability to create audiences and triggers. Audiences can be used to target specific users who have met a certain criteria, such as visiting your website a certain number of times or spending a certain amount of time on your site.

Triggers can be used to automatically generate events when a visitor enters an audience, which can then be used as conversions in Google Ads. This gives you a wide range of possibilities to create more complex rules for tracking user behavior.

Better Cross Domain Tracking

Cross-domain tracking was very confusing and difficult to set up in Universal Analytics. But in Google Analytics 4, things have been greatly simplified. Instead of configuring various commands in the code, now we just have to list all domains (that belong to the business) in the settings of a web data stream.

These enhanced cross-domain tracking capabilities, allow you to track user behavior across multiple websites and/or subdomains. This can be useful for understanding how users interact with your brand or products on different websites and landing pages that you manage.

GA4 also integrates with Google’s other marketing platforms, such as Google Ads and Google Sheets, making it much easier to track and analyze your data.

GA4 has a new set of metrics for more accurate engagement tracking

GA4 includes a new set of metrics to help you track user engagement more accurately. Called “Attribution,” these metrics provide insights into how users interact with your website across different channels and devices. This can help you to understand which channels are most effective at driving conversions and ROI.

The Attribution module also includes a “Path Length” metric, which measures the number of steps it takes for a user to complete a conversion. This can be useful for understanding how users interact with your website and identifying any bottlenecks in the conversion process.

Other engagement metrics include engaged sessions, engagement rate, engaged sessions per user, and average engagement time.

Event tracking setup is much easier in GA4

In GA4, you can simply add the event tracking code to the header of your website. This code will automatically track all events on your website and you can easily modify any event or create a new event based on the occurrence of other events

Universal Analytics required a lot of complicated coding to set up event tracking. But with GA4, it’s now much easier and faster to get started. This makes it simpler to track user behavior across different devices and channels and gain insights into how users interact with your website.

GA4 has debugging within the reporting interface

Google GA4 offers a debug view within the reporting interface, which allows you to troubleshoot any errors that may be occurring on your website. This can help you quickly identify and fix any issues that may be impacting your website traffic or user behavior tracking. GA3/Universal Analytics did not have this feature and troubleshooting your conversion tracking could take a lot of time. Now the new debug mode shows events happening every second and displays them in real time so you can fix any issues quickly.

GA4 is more accurate and less susceptible to bot traffic interfering with your data

Bot traffic can distort your data and make it difficult to accurately measure website traffic and user behavior. But with GA4, you can be confident that your data is accurate and reliable since GA4 offers enhanced data filtering options, which make it easier to filter out irrelevant data and get a clearer picture of how users are interacting with your website.

GA4 has great report templates and tools built right in

Google GA4’s report tools make it easier to track and analyze your website data. The report templates are easy to use and include a variety of different options, such as conversion tracking, audience insights, and website performance.

The tools built into GA4 are also very powerful and allow you to customize your data in a variety of ways. For example, the filter tool can be used to exclude or include specific data points from your reports. This is a great way to focus on the data that is most important to you.

Google GA4 analytics is a more accurate and user-friendly version of Universal Analytics. It offers enhanced cross-domain tracking capabilities, easier event tracking setup, and more accurate engagement metrics. Overall, GA4 provides a wealth of features and tools that make it simpler to track and analyze website data, and this is just a small sample of the great benefits that Google has added to GA4.

Have no fear that Universal Analytics is going away because Google has replaced it with a vastly improved way to measure user behavior and engagement.