Graceful Transitions from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4
When the need to transition from UA to GA4 became a reality and there was no turning back from the imminent date of the UA sunset, which was announced exactly a year ago, in March of 2022, many started feeling the looming burden of the migration, expressed in some resistance and questioning the new solution.
All eyes were on the Google Analytics experts and bloggers trying to demystify the new tool in its very preliminary form, updating their posts regularly whenever new features came out. Learning new tools is exciting, but it can also be daunting, as we are naturally hardwired to resist change, and it is true especially for a tool that’s been around since 2005. Well, let’s admit this upgrade was long overdue ;)
Our team is curious by nature, and we like to confront things before they confront us, so we started getting our hands dirty early on, reading blogs, attending workshops, and poking around the tool. We have transitioned all of our clients to Google Analytics 4, websites of various scopes and complexities, and we feel very comfortable navigating the whole process. Moreover, we actually really enjoy the new tool and recognize the potential it has. At the same time, we hope Google is relentlessly working on resolving some of the bugs and introducing just a couple more features ;)
The Why Behind GA4
Apart from the fact that GA4 is a response to a more contemporary online user behavior across multiple channels, devices, and properties like websites and apps, it is also taking on the challenge to provide conversion and behavioral data for users who reject cookies, which is huge for companies operating in Europe bound by the GDPR regulations, or several US states that also require cookie consent, like California or Virginia. GA4 is equipped with data modeling capabilities that can model the missing data based on the data that’s available from users who accepted tracking on the website. You don’t miss out on the conversion data, while still respecting the users’ privacy. GA4 is also more accurate with counting users due to its improved cross-device tracking capability and the use of Google Signals (you can expect to see lower Users data in GA4 than you saw in UA thanks to that cross-device deduplication).
Below are some of the crucial differences between Universal Analytics (UA) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4):
All Data in a Single Account
GA4 only has a single Data Stream (aka data source), which combines data from websites and apps, to better understand the user behavior across multiple platforms. If you only have a single website, you’re not impacted by that change as much, unless you operate in multiple countries and used to have separate views for all of them. Now, you’ll need to work with segments to analyze performance, unless you have GA4 360, which allows subproperties.
Custom KPI Tracking Events
This is a big change compared to Universal Analytics (UA) that operated with users, sessions and views. GA4 is more user-based, and everything now is an “event.” A new session starts - a session_start event is triggered. A user views a page - a page_view event is triggered. A user scrolls to 90% of your page - a scroll event is triggered. A lot of these events (like session_start) are tracked by default.
Then there is Enhanced Measurement (not to be confused with Enhanced Ecommerce in UA), which offers some additional events that you can toggle on (we recommend skipping form interactions for now until GA4 resolves the bug).
And lastly, there are Custom Events, which can be literally anything you want to track, including all E-commerce tracking, since GA4 doesn’t offer Enhanced Ecommerce.
Each event can have up to 25 parameters, which describe an event in more detail. For example, an outbound click event could have a click URL parameter, which shows the destination URL, or a page URL, which shows where the click occurred.
And then you can set up reports for those events and parameters, which brings us to another big change in GA4 - flexible reporting.
Powerful Custom Reports that fit Your Business Needs
This is still work in progress and some reports are a little wonky, but it’s supposed to offer the opportunity to customize the reports to whatever a business needs, and we’re having a lot of fun with these features! You’ll see that the general number of reports available by default decreased drastically compared with UA, but this is just to get your started on building your own reports.
The high level data is presented in the Overview Reports, which are similar to the ones we had in Universal Analytics (e.g. the Acquisition Overview report). These are great to share with leadership that don’t need to know the itty bitty stuff.
Then you can go a step further and pull out metrics that you want to focus on to create Detailed Reports. For example, you can pull out the Google Ads report from the Acquisition Overview, customize it, and add it to show up in the Acquisition category on the left hand side.
Next step would be creating new reports based on Custom Events and Parameters. For example, we implemented custom events tracking outbound clicks on a map with retailers to see where people click through the most to purchase in store (we set up tracking for clicks on directions, clicks on the phone number, retailer’s name, and on the website URL). You could also pull out individual parameters like a click URL and create reports around that parameter only (secret tip - they need to be added as a Custom Dimension first!). Having separate reports for these metrics allows for adding secondary dimensions and segments, which lets you dive deeper into data.
And lastly, there are also Exploration Reports, which are highly customizable and can help analyze User Paths and Funnels (this is where most bugs live too as of today). You can see where people drop off on your page, what steps of the checkout process need improvements, and even analyze specific segments and how they navigate the website, e.g. look at a path only of those people that submitted a contact form. Powerful!
Bye Bye Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of people that come to a single page and then leave the website without navigating to another page. We are not very sad to see this one go, because it is a little skewed given the user behavior of opening a tab and forgetting about it (reminder to focus more on trends than metrics alone!). GA4 is introducing new metrics, which are better in our opinion - Engaged Sessions and Engagement Rate. An Engaged Session happens whenever a user:
Spends at least 10 seconds on the website (you can change that number and we recommend to do so)
Triggers an event
Views more than 1 page
Now this is way closer to showing the true engagement, although we always recommend supporting such analysis with heat mapping reports and recordings.
We could go on and on and on, but this is what we wanted to cover for now. We might follow up with another update in a while once Google rolls out some updates, since things are still changing and we’re also constantly learning new things.
For now, here are some great resources from people who are very knowledgeable about all things Google Analytics, if you’d like to dive deeper!