Blog Post: What have we learned since GA4 became the standard?
By Jarrod Adams
If you’re in the marketing industry, you’ve probably heard about Google’s new analytics property, Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Google officially transitioned to this new property on July 1st, sunsetting(ish) the older Universal Analytics (UA). After a month since the transition, we wanted to provide some points of interest on the differences between them and the general best practices our team uses for our clients.
Overview
GA4 uses event-based data instead of the session-based data that UA focused on. A preset number of events automatically populate when you create a GA4 property including page view, user engagement, session start, first visit, scroll, and click. GA4 also automatically creates one conversion: purchases. This conversion is primarily for ecommerce websites.
GA4 includes privacy controls such as cookieless measurement, behavioral, and conversion modeling. It also does not collect user IP addresses. GA4 appears to be more reliable than UA in terms of data sampling, thanks to the absence of hit limits. This ensures reports are based on 100% data. In other words, you don’t have to worry about working with a limited percentage of data like in UA.
New Metrics
Since GA4 is focused on event-based data, new metrics have been created with this in mind:
- Engaged Sessions: The number of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, or had a conversion event, or had 2 or more screen or page views.
- Engagement Rate: The percentage of engaged sessions (Engaged sessions divided by Sessions).
- Engaged Sessions Per User: Number of engaged sessions per user (Engaged sessions/Users).
- Average Engagement Time: The average length of time that the app was in the foreground, or the web site had focus in the browser.
Automatically Collected Events
When you create a GA4 account, specific events are created automatically without the need for snippets of code or Google Tag Manager:
- first_visit: This event is triggered when a user visits a website or launches an Android instant app with Analytics enabled for the first time.
- session_start: This event is triggered when a user starts a new session on your website or app.
- user_engagement: When the app is in the foreground or webpage is in focus for at least one second
- page_view: This event is triggered each time when a web page loads in the browser window.
- file_download: Occurs anytime a user downloads a file on the website
- click: each time a user clicks a link that leads away from the current domain
- form_submit: when the user submits a form
- scroll: the first time a user reaches the bottom of each page (i.e., when a 90% vertical depth becomes visible)
You can also manually create custom events like in UA. This allows you to call out unique elements of the event such as specific CTA buttons, chatbot engagements, or email/phone link clicks.
Conversions
In GA4, you no longer must set-up goals based on a limited set of conversion criteria. Instead, you can mark any event as a conversion. This includes automatically collected events and custom events that have been manually created. Once an event is marked as a conversion, it can be imported into any a Google Ads account that has been linked to the GA4 account. You can mark up to 30 events as conversions.
Audiences
In GA4, audiences let you segment users in ways that are important to your business. You can segment by dimensions, metrics, and events to include practically any subset of users. At Wahl, our team primarily uses custom audiences for remarketing. These audiences auto-populate within the Audience Manager section in a linked Google Ads account. Custom remarketing audiences give you the ability to track users who landed on a page and didn’t engage with an event/conversion in the last 30 days, came to the website from other paid/organic channels to expand reach & frequency, specific user demographics, or even location.
Conclusion
Our team is excited to embrace a new analytics format, even if it comes with some challenges along the way. Even as the industry seems to loath the new format, we see it as an opportunity to work with better data and the insights it provides for our paid media campaigns. Plus, this is just the beginning. If Google has taught us anything over the years, it’s that it will continue to change, update and evolve the property, most likely without telling us first.