In anticipation of Google’s Universal Analytics platform sunsetting, we reached out to our experts at Conversion Logix, VP of Ad Operations Daniel Ekdahl, and our Campaign Performance Manager, Liam Keller, to give you an inside look at how our team is leveraging Google’s new analytics platform, GA4.

What industry trends set the stage for Google’s introduction of GA4? 

Danny: There are a couple of trends that have been prevalent in the industry for a long time that Universal Analytics started to address, but Google has pushed the boundaries further with GA4. 

We know internet users are switching devices from their mobile phones to their laptops and now to TVs with the adoption of smart TVs. Marketers have always found multichannel attribution to be challenging. Google is trying to help marketers with this by taking into account how a user encounters a brand across multiple devices while still maintaining privacy.

Liam: To elaborate on Danny’s point about privacy, it’s an interesting time right now in the marketing world because analytics is becoming privacy-centric, but at the same time, as an industry, we are trying to be more data-driven. We now understand cookies are eventually going away, and machine learning is being explored as a way to close that gap. 

A lot of the evolution we are seeing in Google Analytics really centers around those trends, understanding cross-device behavior and improving the way we capture data from mobile devices while giving users the anonymity and privacy they desire.

How is GA4 different from Universal Analytics?

Liam: GA4 is definitely more focused on understanding how people interact on a website. Comparatively, Universal Analytics was focused on understanding traffic volume and less granular methods of collecting user intent, like bounce rate and pages per session. In place of these types of volume metrics, GA4 provides more engagement metrics.

Danny: The biggest paradigm shift is the move from session-based to event-based analytics. Events are the star of GA4. In Universal Analytics, you had the ability to define goals (now called conversions in GA4), but in GA4, Google delineates further between events and conversions. Now advertisers are led to think about what actions are leading to other actions.

Liam: Especially when studying the purchase journeys we analyze for the multifamily housing and senior living industries, we know a user doesn’t just teleport to the end conversion [apply to lease an apartment or move a loved one to a senior living community]. There are micro-conversions that happen along the way, and Google is getting better at helping us track these smaller steps.

With these new metrics, what is your team using to evaluate campaigns?

Liam: Engagement rate and conversions are the main two metrics we look at when evaluating campaigns for clients. These action-focused metrics tell us whether prospects are engaging in ways that indicate they are interested in our clients. If these metrics are low for specific campaigns, then I would consider making changes to the campaign or moving the budget towards campaigns driving more engaged traffic.

Can you share an example of how you have used GA4’s new metrics or features to optimize campaigns?

Liam: One of the more exciting things we can do in GA4 is set up audiences (segments of users with similar website behavior) and port them into Google Ads campaigns. While audiences were available in Universal Analytics, in GA4, they’ve become more robust and easier to leverage for campaign optimization. Once added to the Google Ads platform, we can then target the users in these audiences and tailor our bidding strategy. We’ve tried this by modifying Google Ads bids based on their engagement with floor plan pages. This helped us bring high-intent users back to the client’s site, increasing conversions. 

Overall, Google is making it easier to optimize campaigns across their platforms with GA4 so advertisers can leverage tools from one platform into another, which is great news for advertisers. 

What new insights are available with GA4 that weren’t accessible with Universal Analytics?

Liam: Danny eluded earlier to the importance of understanding how users engage across multiple channels and platforms. In GA4, Google is getting better at tracking and reporting on multitouch attribution. We’ve always known how impactful top-of-the-funnel advertising campaigns like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Display, and YouTube are in driving high-converting prospects, but so much of that journey gets lost when we only focus on direct conversions. With GA4’s new multitouch reporting, we can now clearly see users taking four or five touches before converting, giving us a better reflection of how marketing actually works. It’s not a simple landscape by any means, and it’s nice to see the industry make progress toward understanding that.

What should marketers do to prepare for the sunset of Universal Analytics?

Danny: Most importantly, establish a GA4 property as soon as possible. Spend time learning how the new platform works and getting familiar with the new metrics and features to get the most out of the platform.

Google recently announced that they are now giving users a six-month window past the sunset date to extract and store Universal Analytics data. If you have a Universal Analytics account, I suggest looking into the best option for storing that data for your organization.

What can we expect from GA4 in the future?

Danny: The industry has been blaring the cookieless future siren for a while now. Google has been exploring alternatives to cookies. I’d expect more innovation from Google around privacy in the near future.

Liam: Predictive analysis is another area I see Google building upon in the years to come. While machine learning already makes up the backbone of GA4, I expect GA4’s predictive features to improve over time as the platform gathers more data. Right now, we can see cool things in GA4 like, “Google Ads was a part of 63% of user journeys for this account”. I see insights like these becoming more predictive as more data is collected. 

GA4 Resources to Keep You Ahead of the Curve 

New to GA4 and ready to learn more about it? Check out our four-part blog training series to help you get started. 

1. What is GA4? [Updated for 2023]
2. GA4 Essentials: What You Need to Know About GA4 [Updated for 2023]
3. GA4 Essentials: Interpreting New Metrics in GA4 [Updated for 2023]
4. GA4 Essentials: How to Set Up Conversions in GA4 [Updated for 2023]

Don’t miss our exclusive LinkedIn Live, Unlocking the Power of GA4: Best Practices from Google and Conversion Logix! Danny and Liam are teaming up with our agency advisors from Google to give you an inside look into the new GA4 platform.

The post Ahead of the Curve – GA4: The Next Frontier of Marketing Analytics appeared first on Conversion Logix.

The biggest difference between GA4 and Universal Analytics is the event + parameter model GA4 uses to track user engagement. Along with this new form of behavioral analytics comes a simpler and more automated way of tracking events. Google uses machine learning to determine which actions on your website to track as events and labels these within the engagement section in GA4. This means that you will now have access to more event tracking than you did in your previous analytics account and can use this information to better assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. In this blog post, we’ll show you how event tracking has changed and how to set up conversions in GA4.

What are conversions in GA4?

Just like in Universal Analytics, Google gives you the ability to track specific user engagements on your website as events. These events can be labeled as conversions by users in Google Analytics. 

In the old analytics platform, the only way you could set up events was to do it yourself using Google Tag Manager or add custom scripts. Now Google continually adds events for you. This means you can have hundreds of events in your account at any given time.

Creating conversions (the new term for “goals” in Universal Analytics) is what helps users narrow down their analysis on the events that reflect important milestones in the customer journey, like a scheduled appointment or a sale.

How to Set an Event as a Conversion in GA4

GA4 gives users a new way to set up conversions directly from the analytics platform. To do this, go to the left-hand sidebar in your GA4 account and click on “All Events” under the “Events” heading and below “Conversions”.

Once you click on this page, you will see the list of events you are tracking in your account. In the example below, you will see some of the new events Google automatically creates in the platform, like page_view, scroll, and first_visit. Assigning one of these events as a conversion is as simple as toggling the switch under the “Mark as Conversion” column for an event. You can confirm if the event was set as a conversion by going to the “Conversions” page on the left-hand sidebar and checking to see if your custom event name appears there with the blue toggle turned on. 

For most users, however, Google’s default events won’t be specific enough to track the type of conversions they want to record in their account. These users will need to set up custom events in GA4. 

How to add events in GA4

With GA4, Google released a new way to create events. The new process is much easier to set up than the process in Universal Analytics. To get started, select the “Create event” button, displayed in the screenshot example above. Once you click on it, it may ask you to choose a web data stream. If you are trying to set up an event on your website, select that option.

Once you select your site, you will see the following.

Select “Create”.

Add the name of your custom event. Use underscores in place of spaces.

Select parameters that limit what gets tracked as your custom event. For example, if you want to track form submissions on a contact page and you have a thank you page with “thank you” in the title, then select “page_title” as your parameter and an operator like “contains” and type “thank you” in the value field. 

Now every time a user visits the contact form page, submits the form, and views the thank you page, an event will fire. This event can be set as a conversion, and then you can start tracking contact form submissions as conversions in your GA4 account.

What are the new limitations to event tracking?

Along with the events Google adds to your account, analytics users can add as many custom events as they want and up to 30 conversions. 

One thing to note about Google’s new autonomous event tracking, they don’t give users insight into how each custom event is set up. They give you a name for an event which can help you determine what website action drove an event. For this reason, we still set up our own custom events to ensure we are tracking the website engagement metrics that are most relevant to our clients.

Conclusion 

Google’s new analytics platform was designed with event tracking in mind. Existing users can tell this new version has come a long way in making the event and conversion tracking process easier to set up. We hope you found this article useful in setting up conversion tracking in your own GA4 account. Interesting in learning more about GA4? Watch this webinar recording with Google rep Nick Danford and the Conversion Logix team.

The post GA4 Essentials: How to Set Up Conversions in GA4 [Updated] appeared first on Conversion Logix.

The launch of GA4 came with the addition of new metrics in Google’s latest analytics platform, along with the removal of some commonly used ones. Since the switch to mobile-first websites, website layouts have become increasingly centered around scrolling rather than page clicks to navigate a website. Rather than base website analytics at a session level, the new platform focuses more on tracking activity at a user level.

In GA4, Google changed the way they look at what constitutes an engaged website session and an engaged user. They decided that a session-based approach looking at page views per session, average session duration, and bounce rate didn’t do a great job of capturing how active a user is on a website.

For example, if a user lands on a website, finds the information they need quickly, and then leaves the site, that is considered a bounce and looked at as a negative experience in the current analytics platform. In the new platform, the user’s engagement with the site is measured by how often they scrolled on the page and what actions they took when they were on the site (ex: pressing buttons and filling out forms) to determine if they had a good experience. 

Here are the new metrics in GA4 and how to use them to analyze your website behavior.

New GA4 Metric: Engaged Sessions

These are sessions that last longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had two or more screen or page views.

This new metric looks beyond the occurrence of a session and reflects the quality of the session.

A session in GA4 is created when an app or webpage is opened and ends when 30 minutes of inactivity have occurred from a user.

In Universal Analytics, when the campaign source changes mid-session, it is counted as two separate sessions. GA4 counts this as one session. This provides more accurate session measurements and will result in lower session counts than what you might be used to in the previous platform. 

New GA4 Metric: Engagement Rate

Engagement rates represent “engaged sessions” divided by “total sessions”. 

This new metric gives Google Analytics users the ability to compare the quality of their website traffic by acquisition channel. This metric was created to replace bounce rate as a measure of traffic quality.

In the past, a marketing channel that had a high bounce rate was judged as being a lower-performing traffic source. This misjudged the effectiveness of marketing campaigns that led to active website traffic that happened to only view one page. This new metric will change the way marketers assess a campaign to encompass user actions that reflect active participation on a website or app.

New GA4 Metric: Engaged Sessions Per User

Engaged sessions per user reflect your engaged sessions divided by the number of users in a given time period. 

With better user tracking, Google can now help marketers tie multiple website experiences to a user. Viewed in aggregate, this can help marketers understand how effective their efforts are at bringing people back to the website.  

Other improvements in GA4 make this tracking even more valuable for analytics users that have both an app and a website. One of the new changes that GA4 brought was cross-platform tracking between apps and websites. With new cross-platform tracking analytics, users can measure engaged sessions per user across apps and websites. This helps marketers and developers analyze a more holistic user experience.

New GA4 Metric: Average Engagement Time

In place of average session duration, average engagement time measures the length of time an app was in the foreground, or a website was in focus in the browser.

Since the bar is set higher for average engagement time compared to average session duration, your stats may look lower than what you are used to.

Conclusion

GA4 offers marketers a range of new and exciting ways to track user engagement on websites. Gone are the days of relying on bounce rates to evaluate how engaged your website visitors are. Now marketers have more tools in their tool belts to assess the effectiveness of campaigns.

Interested in learning more about what’s new in GA4? Watch this webinar recording with Google rep Nick Danford and the Conversion Logix team.

Read This Next: GA4 Essentials: How to Set Up Conversions in GA4 [Updated]

The post GA4 Essentials: Interpreting New Metrics in GA4 [Updated] appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Google launched a new version of Google Analytics called GA4. If you’re a new user, your Google Analytics account will be created by default. If you’re an existing user, we recommend keeping your existing profile active and installing GA4 alongside your current profile.

In this blog post, we’ll explain how to upgrade your new GA4 property alongside your current Google Analytics account and walk you through the steps you need to get started in GA4. We’ll also talk through a few of the things to watch out for with this new platform.

The benefits of GA4 and what to watch out for:

• Google Analytics 4 comes with new metrics and cross-platform data collection and pulls in more event data than ever before. In order to make use of this new data, you will want to collect it for a while so your team can analyze trends over time. Google Analytics doesn’t report data retroactively, so starting the process with GA4 will enable you to collect historical data that you can use when you make the switch.
• The switch to GA4 means you will lose metrics that have long been regarded as website performance KPIs, like bounce rate, pages per session, and average session duration. In place of these, Google has added new metrics that more accurately report website engagement. It’s a good idea for your team to spend time learning the new KPIs GA4 relies on on in place of these to develop new internal benchmarks.
• GA4 uses a new event tracking and event reporting system, which means you will need to recreate the goals you have set up in Universal Analytics as conversions in the new platform. For some teams, this can be a time-consuming process, and skipping this step could mean losing access to the conversion data key decision-makers rely on.

Getting started with GA4

Before we show you how to set up GA4 in tandem with your existing universal analytics account, let’s go through a brief overview of how the account structure has changed from Universal Analytics to GA4.

In Universal Analytics, an account could contain multiple properties (these properties included a unique website or mobile application) and within a property were views. One website could have more than one view, which is another way of saying configuration (settings) in the platform. In place of this structure, GA4 has accounts, properties, and data streams. Properties within an account can now include both website data and mobile app data, unlike the past system, which required you to separate these into two properties. Data streams are what differentiate the data sources you collect data from in your property.

How to create a GA4 property from your existing Universal Analytics account:

Log into your existing Google Analytics account.

Select “Admin” on the bottom left.

Check the top left under “Account” and the “Create Account” button to make sure you’ve selected the right account.

Go to the middle column labeled “Property”. If you have more than one, select the one you want to create an upgraded GA4 property for. Click “GA Set Up Assistant” right below.

Click the “Get started” button below “I want to create a new Google Analytics 4 property”.

Enable data collection of your existing tags by checking the box at the bottom of the prompt. If you have any customized tags, those will have to be recreated once you are in the account. By enabling this option, you are allowing Google to alter the tracking code on your existing website so that you pull website data into GA4 without having to edit or reinstall your tracking code. This will also allow Google to pull in event tracking from your Universal Analytics account.

Next, click the “Create Property” button.

Once you create your property, you should see the following screen. This means your new GA4 property has been set up in tandem with your Universal Analytics account. If you click the button “See your GA4 property” you will be taken to the new GA4 interface. You will know you are in GA4 if you see 14 icons on the far left sidebar and an option to look at “Data Streams”, a new feature in GA4.

Conclusion

Once you set up your GA4 property, you’re ready to start tracking new metrics and events. After 24 hours, your event data will begin to appear on the platform. In the meantime, you can learn more about the new metrics you’ll see in the platform by watching this webinar recording with Google rep Nick Danford and the Conversion Logix team.

Read This Next: GA4 Essentials: Interpreting New Metrics in GA4 [Updated]

The post GA4 Essentials: What You Need to Know About GA4 [Updated] appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Google launched a new Google Analytics platform called GA4. GA4, otherwise known as Google Analytics 4, is now the default Google Analytics platform when you set up a new Google Analytics account. The new platform came with a lot of changes. New metrics have been added, familiar metrics have been removed, and the overall navigation of the platform has evolved. Users of the current analytics platform may find the experience a bit jarring as they enter the new interface. Here’s what’s new in GA4.

GA4 Event Tracking 

Event tracking is at the core of GA4’s new platform. Now Google uses machine learning to autonomously set up events that indicate user engagement on your website. In the current Google Analytics platform, events have to be created by an individual using Google tag manager or custom scripts. While GA4 still gives users the ability to add their own custom events, the events added by Google are used to determine engagement on the website, which bleeds into other new metrics in the platform.

The following events are used to report engagement in the new platform: active on the website for at least 10 seconds (set up by GA4), fires a conversion (conversions are set by the user), or fires two or more screen or page view events (set up by GA4).

New Google Ads Features Linked in GA4

One new feature that GA4 offers that the previous analytics platform didn’t is the ability to easily link ad accounts from the Analytics platform rather than in the ad account. Once Google Ads is linked to your new GA4 account, you will notice a few new improvements to the integration. 

New GA4 User Metrics 

Along with an overhaul of sessions, page views, and event tracking, Google launched a few new metrics that are critical to understand if you plan to use GA4. The three most important are user engagement, engagement time, and engaged sessions per user.

Multi-touch Attribution & Cross-Device Improvements

Google launched multi-touch attribution and cross-device tracking years ago, but they’ve made several improvements to the tracking. They improved user tracking and machine learning to fill in the gaps. This makes this data more accessible to accounts that typically don’t have enough data to report these insights.

Better Insights & Predictive Analytics

GA4, like its predecessor, has predictive analytics and recommendations in the platform. The recommendations are more common on pages outside of the platform home page, unlike the previous platform. Analysis of your data with tips for improving your website shows up on the right side of the screen across more pages. The recommendations have become more sophisticated as well.

New Google Analytics Reporting Tools

The new platform comes with templates that allow users to create custom reports they can come back to, like conversion funnels, user journey mapping, cohort analysis, and more. While some of this exists in the current platform, new templates have been added to go along with the new tracking capabilities. The templates are more user-friendly than before as well.

Conclusion

So what do you think about the new changes to Google Analytics? Are you ready to try out the new platform? If you are interested in getting started with GA4 but don’t know where to begin, watch the Marketing Academy: Applying Your Analytics webinar recording with Google rep Nick Danford and the Conversion Logix team.

Read This Next: GA4 Essentials: What You Need to Know About GA4 [Updated]

The post What is GA4? [Updated] appeared first on Conversion Logix.