Marketing

What is Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google’s web analytics measurement tool. It replaced Univeral Analytics when it went up on the first of July, 2023. Businesses and website owners use GA4 to analyze website data to keep track of their performance accurately across multiple platforms.

Google Analytics is a valuable tool and with the many changes made in the update from Universal Analytics to GA4, it’s important for website and business owners to understand what changes have been made and why they matter.

GA 4 vs. 3: What is the difference?

Google Analytics 3 was more commonly known as Universal Analytics. The most notable difference between the two versions is that Univeral Analytics focuses on sessions and pageviews. However, GA4 uses more data points to deliver a more complete and comprehensive view of your website’s analytics.

GA4 makes use of a machine learning model, which helps it keep track of the most important attributes of each website or app it monitors. With more useful data being gathered and displayed, website developers will gain clearer insight into how to improve their websites in ways that matter and deliver better results.

While GA4 collects more relevant data, Universal Analytics collected some data points that GA4 does not. Universal Analytics could track certain custom metrics and dimensions, which provided more detailed customer data, GA4 is unable to track this specific type of information. GA4 can also not perform cross-domain tracking, which is useful for tracking users across multiple apps or websites.

Despite these minor limitations, GA4 is still able to produce a more comprehensive breakdown and analysis of user behavior by collecting a broader scope of data. The data captured by the latest version of Google Analytics were implemented to help businesses make better decisions and optimize their user experience.

Is GA 4 Free?

Google Analytics 4 is the free version of the software provided by Google to everyone who runs or manages a website. Google Analytics 4 360 (GA4 360) is the paid version. GA4 360 is part of the Google Marketing Platform.

What is GA4 360?

GA4 360 is the enterprise version of Google Analytics. It has more advanced features and greater usage limits than the free version. It allows you to collect more extensive data before reaching or exceeding sampling limits, giving you more data to work with and creating better, more informed insights. It also provides more flexibility in data collection by giving you more functions to use. It lets you create custom dimensions, look for custom metrics, event parameters and anything else you need.

What are GA4 Features?

Google Analytics 4 has loads of features that make it an essential part of any web developer’s and website manager’s tool kit. Here are seven main features that GA4 provides users with:

• Real-time data: Monitor and track data as it happens using GA4’s real-time data tracking capabilities. You can monitor user interactions as they happen, which is perfect when running user tests and seeing how people interact with newly implemented features. This feature does more than capture valuable data. It is also a valuable tool for improving customer satisfaction and user experience. Find out how they navigate your website and which pages they look for the most so you can make shortcuts or promote links.
• User-centric reporting: GA4 captures user journey data and more than page views. The Google Analytics reporting feature lets you track various valuable data to help improve your website. With the focus on user-centric data reports, it’s never been easier to optimize how your website works to attract more traffic and increase session time.
• E-commerce data tracking: The e-commerce tracking feature helps businesses with online stores learn more about their customers. It provides data that provides a granular understanding of your customers by looking at the content they interact with, their user journey and more. Stores and e-commerce tools like Shopify are GA4 compatible, so no matter how you run your store, you can still get all the benefits of Google Analytics.
• Simplified implementation: Implementing and using GA4 has been simplified to make it a more accessible and usable tool for all website owners, regardless of skill level. Setting up an account and migrating data to the platform is straightforward and user-friendly.
• Machine learning: GA4 produces insights for the user through machine learning. These generated insights can recommend audience segments, provide revenue forecasts and more. All machine learning insights will help businesses and developers make proactive decisions.
• Event-driven data tracking: A feature new to Google Analytics is the event-driven data model. By setting custom events to track, developers and owners can gain more useful and relevant data relating to the events they want to learn more about. Events include clicking an ad, purchasing a product and many more actions.
• Cross-platform tracking: This feature lets you track user activity between different platforms. You can monitor how they move from a website they are visiting to an app or another site. This allows you to gain deeper insight into how users behave and how to predict or entice them to act in a certain way.

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Getting valuable data and insights is one thing, but knowing what to do with them and how to action your ideas is another. At Grade My Website our experts can help you achieve your wildest ambitions and elevate your website to new levels. We are a full-service digital marketing agency with years of experience and a long list of incredible results and success stories to prove our ability.

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