Revealing Insights: Our first experiences with Google Analytics 4
Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2025 4:35 am
Google Analytics 4 is coming. Whether you’re ready or not, GA4 is fast approaching. At Rock Content, we’ve been playing around with the tool and adapting our processes to make sure we’re ready for when GA4 hits the market.
In this article, I'll share our experience with GA4, from how we're adapting to new features and changes to things we liked, as well as what we missed compared to UA (Universal Analytics).
If you’re a marketing professional, this is definitely something you’ll why choose our service want to read up on. So, without further ado, let’s take a first look at Google Analytics 4!
The story of a name: GA4
Google Analytics 4 is the fourth version of the most popular web analytics service offered on the Internet. According to W3Techs , Google Analytics is used by 56.6% of all websites, representing an 86.1% share of the traffic analysis tools market.
Since acquiring Urchin in 2005, Google has released improvements and updates on a regular basis. In 2007, it launched Google Analytics Classic (2nd version), and in 2009, an asynchronous version that allowed web pages to load faster and improved the accuracy of data collection.
Universal Analytics (the 3rd version of Google Analytics) was launched over ten years ago in 2012 and remains the most widely used version today. Compared to its predecessors, it provided more detailed insights into user behavior and had several back-end improvements.
While Google has continually improved Universal Analytics, its most significant change has been the launch of the global site tag ( gtag.js ) in 2017, which was intended to allow users to manage multiple Google products with the same tag. Other than that, we’ve been using the same version of analytics for ten years.
And that’s about to change. Google announced that on July 1, 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties would no longer process data. You’ll be able to view your Universal Analytics reports for a period of time after July 1, 2023. However, new data will only flow to Google Analytics 4 properties.
So, if you are still using the Google Universal version, it is time to get out of your comfort zone and learn something new.
Why is Google Analytics releasing a new version?
The digital world has changed a lot in the last decade. Today, companies must tackle the complex task of recording their customers’ cross-platform experiences while maintaining user privacy.
GA4 was born with privacy at its core, no longer storing IP addresses or relying exclusively on cookies. It also uses an event-based data model to offer user-centric measurement.
While Universal Analytics offers a variety of privacy controls, Google Analytics 4 has more comprehensive and granular controls for data collection and use. These solutions and controls are especially necessary for today's global data privacy landscape, where users increasingly expect greater privacy protection and control over their personal information.
GA4 provides a more reliable tracking system with improved data accuracy. This means that GA4 can track users across their devices such as desktop, mobile, tablets and has been designed to work with or without cookies.
Tracking users who have disabled or blocked cookies was impossible with Universal Analytics. Machine learning and statistical modeling offer a promising solution through GA4. This allows companies to fill data gaps and gain valuable customer insights that were previously unavailable.
A privacy-focused design allows GA4 to maintain key information despite cookie blockers and privacy regulations.
GA4 has many similarities with Universal Analytics, but it introduces some significant changes to note. Let’s dive deeper into our experience with the tool.
What we liked about GA4
There are many differences between GA4 and Universal GA, and we liked most of them. In the end, GA4 provides businesses with greater clarity on user behavior and deeper insights than ever before.
Google Analytics has undergone its most significant overhaul since it was originally launched. This isn't just a simple facelift. It's a whole new product!
Here I would like to summarize the main changes we observed and provide you with an overview and links to more detailed information, should you decide to explore it further.
Ready-to-use event tracking
The first thing that stands out when working with GA4 is how easy it is to set up and how quickly you can start collecting event data.
For Google Universal Analytics, you needed to create custom events for everything except page views. In GA4, everything is event-based, and you can enable some to be captured automatically with the new, improved event measurement. In addition to mandatory page view, you can enable capture of page scroll (90% depth only), outbound clicks, site search, form interactions, video interaction, and file downloads.
It was a good opportunity to review our existing event tracking strategy and see what we needed to implement custom or not in our new GA4 property.
Adopting Google Analytics 4 also allows us to confirm which KPIs were important to our stakeholders. After analyzing the data, we came to the conclusion that some of our previous conversions were no longer meaningful and identified new tactics to measure success.
In this article, I'll share our experience with GA4, from how we're adapting to new features and changes to things we liked, as well as what we missed compared to UA (Universal Analytics).
If you’re a marketing professional, this is definitely something you’ll why choose our service want to read up on. So, without further ado, let’s take a first look at Google Analytics 4!
The story of a name: GA4
Google Analytics 4 is the fourth version of the most popular web analytics service offered on the Internet. According to W3Techs , Google Analytics is used by 56.6% of all websites, representing an 86.1% share of the traffic analysis tools market.
Since acquiring Urchin in 2005, Google has released improvements and updates on a regular basis. In 2007, it launched Google Analytics Classic (2nd version), and in 2009, an asynchronous version that allowed web pages to load faster and improved the accuracy of data collection.
Universal Analytics (the 3rd version of Google Analytics) was launched over ten years ago in 2012 and remains the most widely used version today. Compared to its predecessors, it provided more detailed insights into user behavior and had several back-end improvements.
While Google has continually improved Universal Analytics, its most significant change has been the launch of the global site tag ( gtag.js ) in 2017, which was intended to allow users to manage multiple Google products with the same tag. Other than that, we’ve been using the same version of analytics for ten years.
And that’s about to change. Google announced that on July 1, 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties would no longer process data. You’ll be able to view your Universal Analytics reports for a period of time after July 1, 2023. However, new data will only flow to Google Analytics 4 properties.
So, if you are still using the Google Universal version, it is time to get out of your comfort zone and learn something new.
Why is Google Analytics releasing a new version?
The digital world has changed a lot in the last decade. Today, companies must tackle the complex task of recording their customers’ cross-platform experiences while maintaining user privacy.
GA4 was born with privacy at its core, no longer storing IP addresses or relying exclusively on cookies. It also uses an event-based data model to offer user-centric measurement.
While Universal Analytics offers a variety of privacy controls, Google Analytics 4 has more comprehensive and granular controls for data collection and use. These solutions and controls are especially necessary for today's global data privacy landscape, where users increasingly expect greater privacy protection and control over their personal information.
GA4 provides a more reliable tracking system with improved data accuracy. This means that GA4 can track users across their devices such as desktop, mobile, tablets and has been designed to work with or without cookies.
Tracking users who have disabled or blocked cookies was impossible with Universal Analytics. Machine learning and statistical modeling offer a promising solution through GA4. This allows companies to fill data gaps and gain valuable customer insights that were previously unavailable.
A privacy-focused design allows GA4 to maintain key information despite cookie blockers and privacy regulations.
GA4 has many similarities with Universal Analytics, but it introduces some significant changes to note. Let’s dive deeper into our experience with the tool.
What we liked about GA4
There are many differences between GA4 and Universal GA, and we liked most of them. In the end, GA4 provides businesses with greater clarity on user behavior and deeper insights than ever before.
Google Analytics has undergone its most significant overhaul since it was originally launched. This isn't just a simple facelift. It's a whole new product!
Here I would like to summarize the main changes we observed and provide you with an overview and links to more detailed information, should you decide to explore it further.
Ready-to-use event tracking
The first thing that stands out when working with GA4 is how easy it is to set up and how quickly you can start collecting event data.
For Google Universal Analytics, you needed to create custom events for everything except page views. In GA4, everything is event-based, and you can enable some to be captured automatically with the new, improved event measurement. In addition to mandatory page view, you can enable capture of page scroll (90% depth only), outbound clicks, site search, form interactions, video interaction, and file downloads.
It was a good opportunity to review our existing event tracking strategy and see what we needed to implement custom or not in our new GA4 property.
Adopting Google Analytics 4 also allows us to confirm which KPIs were important to our stakeholders. After analyzing the data, we came to the conclusion that some of our previous conversions were no longer meaningful and identified new tactics to measure success.