DATA ANALYSIS

Hello Google Analytics 4

(everything you need to know)

Data is becoming increasingly valuable to businesses, especially in the competitive travel and tourism sector. As a result, organisations turned to tools such as Google Analytics to measure their performance. In less than 12 months Google Analytics will be turned off in favour of Google Analytics 4 affecting every single website in the south west.

This article from Marwick Marketing CEO, Christian Thomson, explores everything you need to know about Google Analytics 4.

Google Analytics 4, announced in October 2020, marks a significant shift in how web and app properties are tracked. The change acknowledges the increasing overlap between web and mobile app development and responds to marketers’ repeated calls for unified data. As a result, Google Analytics 4 aims to remove the need for manual switching between platforms. Google Analytics 4 is an entirely new product that can be installed alongside your existing Universal Analytics profile. As users become more concerned about data collection and privacy, more people are opting to hide or block websites from collecting specific data. Google Analytics 4 was created to fix this problem. Instead of relying solely on available user data, the platform utilises artificial intelligence and machine learning to build reports that model visitors to your website and create a forecast of what user data might look like if all data was collected.

User Journey

One of the key benefits of Google Analytics 4 is that you will learn more about user journeys. The focus is no longer on easily fragmentable measurements by device or platform but on users and their interactions which are captured as events rather than hits. This new and improved model allows you to look at a set of metrics for web and app data, allowing for more logical and intelligent aggregation. For example, people who visit your website may use multiple devices in a short amount of time. They might initially visit your website on their mobile, only to open your website on their laptop and then purchase a product on your app. Before, these user journeys were separate. With Google Analytics 4, these user journeys are stitched together, giving you a more accurate picture.

Engagement

Google Analytics 4 is more focused on engagement than Universal Analytics. The new platform replaces ‘Audience’, ‘Acquisition’, ‘Behaviour’ and ‘Conversion’ with ‘Lifecycle’ sections, containing ‘Acquisition’, ‘Engagement’, ‘Monetisation’ and ‘Retention’. Additionally, the tool includes a section devoted entirely to users, which focuses on user demographics and the technology used. The new platform uses artificial intelligence to predict customer actions from how they interact with your content.

Privacy and Tracking

In recent years, there have been calls for Google Analytics to offer users more control over the collection of personal data—Google Analytics 4 has answered this call with a platform that is “privacy-focused and durable for the

future”. Now, you and your users have more control over what personal data is collected, enabling you as a business owner to comply with relevant privacy regulations. For example, you can exclude specific user properties from ads personalisation. However, as users push for enhanced privacy, tracking users across different platforms is becoming harder. Google Analytics 4 uses machine learning to fill in data gaps in response to this problem.

Predictive Metrics

As we alluded to previously, Google Analytics 4 supports three predictive metrics: purchase probability, churn probability and revenue prediction.

• Purchase probability: The probability that a user active in the last 28 days will start a purchase event within the next week.

• Churn probability: The probability that a user that was active on your website within the last week will not be active within the next week.

• Revenue prediction: Revenue expected from purchase events within the next 28 days from users who were active on the website within 28 days.

These predictive metrics are created using machine learning algorithms that measure customer progress towards a conversion.

New and Improved Visualisations and Reporting Tools

While much of the user interface has stayed the same, several new visualisations and enhanced reporting tools are available. The Analysis Hub is one of the most noteworthy features of Google Analytics 4, as it will allow you to gain deeper insights into customer behaviour. This, in turn, will give you the insights you need to make better marketing decisions. Additionally, Google Analytics 4 offers built-in reports for top-level data. Using the Analysis Hub, users can create custom reports that drill down to specific data and have more freedom to choose the format and type of data included in a report.

Conclusion: Analysis Over Reporting

Google Analytics 4 will be a vital tool for tourism businesses thanks to its new insights into user journeys, a focus on engagement, improved privacy for users, predictive metrics using artificial intelligence and machine learning, custom event parameters, and new and improved visualisations and reporting tools. What separates Google Analytics 4 from earlier versions is that it is an analysis tool rather than a reporting tool. Universal Analytics was created to collect information, store data and build reports from said data. Google Analytics 4 marks a clear separation from this—instead, the platform will give business owners the tools to analyse users to determine their next steps. As a result, it will take time for you to master Google Analytics 4. Therefore, we recommend that you set up Google Analytics 4 alongside your current Universal Analytics to give you time to learn the tool and gather the data you will need when Universal Analytics is replaced by Google Analytics 4 on 1st July 2023.

User journeys are stitched together, giving you a more accurate picture