Main differences between Google Analytics 4 & Universal Analytics (Ft. Hackle)
Google Analytics is an analytics service that tracks and reports website and app traffic. Since the initial launch of the service in 2005, Google Analytics has undergone many transformations, and currently, the latest version GA4 allows for the cross-platform tracking and reporting of data for both web and app platforms.
In this blog we will cover:
- What is GA4?
- What is Hackle?
- GA4 VS UA
- GA4 VS Hackle
What is GA4?
Google Analytics 4, or GA4, is the latest data analytics tool from Google Analytics (GA) that collects data from apps and websites. Once GA4 is set up on your app or website, you will be able to collect and analyze your customers’ behavior and how they use your digital products. This allows many different teams within tech firms to gain insights on how and where to make improvements.
What is Hackle?
Hackle is an all-in-one platform that provides all the necessary tools for digital tech teams to scale up. With a single SDK integration, Hackle’s customers can enjoy event management tools, data analytics, A/B testing, and feature flags all from a single platform. As one of the world’s most customer-oriented SaaS companies, Hackle’s customers can enjoy the most optimized platform to seamlessly create impactful digital products.
Launched in 2020, Hackle was created by a group of experienced product managers, data scientists, and software engineers who successfully launched, optimized, and grew their digital products to surpass 10M+ MAU (monthly active users) using their data insights.
As you can infer, GA4 and Hackle are similar at their core. They are both SaaS tools that collect and process user behavior data. Tools that are becoming increasingly sought after by product owners, growth marketers, data scientists, and developers in order to help gain the right insights to make the right improvements on websites or apps to make informed decisions. Such decision-making processes are powerful because data-backed decisions can translate into positive performance on business KPIs and metrics that count.
The major differences between GA4 and UA
Universal Analytics, hereinafter referred to as “UA”, is the previous version of GA4. Due to the differences, the launch of GA4 has led many marketers to re-evaluate how marketers understand user data.
Tracking User Data: Events and Sessions
User data tracking and the approach to data collection between GA4 and UA are completely different. UA defines user behavior as “hits” and each hit is session-based. Hits are categorized into three main groups: page views, events, or transactions. Session is an umbrella term that groups all hits that happen within a certain time period together underneath one session. Hence each “session” can include multiple user behavior hits such as page views and several transactions (In UA, if a user is inactive for more than 30 minutes, they are regarded as a new session).
If you wanted to collect data on other user behavior other than the number of page views of different pages navigated within a website, you would have to manually set up the additional event behaviors with UA.
On the other hand, for GA4, all user behavior is defined as “events”, which allows for the versatility in the type of user behavior data that is being collected. This means that any type of event can be tracked with the updated GA4, which helps users meet their unique tracking needs depending on the type of digital product they have. GA4 logs events automatically without requiring code, reducing the dependencies on tech teams to configure events using global site tags (gtag.js) or Google Tag Managers. Automatically collected events include recommended events, automatically collected events, and enhanced measurement events. However, on top of the automatically collected events, if you would like to track custom events, you would have to set these up manually with code.
Web or App VS Web and App from a Single Dashboard
The number of properties that can be synced within a single dashboard is also different between GA4 and UA. The term “properties” have a unique meaning within the Google ecosystem. Simply put, properties are the platforms from which data is being collected, which means that it can either be your website, app, blog, or any other type of digital platform.
With UA, the type of properties you could sync up was limited to websites. If you wanted to collect data on mobile apps, you had to familiarize yourself with another separate Google Analytics tool called Firebase.
On the other hand with GA4, you are able to combine the different properties to analyze from a single dashboard which allows for a cross-platform analysis.
Traffic Limitations
With the free version of UA, you were only allowed up to 10 million hits per month per property. With the free version of GA4, there is no limit to the number of events that can be collected, you do not have to worry about additional data not being processed even if you have a high level of traffic. However, with the GA4, there is a limitation on the number in the type of unique events that you can set up. Hence, once you exceed the given quota, you will not be able to add new events to the list to track ane measure.
The major differences between GA4 and Hackle
Hackle’s Data Analytics Interface
GA4’s new dashboard interface has a lot of mixed reviews. Many claim that it is hard to navigate around and is designed specifically for large companies with their own analytics team. Unlike GA4, Hackle’s dashboard interface is highly customizable and built with all teams in mind.
Tracking and Managing User Data
Similar to GA4, Hackle places even greater importance on defining and keeping track of each and every user behavior data that is collected from a particular website or app. Hackle also defines all user behavior as events that allow for flexibility in the type of data and user behavior that is collected from each platform.
Hackle’s Event Management is a menu within the Hackle dashboard that allows you to easily create, log and manage all the events associated with your device. Hence Hackle allows you to not only perform data analytics but create and manage all your events from a single platform. Here you can manage not just the automatically collected events that Hackle’s SDK automatically detects from your code but also the events you created yourself on the Hackle dashboard. Unlike Google Analytics 4’s rather rigid interface, Hackle understands how hard it is for all team members to keep track and remember all the different types of user behavior that correspond to each event name. Hackle’s Event Management allows team members to include a photo and screenshot of the event.
Setting up and configuring events for data collection
GA4 defines the digital products to sync to Google Analytics as properties. While Hackle does not have a separate name for the digital product you sync with our dashboard, we offer SDKs based on different coding languages in order to cater to each digital product. Currently, Hackle supports iOS, Android, Javascript, React, React Native, Java/Kotlin, Python, Node.js, Unity, Ruby, and PHP allowing users to integrate any type of app or website with the Hackle dashboard.
Moreover, with Google Analytics, rather than using SDKs and managing all your events via Hackle’s Event Management, you need to familiarize yourself with the Google Tag Manager, a tag management system that you have to set up in order to manage and deploy marketing tags. Although you can use g-tags, these only work with Google tools, and hence many opt to use Google Tag Managers when setting up their Google Analytics tools for the first time.
Google Tag Manager works alongside Google Analytics and essentially acts as the file cabinet or database for all the events that are being collected. However as it does not have data reporting features, a Google Tag Manager is a separate account that is used to track and send data from your website, which means that you have multiple accounts to manage. However with Hackle, with a single SDK integration, you can view and manage all events within the same dashboard as when you carry out A/B testing or data analytics.
Event Limitations
GA4 has a limitation on the number of events to track. Unlike GA4, Hackle does not have a limitation on the type and number of events that can be set up from the Hackle dashboard.
Sampled VS Unsampled Data
Sampled data is when a portion of the total data is used to estimate the actual total. Data sampling is a common concept that many users of Google Analytics tools are familiar with. Although data sampling translates to the faster speed at which Google Analytics can serve up data reports, data sampling can cause many problems. Especially in cases where you need to analyze precise data, for example, the total revenue or conversion rate. In GA4, if you want to create advanced reports or if you exceed 10 million events, you will most likely be given sampled results. Advanced reports in GA4 are a set of tools that allow you to go beyond the default key business metrics for a more in-depth analysis of user behavior, which means that collecting accurate data would be even more important. With Hackle’s Data Analytics platform, data is never sampled, and even if you set up advanced metrics, our dashboard will only serve up calculations that are created by data collected from all users.
A/B Testing and Experimentation with User Data
Analyzing the trend in user data is important but experimentation is one of the direct methods to allow teams to make the right decisions in changing different features in order to optimize user experiences. People can not only create new hypotheses and gradually find out the elements that impact user behavior and experiences.
Hackle places great pride in creating the most customer-oriented platform that is not only easy to use but contains all the necessary tools in order to assist teams with product development. Hence, with a single SDK integration, you can not only track the necessary data collected from each platform, but you can also conduct controlled online experiments or A/B tests from the same dashboard. However, within the Google ecosystem, GA4 and Google’s experimentation platform called Google Optimize are separate platforms. In order to use the data from GA4 in an A/B test, you need to first link your Google Optimize dashboard to your GA4 property, however, this only integrates the data or data stream. Even if you perform a detailed data analysis from your GA4 platform, if you would like to perform a specific A/B test, you would still have to navigate to a new Google Optimize dashboard to do so.
“We have experienced product managers dedicated to helping you reach your success and desired metrics.”
Unlike GA4, we have experienced product managers who are highly skilled in user conversion and product optimization via data. We provide various webinars and 1:1 coffee chat sessions for startups who are in the early stages of using data. From explaining the basic concepts of events and what they are to personally assisting the set-up stage of defining the right metrics/events that are needed for each experiment, our consulting team acts as the data-scientist next door for our clients.
Other than our user-friendly dashboard, we believe that the onboarding process of helping businesses correctly set up their websites/apps and understand the key concepts behind setting up the data analytics platform is one of the most important pre-requisite steps in order to allow firms to create impact via data.
Check out Hackle now to collect meaningful data and make informed decisions to create the best digital product experience for your consumers. With our Free Plan, you will be able to use all the tools required in product development for free from setting up advanced metrics for your A/B test to configuring unique events to track for your data analysis.
