GA4 — When should you Jump in?

Google Analytics is a staple of digital marketers everywhere. The amount of data that your organization can leverage without any cost being incurred is significant. The only upfront cost for most businesses is deployment in development time.

When the analytics platform begins to iterate into a new version, it creates a deficit. Many brands have no problem with the way their Google Analytics is currently set up and their decision to prioritize tagging their website with GA4 will be driven by how fast universal analytics will be deprecated (likely, not fast at all) and more importantly, what new features GA4 will bring them.

The feature parity between Google Universal Analytics and GA4 is actually very close. The main purpose of the new technology is to consolidate tracking between Android / iOS and web tracking.

An example of reporting for both Android App and Web in one place.

For brands that have actively been investing in their app experience and have a robust CRM that they can use to stitch together sessions, this tool is a powerful option.

It does however come with a slew of new technological changes.

1. Hit types are now all classified as events rather than existing across different buckets (Pageview, Event, and Transactions to name a few). it will be important to pass in attributes with event hits that are supposed to contain more information like product arrays or event category/action/label.
2. Sessions are changing, new attribution sources no longer reset the session and there is no longer a session scope for custom dimensions in GA4
3. Client ID’s can no longer be retrieved using the GA command queue (This is a staple of getting granular data in Google Analytics reports currently and is a feature of the User Explorer)
4. New interface that removes many of the standard reports from the sidebar that are familiar to Google Analytics users

Perhaps one of the most valuable benefits to Google Analytics 4 is that it will now offer a connection to BigQuery for everyone (premium and non-premium users alike). This improvement will remove the need to use the reporting API, ETL, and data warehousing techniques altogether and is a very good thing.

GA4 is the best way to combine web and app traffic together, the features for this tracking method are growing every month and features like automated insights will likely push this technology from being a nice to have for app/web platforms to being a must-have across the board. Our recommendation at SMI is to start building a GA4 property now if you have an app. It will be important to begin familiarizing yourself with it’s very new and different deployment structure.