Google’s upcoming GA4 update has been generating a lot of buzz in marketing circles — and for good reason. Its predecessor Google UA is what many people have gotten very accustomed to over the last nine years, so making the shift to a new platform is going to take some adjusting.
However, there’s a lot that the new GA4 has to offer in terms of improvements on what Google UA started. Here are some of the benefits you can expect to enjoy with GA4 this coming July.
Flexibility for Future Updates
Google UA has been around for a fairly long time now, and it’s become pretty outdated. There are plenty of updates and features that don’t work like they’re supposed to. By all accounts, GA4 has been designed to be much more flexible for future updates, making new additions, features and capabilities easier to develop and implement.
GA4 is also going to be more adaptable to cookie-less functioning. It will use an event-based measurement model just like Google UA, but will track and gather insights without cookies, something that’s important as the entire internet moves toward cookie-less functioning.
Single View
Google UA always allowed for multiple views per property, but in GA4, there will only be one view per property. The reason this is going away is because having multiple different parties sharing one account with multiple views would lead to discrepancy in reporting among vendors, which is a big issue. Multiple people looking at different views of the same data and presenting it in different ways created lots of confusion. Having one centralized point for the data so that everyone is looking at the same thing will help to reduce this issue.
Changing Metrics
Some data metrics from Google UA are going away, such as Bounce Rate, Pages-Per-Session, Average Session Duration and Unique Page Views. With GA4, Google is trying to introduce a more holistic approach to using AI, and getting rid of these metrics is part of that.
Instead, new metrics are going to be introduced like Engaged Sessions, to provide data on the percentage of user sessions that had engaged traffic. Other metrics focused on engagement will be popping up as well, like Engagement Rate, Views and more, meaning that although we’re losing certain metrics that we’ve gotten used to, we’re gaining other valuable ones.
Switching from Google UA GA4 next July will certainly be an adjustment, but there’s a lot of benefits to this update that we can look forward to. If you want to learn more about the GA4 update, other changes to expect, and how to protect your existing data from Google UA, continue reading here.
