Universal Analytics (UA) will soon fade into the digital marketing history books. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will take its place. What does this mean for brands and the digital marketers who support them?
Ask digital marketers how they feel about the upcoming transition from UA to GA4, and they might tell you they’re nervous. That the deprecation of UA is coming too soon. We feel it, too. We are also jumping at the bit.
The truth is, this change is big AND it’s exciting. And Google is making it easy to be proactive in preparing for the transition from UA to GA4 by communicating the timeline well in advance and building in an overlap, i.e., really generous grace period.
Check it. Google has given us a solid three years for making the move from UA to GA4. That feels about right.
UA was built and optimized for a primarily desktop-based internet, with people interacting with brands and information while seated in a chair, looking at a big screen, navigating with a mouse. You probably still know the motions.
One of the key differences between UA and GA4 is the ability to measure users’ interactions with brands across both websites and apps, desktop and mobile, creating a more unified look at their engagement with brands’ data streams. A combination of more powerful identity signals and event-based modeling takes this a step further, making it easier to deduplicate data and pinpoint a given user’s specific actions on a brand site or app.
In addition to improved measurement overall, GA4 also offers:
These features work together to create a clearer AND broader understanding of users’ relationships with brands that UA just didn’t provide. We’re already living in the future that GA4 is built to address—engaging with brands at the literal touch of a screen—so it’s only natural that we shift measurement and analytics to match.
In order to stay ahead of the program, it is imperative for businesses to establish GA4 properties well in advance of the deprecation date of July 1, 2023. The good news is that GA4 properties can be set up alongside existing UA properties, so digital markets can ingest data and take advantage of GA4’s new features without affecting your UA properties.
As we familiarize ourselves with GA4 and discover the powerful insights it is capable of producing, apprehension surrounding the transition is sure to melt away. The move from UA to GA4 opens the door to a more comprehensive understanding of customers and their behaviors across platforms. The more we understand about the customer journey, the more informed our decisions become, empowering us to achieve and exceed brands’ business objectives.
All to say, we’re already well on our way to making the transition for the brands we support. If you have questions about how your digital marketing team is preparing your brand, let’s talk.