You Ask, I Answer: First Impressions of Google Analytics 4?

In today's episode, Tristan asks, how are you getting on with the new Google Analytics for interface and data collection? Yeah, Google Analytics 4 is a major sea change for uh marketers for all of us in how we use the application. And it represents a sea change in how Google thinks of its own marketing platform. You know, traditional Google Analytics, the classic version, which really has been functionally similar for the last 15 years since they bought it from Urchin in 2005. It it's always been kind of all in one application where you you drop the uh the tracking code and then you do everything in Google Analytics and uh and you get your reports and stuff, and and that's the way people have been used to using this thing.

Um now the new version really represents a more mature philosophy about analytics and about analytics infrastructure. It is going to cause um some people some pretty significant changes in how they do uh how they do their analytics, how they think about their analytics. Um let's uh let's go ahead and and and flip over here. So if you have not seen it already, this is what Google Analytics for looks like. And at first glance, it look you looks okay.

Kind of see how it looks like Google Analytics. You see some of the the very basics, but you'll notice right away, particularly when you go into things like the admin here, some major changes. There used to be things called accounts properties and views. Views are gone, right? Which makes you go, um, well, where do I put my goals?

Those are gone too. Um, there's some there are different ways Google is handling this now. Um you see from a philosophical perspective, you see now that Google Analytics really is a true analysis engine, even has an you know an analysis hub here where you can do ad hoc um analysis of your data, true slice and dice. Let's look at your data and see all the different ways that you can analyze it to try and understand what happened. So that raises the question well, where are your reports?

Uh many of them, again, are gone. There's a there's a slimmer uh view in here, and the way that we track things has substantially changed. So let's go ahead and look here at user acquisition real quick. Uh, how do I get users to my website? Uh you'll notice channel groupings are gone, right?

So the you know, organic, social, email, all that's gone, and it's now source medium uh or just medium, depending on uh what you want to use. Um this is a big change because for years we've used channel groupings um to sort of classify traffic, and now medium honestly has been channel for a really long time anyway, but this is going to be a big problem for some folks if you don't have good governance, if you don't have really solid um logical ways of of laying out your source medium, like the medium is is effectively a channel. So as you're doing your tracking codes, your UTM tracking codes, once you implement uh GA4, you're really gonna have to make sure that they're logical, they're sensible, and that they and that um you and your vendors all agree on what those should be. Because if you don't, you're gonna have a hot mess in here. Um the other big thing, and this is really a uh I think probably the biggest change for everybody, is that the scopes are gone.

So previously there were four scopes in Google Analytics and different metrics within each of them. There was users, there were hits, there were sessions, and there were products, right? Those are the four major scopes. And there are some things, like for example, bounce rate was a page level uh scope, uh hit level, uh, whereas say retention uh was a user-level scope, and you couldn't mix and match the two. It just didn't work because they were they were different measures.

Um now everything is events. Everything from from the littlest interaction all the way up to the biggest measurement is all based on events. And what this means is that we have to radically rethink how we do our analysis, right? Uh everything from uh you know how you do our tracking codes to even your goals. Like, for example, in here, there are all these different events, and you can mark some of them as conversions if you know what they are.

One of the big things that you're gonna have to do right off the bat when you switch over in Google to Google Analytics for is go into uh, for example, your Google Tag Manager, which is where you're gonna be doing all of your goal setting, goal configuration, and go through and actually uh rebuild your goals as as events. So you have to specify like what these things are, and you know, tag manager is is gonna be the place that you do that. So events are the new way of thinking about every interaction with a user, and that's a good in a lot of ways because now you get rid of well, you know, you can't have this um bounce rate if uh you're dealing looking at users. Now it's all events top to bottom. One of the other big changes that's gonna be that's super important for data nerds, is that Google Analytics now out of the box integrates with Google's bigQuery database.

They can link it up to a table, and then in your BigQuery database, you can see all of the data that you get out of Google Analytics. Let's make this a little bit bigger here, at a an individual hit level, which is pretty amazing. Uh and you can see what types the all the different types of events, session starts, page views, uh, any of the events you configure, user engagements, um, and each one of these has things like source and medium, uh, campaign, all this the really good data that we've been frankly craving forever, right? Um if you have great database skills, this is a gold mine. This is where you're not you're now going to be able to build amazing attribution analyses, amazing um uh reports of every kind.

And that brings me to like the last thought on this. This change now means that Google Analytics is no longer an all-in-one application, it is one of three pieces. So, tag manager, a lot of the things that you used to do in Google Analytics, you now do in Tag Manager. Um, so it is sort of the the tracking and configuration component of the the marketing platform, Google marketing platform. Google Analytics now actually lives up to its name.

It is the analysis engine that takes that raw data coming from Tag Manager, slices and dices it, um, and prepares it for analysis, and there are analysis tools, real business intelligence tools in here. What's not in here is a lot of canned reports. There's very, very few canned reports. Instead, there is the analysis hub, um, and it is up to you as the user to kind of go in here and build these reports for if you know what you're looking for to do at the ad hoc analysis. And you'll note that a lot of these really are deep dives into your data.

What's not in here are the simple reports, right? So, where do they go? That's all Data Studio. Google intends for Data Studio to be the visualization and reporting engine to take all the data that you've analyzed and sliced and diced in Google Analytics and pass it to Data Studio so you can do your visualizations there. And again, because everything is now at the event level, we see that the raw data, um, you'll do things like segments and filtering and stuff within Data Studio and not in Google Analytics.

Because again, with the view gone, there is no more, there are no more segments. That's that's gone. Now it is all that's all handled in the your visualization and reporting engine, which is Google Data Studio. So this is a big change. The good news is you don't have to switch over right away.

And there's not even been been given a timeline as to when they're gonna sunset classic Google Analytics. So if you're just trying to get stuff done, um stick with classic. If you want access to the good stuff in terms of raw data, in terms of you know database level stuff and the new analysis engine, it's turn on Google Analytics 4. I recommend that everybody turn it on, get the the basics uh tagging and tracking set up so that you have the data. Because one thing that hasn't changed, nothing with Google is ever retroactive.

You can't go back in time. So get the get it configured, get your goals set up, get it deployed, and then don't worry about it if you can't make use of it, right? Just so that you're getting the data in the system and you're tracking it. Um, and then you can always come back later and tune things up, especially since it's now an analysis engine, which means that if you've got the data, uh you'll be able to slice it and dice it all kinds of different ways. So do that.

If you got questions on that or you need help with that, uh let me know. Uh if you go to trustinsights.ai, uh my company's website, you can uh ask for some help there. Uh and this free Slack group we have too, trustinsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. But yeah, there's a ton of new stuff that's going on with Google Analytics 4. I recommend that you get your feet wet and at least get familiar with it and all the big changes, and then uh and go from there.

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