Google Analytics 4 was introduced to address the challenges businesses face in today’s measurement landscape, where they need to understand the complex, multi-platform journeys of their customers while also prioritizing user privacy. Google Analytics 4 is a flexible measurement solution that is designed for the future, with the ability to measure a variety of data types and provide a strong analytics experience. It enables businesses to see unified user journeys across their websites and apps, use Google’s machine learning technology to surface and predict new insights, and adapt to a changing ecosystem.

It is important to have a modern measurement solution in order to access essential insights that can impact your business. Therefore, now is the time to adopt Google Analytics 4 as your cross-platform analytics solution. In the near future, we will be discontinuing Universal Analytics, the previous generation of analytics. On July 1, 2023, all standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new data, while Universal Analytics 360 properties will have an additional three months of processing until October 1, 2023.

Moving on from Universal Analytics

Universal Analytics was designed for a time when online measurement was focused on the desktop web and used independent sessions and easily observable data from cookies. However, this measurement methodology is becoming outdated. In contrast, Google Analytics 4 is designed to operate across platforms and uses an event-based data model to provide user-centric measurement that is not reliant on cookies. Additionally, Google Analytics 4 prioritizes privacy in order to provide a better experience for customers and their users. It offers comprehensive and granular controls for data collection and usage that meet evolving user expectations and privacy needs, and it does not store IP addresses. These features are particularly important in today’s data privacy landscape, where users are increasingly seeking more control over their data.

Starting your measurement with Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 is tailored to help businesses achieve their key objectives, such as increasing sales or app installs, generating leads, and connecting online and offline customer engagement. Some of the ways that Google Analytics 4 can support a business include:

Understand your customers across touchpoints

Obtain a comprehensive view of the customer lifecycle using an event-based measurement model that is not fragmented by platform or organized into independent sessions. For instance, the UK-based fitness brand Gymshark used Google Analytics 4 to measure across its website and app, enabling them to gain a deeper understanding of how users moved through the purchase funnel. This led to a 9% reduction in user drop-off, a 5% increase in product page click-throughs, and a 30% reduction in the time the Gymshark team spent on analyzing user journeys.

Improve ROI with data-driven attribution

Data-driven attribution allows you to analyze the full impact of your marketing efforts across the customer journey by assigning attribution credit based on your Analytics data, rather than just the last click. This helps you understand how your marketing activities collectively influence conversions. You can then export this analysis to Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform media tools in order to optimize your campaigns.

Measure engagement and conversions with business and compliance needs in mind

Country-level privacy controls enable you to minimize the collection of user-level data, such as cookies and metadata, while still retaining key measurement functionality. This allows you to effectively manage and prioritize user privacy.

Get greater value from your data

Google Analytics 4 uses machine learning to generate advanced predictive insights about user behavior and conversions, identify new audiences of users who are likely to purchase or churn, and automatically surface critical insights that can be used to improve marketing efforts.

Easily activate your insights

Google Analytics 4 offers expanded integrations with other Google products, such as Google Ads, that allow you to use insights across your combined web and app data to optimize campaigns. For example, McDonald’s Hong Kong was able to achieve its goal of growing mobile orders by creating a predictive audience of “likely seven-day purchasers” and exporting it to Google Ads, resulting in a more than six-fold increase in app orders. This also led to a 2.3 times stronger return on investment, a 5.6 times increase in revenue, and a 63% reduction in cost per action.

Address your enterprise measurement needs

Google Analytics 360 includes new sub and roll-up properties that allow you to customize the structure of your Google Analytics 4 properties to meet data governance requirements. This enables different teams or partners, such as advertising agencies, to access the data they need in accordance with your policies. Additionally, Analytics 360 offers higher limits to meet growing demand, including up to 125 custom dimensions, 400 audiences, and 50 conversion types per property. It also provides service legal agreements (SLAs) across most core functionality, including data collection, processing, reporting, and attribution, to give you peace of mind.

What happens next?

On July 1, 2023, all standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new data, while Universal Analytics 360 properties will stop processing new data on October 1, 2023. After that, you will still be able to access your previously processed data in Universal Analytics for at least six months. It is recommended that you transition to Google Analytics 4 as soon as possible in order to build up the necessary historical data before Universal Analytics stops processing new data. For more information, you can learn more about what to expect.