What is Google Analytics 4 and What Does It Mean for You?
By LeadPoint Digital
Everything You Need to Know About GA4 Migration
Many of you have probably been receiving notifications for more than a year about migrating your Google Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). On July 1, 2023, Google will discontinue Universal Analytics, which means none of your website analytic data will track through that property anymore. In December 2023, all data from Universal Analytics will be erased.
What that means is that you must make the switch if you want to have consistent – or any – website tracking information. But LeadPoint Digital clients don’t have to do a thing. (We’ve got you covered already.)
What to Expect
To break it down simply, the data we review with our clients monthly will change for the better and be more expansive. The largest change from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 is that your website data will be tracked through events, rather than pageviews.
The Good News: Google Analytics caught up with LeadPoint Digital! Long before Google Analytics 4 was announced, LeadPoint tracked your website data through events. Most of the data we review with you on a weekly or monthly basis has been events-based since our relationship began. Event metrics that we regularly review with our clients are form submissions, document downloads, clicks to social media, video viewing rates, clicks to call, clicks on email address, and clicks to important outbound websites.
The Bad News: All the data we tracked for your website to this point will disappear in December 2023. LeadPoint Digital is taking measures to download all historical data for comparison under the new Google Analytics 4 tracking. We have also been tracking Google Analytics 4 data over the last year, so we should have data to compare immediately.
Smarter Marketing with GA4
- User-ID Tracking
- Customer Data Integration
- Data-Driven Lead Tracking
User-ID tracking will better measure websites that have registered users, such as e-commerce or login areas. This will enable you to track your registered users as one journey whether they visit through a mobile device, laptop, or tablet. In the past, these visitors were viewed as three separate visits. Now we can measure the cross-device behavior between registered users.
Customer data integration will allow you to upload customer and prospect data from your point of sale, customer relationship management, or other offline data collection. The benefit to this is to track your overall business performance in a unified view and match website behavior for all users. This will help with full-funnel tracking for offline sales. For example, if a user submits information through your website, but purchases offline, the closing sale data can be incorporated and tied to the initial lead, providing more accurate return-on-investment data and customer journey data.
Data-driven lead attribution was recently released on Google Universal Analytics. LeadPoint Digital has already been using the data-driven lead attribution and it will be automatically migrated to your Google Analytics 4 environment.
In the past, lead attribution for digital marketing campaigns has been tracked by last click, which means the digital marketing campaign only gets credit if that’s the last source a website visitor comes from before taking a conversion action on your website. The problem with that is a website visitor may interact with multiple marketing campaigns such as social media, email, organic search, and/or paid search. Data-driven lead attribution now weighs the lead based on the campaigns the visitor interacted with. This will allow you to see the true performance of your digital marketing campaigns by getting a holistic view of the customer journey.
What You Have To Do
Nothing. LeadPoint Digital has it all covered for you. We’ve successfully migrated all clients to the new Google Analytics 4 and have been tracking data. There are a lot of buzzwords being thrown around and new naming systems of metrics. This does not affect our clients; this is all behind-the-scenes information that is important for your LeadPoint team. We can educate you on the meaning of these changes if you desire, but we’ve taken care of everything so you can focus on your regular business activities and trust that LeadPoint has your digital marketing campaigns and reporting covered!
