A lot is happening at Google, particularly on the analytics front with the new GA4 version. Apart from some practical UI choices, this Google Analytics update has made some much-needed amendments for user privacy, as well. A long-awaited successor to Universal Analytics, let us explore what this version has in store for all of us. Web and Mobile analytics combined GA4 will combine your web and mobile numbers for you. Your marketing team will be able to leverage this for their campaign results. And as a brand, you will be able to assess your user behavior across platforms in a single place. All this is possible because Firebase Analytics is now deployed in the backend by Google. Increased focus on user privacy GA4 will not rely on tracking pixels (cookies). Instead, it will cash in on Google Signals and machine learning for the assessment of user behavior. Changes in reporting and UI UI changes are visible in this update. Reporting categorization has changed, like the early Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions groupings are replaced with Engagement, Retention, and Analysis. What remains unchanged is that data visualization is on the right and report selectors are on the left. You will also find an ‘Analysis Hub’ that will assist in creating reports with ease. The region, device used, device model, user resource, age, language preferences, etc all can be seen in a single place under user properties. These changes reflect that shortly, your users and their experience is all that matters. Enhanced Built-in event tracking capabilities This upgrade is all about tracking and measuring real time conversions. It includes page scrolls, video engagement, outbound link clicks, etc. Via this, you will be able to engage with your users right from the beginning and grab their attention for a longer duration. This reporting is a major shift and focuses on event based tracking as opposed to session based tracking in Universal Analytics. Additionally, you do not need additional code for all this or even setting up event tracking in Google Tag Manager. AI powered predictions GA4 will leverage AI and machine learning for predicting trends and decoding patterns in customer centric data. Marketers can benefit from this data in various ways, like seeing the surge in demands in a particular product, potential revenue and churn rate estimates, and plan their marketing campaigns accordingly. Greater flexibility GA4 enabled the option to create custom reports as per their requirements. Pre-made reports are a thing of the past now. You will see only the data relevant to your business and a clean dashboard that is also easy to get a hold of. Some more noteworthy updates There is no bar on the volume of data that you send to the GA4 property but there is a limitation on the number of unique events that you can use. Free BigQuery export for all (free version included) and you can access raw data and even run SQL queries. Cohort analysis will help in grouping your users with specific common characteristics, say the average time spent on your app/ website or users who signed up for your newsletter, etc. The bounce rate has now been replaced with the engagement rate. And many other new engagement metrics are seen like engagement time, engaged sessions per user, etc. You will find debugging in the reporting interface itself. You can also find total unique users from various platforms in the reporting view present in the GA property report. The GA4 train is all set to jump into the future. It’s best to get on board as early as possible as Google has ensured that the updates are done in anticipation of the future user needs. If you need someone to do the migration for you or handle analytics for you in the future, do get in touch with us. About us We, at Galaxy Weblinks, are all for new ideas and experiments. We believe that being up-to-date in this fast-paced world gives us adequate time to explore and implement new changes. Our analytics team is proficient in building apps that are well aligned to our client’s and platform requirements. Contact us for a free consultation!