Maximize Google Analytics 4’s potential: A complete migration guide and how to get the most out of your resources

What is Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 is an analytics service that helps measure traffic and engagement on your websites and apps.

GA4 is focused on providing more data throughout the entire customer journey lifecycle. This means more data is available after a customer has been acquired, including their level of engagement, monetization, and retention.

GA4 includes Machine Learning to automatically display useful information and gives you a complete understanding of your customers across all devices and platforms. It’s also focused on privacy, so Analytics can be trusted even when industry changes like restrictions on cookies and identifiers create gaps in your data.

How is Google Analytics 4 different from Google Universal Analytics?

Google Analytics 4 brings several benefits:

• Deeper integration with Google Ads –
  This allows you to see in-app and web conversions for Google Ads, YouTube Ads, other paid channels such as Facebook, and organic channels including search, social, and email.
  This helps make it simple to measure the overall impact of all your marketing investments, regardless of acquisition channel.

• Customer-Centric Measurement –
  Google Analytics 4 uses multiple identity spaces, including vendor-provided user IDs and unique Google signals from users who opted into ad personalization, to give you a complete view of how your customers are interacting with you. your business.

• Reporting reorganization –
  In terms of reporting, the goal of Google Analytics 4 was to simplify tracking a customer through a marketing funnel. An example of this is the new section called “Life Cycle”, which includes reports on:
  • Acquisition
  • Commitment
  • Monetization
  • Retention

• New approach to data controls –
  Google Analytics 4 has developed an approach to data collection that does not use cookies or identifiers.
  Instead, the new platform will rely more on data modeling to fill in the gaps in the customer journey, where data may be incomplete or inaccessible.

How can I migrate from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4?

As Google Analytics 4 is a completely new tool, you should start the transition by configuring both implementations simultaneously: one for Universal Analytics and the other for GA4.

Google recommends creating a new GA4 property as it cannot import data from the legacy version. It’s important to start collecting data and familiarizing yourself with the tool before completely replacing the legacy version.

While not all of the above data will be able to be imported, the two accounts will be “linked”. This means that you can use the Configuration Wizard in Google Analytics 4 to migrate Universal Analytics property settings to the new property.

It is important to note that Google Analytics 4 properties do not use the “Views” reporting structure, but “Data Streams”. During the setup process, you must connect to a dataflow and configure it based on whether you are joining a web or application dataflow.

To configure this process:

• There is an option for “Enhanced measurement” when configuring a web data stream. This is a plug-and-play event tracking system that can be set up with the flip of a switch. There will be no need for any additional trace configuration for these occurrences.
• When you set up an app dataflow, you’ll be guided through configuring the dataflow before you’re prompted to install the Firebase SDK.

Create a Google Analytics 4 property

1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account.
2. Go to the “Administrator” section and select the correct customer account. Go to the ‘Property’ subsection and click ‘Create Property’. You may need to request editor access from your client if you don’t already have it.
3. Enter a suitable name, time zone, and currency. Next, you will be asked to enter an industry category and company size. After that, you agree to Google’s terms and conditions.

Add data streams

1. Go to Admin > Dataflows > Property
2. Select Web, iOS, or Android and follow the instructions to set up each type of platform.
3. Click ‘Create Stream’

Enable GA4 by adding Tags on websites

To feed website information into Google Analytics, you’ll need to add Tags. To do this, go to the Google Analytics 4 property you created earlier and click on the ‘Web’ data stream.

Adding tags to commonly used CMS platforms

If your client hosts your website on a popular CMS platform like Wix, WordPress, or WooCommerce, you’ll need to find a “G” id code to enter into the Google Analytics field on the CMS backend.

To do it:

1. Go to Admin > Property > Dataflows > Web
2. You will see a code in the top right under “Measurement ID” which is your “G” ID. Copy and paste this code following the instructions for the respective CMS platform you are using.

Add tags to other CMS platforms

For other CMS platforms that do not support “G”-ID, you will need to copy and paste a global tag into the custom HTML section.

For a start:

1. Go to Admin > Property > Dataflows > Web
2. Scroll down to Tagging Instructions and find the Add New Tag column on the page.
3. Click on the first option, which is Global Site Tag (gtag.js).
4. Copy and paste this complete code into the custom HTML function of the CMS platform.

How to make the most of Google Analytics 4 by incorporating data visualization solutions?

There are several ways in which data visualization solutions can be incorporated taking advantage of the data coming from Google Analytics 4.

😉 At Tekne, we have incorporated it into one of our Business Cases:

Problem definition

A company in the fashion retail industry uses a website for its end users. This web page is linked to the Google Analytics service that allows obtaining statistics from it. This company recently migrated to Google Analytics 4 due to its benefits and more importantly its user-centric approach.

However, the commercial department of the company realized that there were certain problems in the handling of the usage data of its website:

• Despite the fact that they had a platform with visualizations that allowed drawing conclusions about the data on the use of the website (New Users, Sessions, Average Order Value), the sales team required certain indicators and data that were not on the platform. . Many times, they presented themselves in a different way than they needed to. Therefore, by not having an adequate visualization of their data, they did not have a clear understanding of what was happening in the company and this generally led them to make wrong decisions.
• A great deal of time and effort was spent trying to manually retrieve the missing information and indicators.
• There was difficulty in communicating results and trends to the rest of the company’s departments.
• They lacked an easy way to spot patterns and trends because they didn’t have the exact information they needed. This also made it difficult to predict future behavior and the ability to plan accordingly.

Objectives

This company wanted to achieve better management of the data coming from their application and for this they wanted to:

• Have their data available in an orderly, efficient and personalized way, with specific indicators and visualizations adapted to your information needs to establish priorities, draw conclusions, detect patterns, predict future behavior and build business strategies.
• Build an analytical environment that would allow scalability without loss of quality in services.

Proposed solution

We work together with the company to carry out an evaluation of its business and techniques with the aim of identifying the best solution for its data visualization problems.

After several meetings, we decided to implement an analytical platform in a centralized repository, with a scalable data architecture, thus facilitating the use of data in analytical applications (Dashboards and Reports). One of the best features of the new version of Google Analytics (GA4) is the linking with BigQuery, which allows GA4 users to enable data export to BigQuery and use the collected raw event data in their websites and applications. . In this case, we use Google BigQuery as a centralized repository.

It was also agreed to develop a series of dashboards and reports that visually organize the data, with its metrics, indicators and visualizations defined by the company in order to achieve better management and facilitate decision-making, as well as the development of strategies. commercial.

Today we continue to collaborate with the company with the aim of establishing the best practices in data management and facilitating the rapid implementation of technological tools for management.

Architecture

Results

After working with us, the company has:

• Dashboards that allow to know the situation of the company in relation to the use of its website, the elaboration of customer profiles according to their behavior, and the generation of commercial strategies based on it.
  These dashboards have indicators such as:
  • Online users
  • Customer retention rate
  • Conversion rate
  • Inactive users
• A safe and efficient environment to provide data to Dashboards and applications quickly, optimizing infrastructure costs.
• An environment that allows scalability, that is, that can be adapted without losing quality in services with continuous growth in a fluid manner.

Have you already made a Google Analytics 4 migration?
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If you want some follow up in your KPIs or in data visualization, get in touch with us.

Referencies:
Devguides
Agency Analytics