The Google Analytics deadline is looming: is your data ready?
You’ve heard it once and you’re going to hear it again - the bedrock of digital analytics, Google’s Universal Analytics is hanging up its hat after a decade at the top.
With just over a year to go until the big shift, what does this mean for marketers? Well, for those of you well up to speed with its replacement, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), congratulations – hat’s off to you!
For those a little further behind, you have until 30th June 2022 to implement GA4. This will allow 12 months of data collection prior to the retirement, which ensures all of those effective year-on-year comparisons can be made. As we know, digital data can often be siloed and disparate, don’t make this worse by having analytics data held in separate areas from the get-go.
Example reporting dashboard in GA4
GA4 Deadline - 30th June 2022
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GA4 Deadline - 30th June 2022 ~
This isn’t just a menial admin task, GA4 has been released with a definitive purpose.
“Google Analytics 4 has the flexibility to measure many different kinds of data, delivering a strong analytics experience that’s designed for the future. It allows businesses to see unified user journeys across their websites and apps, use Google’s machine learning technology to surface and predict new insights, and most importantly, it’s built to keep up with a changing ecosystem.”
Key beneficial features of the platform include:
· Deeper integration with Google Ads. Predictive metrics allow audiences to be created based on potential revenue from a particular group of customers, allowing them to be segmented and targeted accordingly.
· Enhanced measurement through events. Out-of-the-box events including scrolling, outbound link clicks, document link clicks, and website searches can be tracked by default, meaning less manual setup and more immediate insights.
· Explorations that offer greater flexibility. Drag and drop dimensions and measures to build the exact report you need, with segments easily selected to work alongside.
· Prepares for a cookie-less future. The platform is fundamentally designed to be more adaptable when cookies become much less common, with modelling used to fill in the gaps where data may be incomplete.
Quite simply, marketers need to stop dragging their heels and adopt GA4. Becoming more familiar with the interface and capabilities now will ensure you are more equipped to facilitate a seamless migration over the coming 12 months. As our tumultuous past few years have taught us, a lot can change in 365 days - let’s ensure we have the data to prove it going forward.
Accord have successfully implemented over 50 GA4 properties to date across a variety of websites and platforms, so have ample hands-on experience to help businesses prepare for this change.
We get to work pretty quick too, so get in touch today if you need our help.
Dan Ward
Dan is Accord’s Head of Performance and GA Guru. Get in touch if you want to pick his brains on all things marketing performance.
